janesaddiction.org

Arts: Jane's Addiction - Marquee
The Guardian
March 6, 1991
p36

THEY'RE already hacking a broad swathe through the Americas, and Jane's Addiction's  appearance for this 'secret' show turned The Marquee into a vile, heaving sweat-box. It was a major achieveto find a new location for the club which is possibly even more awkward and uncomfortable than the old one in Wardour Street.

Addiction fans are liable to namedrop such illustrious forebears as Zeppelin or The Clash when seeking to describe them. Certainly, the quartet can bang out four-square rockers with a force that flattens your nose against your face.

Cunningly, they walk the line between chaos and K-Mart, often threatening to topple into full-scale sonic overkill, but always reining back with deft command of dynamics. Hence Warner Bros' conviction that they've signed a world-beater a kind of Guns'n'Jovi.

The act is pretty slick, too. Dave Navarro and Eric A (manning the guitar and bass) are lean, mean and naked from the waist up. In charge is vocalist Perry Farrell, a stocky, close-cropped runt of a man dressed tonight like a stevedore from New York's East River. A not-so-nice Jewish boy from the Bronx, Farrell is so wound up he vibrates like a violin-string as he fires razor-edged one-liners into the crowd, and leers at the suicidal moshers plunging off the edge of the stage.

After an hour of blunt-instrument rockers and roaring space-metal one began to wonder if a trip to the psychotherapist on the way home mightn't be a sound idea. But the crowd was spluttering with adrenalin.

Support was from the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies, a quaint duo from the backwoods of Georgia. They whacked out a string of rockabilly stompers and hillbilly boogie with much energy but no finesse. The material was pretty feeble too. If anyone had ever heard of them, you could yell 'hype!'

Jane's Addiction
Charing Cross Road Marquee

THERE WERE rumours abounding this morning that Led Zeppelin were going to play a secret gig at the Marquee two days after Jane's Addiction. Had those rumours been true, after tonight, Percy 'n' Pagey would have been left with the pulling power of Bernard Manning's Y-fronts.

There are times when bands transcend being merely brilliant and enter realms where chaos and magic collide to make something unutterably awesome. It usually takes a deranged genius to pull it off-like Jimmy Page on 'Physical Graffiti' or Jim Morrison's manic paens to the Lizard King. And tonight, Perry Farrell is that mad messiah.

Stripped of his previously exotic garb, in stark black and white with a leather cap, he emerges with gleeful abandon. And as the first sinuous notes of 'Up The Beach' rise like spirit wraiths to circle the room and hold its inhabitants in thrall, the excitement just explodes.

Jane's Addiction roar like the ocean, sing like wild birds, and attack the senses with every kind of sorcery possible tonight. The unearthly, exotic patterns that weave through 'Ritual De Lo Habitual' and 'Nothing's Shocking' only glow with this ferocity when blasted at you live.

And Perry is completely hyperactive. Proudly he rips off his cap to reveal a severely shorn skull. With his shirt discarded his looks like a cross between Henry Rollins and a whippet.

"I'm going to infiltrate the skinheads," he announces "and let them know about black people." The ensuing headrush into 'Idiot's Rule' follows like a battle cry for all he stands for - the rubbishing of conventions, and the glory that comes from defying society's constraints.

Around this whirling, adrenalized form, bassist Eric A. and guitarist David Navarro reap the whirlwind, muscles pulled taut, cascades of hair thrashing the air. Stephen Perkins is a blur behind his drumkit. Then JA pull another masterstroke, the introduction of violinist Morgan, whose eerie, shivering strings add an even more phantasmagoric edge to the heartstopping sound around her.

Perry thumps his skull through 'Of Course', and exorcises devils on 'Three Days'. But it's a deafening 'Stop!' that starts them plunging towards the abyss; a still more magnificent 'Mountain Song' that sends them hurtling in.

Jane's Addiction play one encore, the new single 'Been Caught Stealing', the last word in turning "dance" into "holocaust". A few hundred jaws clang open in its wake.

Jesters, magicians or just musicians? Tonight JA were the masters of the universe.

Cathi Unsworth