B-Side “Fear of ’Zine Failure” could have come out last fall, when New York City’s queer cognoscenti made the Art Book Fair the sold-out social event of the season, with hundreds left feeling like flops on the sidewalk when they couldn’t make the scene. God then appears, not to condemn gays for wanting to marriage but to condemn the joyless institution entirely. As the story goes, a groom shows up at the altar after a night of glory holes. A demo of their introductory anthem “Ban Marriage” lacks the finished version’s majesty but feels somehow more revolutionary in its intimate arrangement of mostly acoustic guitar and percussion. Other tracks on the reissue prove Gibb was a kind of visionary, tapping into the currents that power queer culture today.
#Hidden camera amp how to#
If “Boys of Melody” is a cathedral, the live take from a contemporaneous CBC session is a blueprint of how to build one yourself: Get some friends and some instruments, and voilà. I swear there are generations in the echoes. The song is a coup, a fairy tale, both a recording and invocation of the kind of queer joy we all should be so lucky to witness. In five minutes that build into a shattering crescendo rivaling “O Holy Night” for sonic reverence (and faith in the virtues of falling to your knees), Gibb takes up a pack of ghosts who leave the sea to cruise the beach. “We could be in the army or the Klan,” Gibb warns-and, truly, the subsequent decades have proven that gay men, from Andrew Sullivan to George Santos, are as likely to be found at the forefront of racist and transphobic movements as they are in the #resistance. Two lovers wash and consume each other, then become a literal army of lovers. “The Man That I Am With My Man” queers the idea of blood brothers. Virilely, they pack a couple climaxes into the original album’s 43 minutes. “descend on fours” like moles, fuck and kiss, and “ascend as swans.” Gay sex is metamorphical. The allegorical “Animals of Prey” is equally baroque: Gibb and co. The legend is soundtracked by heralding trumpets, swells of Pallett’s violin and viola, belfries of vibraphone and glockenspiel and sleigh bells.
“A city of gold that lives in broad daylight,” Gibb proselytizes, then prophesies its ruin as he and his lover flood it again. “Golden Streams” is a urophilic fantasia in which the bonds created by the intimate act become literal world-building, as the piss cools into ice. Its 10 songs, not a dud among them, thrust complicated existential and spiritual concerns into boisterous orchestral pop. It surrounds Gibb’s versatile pipes, sometimes crooning like a post-coital Karen Carpenter and sometimes calling out like Slim Whitman or Sylvester, with choirs stacked with luminaries including Owen Pallett and the Fifth Column’s G.B.
The Smell of Our Own, which Rough Trade put out in 2003, starts with a pipe organ pumping. At the center of it all was Gibb delivering his gay revolution psalms and infectious paeans to drinking piss. They put on shows, with themes like “Bread and Shit” and “Skulls” and “Disease” and dancers dragged up in sports costumes and excitable twink choreography and no real demarcation between those watching the scene and the people plucking harps, pounding timpani, bowing strings, and crying out in joy and rage. In the beginning, the band gussied up the egalitarian gang mentality of Belle and Sebastian with the gay-and-loud flamboyance of queercore. You can see how they pulled Travis and Lee into their flock. A news report on their pilgrimage surfaces as part of the 20th-anniversary celebration for The Smell of Our Own, the Hidden Cameras’ debut album.
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