Heavy Metal Showcase
Gaye Bykers On Acid

Metal Muscle
November 1988

Chances are, you've never met a band even remotely like Gaye Bykers On Acid. They are weird, and they are wild. They've got to be, to live up to a shock value name like that, chosen for "instant attention," or so says their frisky frontman "Mary."

Mary and his merry men aren't really gay, and far from Hell's Angles candidates, but the "On Acid" part seems genuine enough. How else could they create an album as brilliantly demented as Drill Your Own Hole, an infectious stew of wah-wah psychedelic metal and freakout punk funk? Perhaps it's their amazing plethora of influences. "It's so numerous," claims Mary, "that if you ask me what our musical influences are, you better get some crystal meth so you can stay up for three days and let me reel it out to you. We are influenced by all sorts of things: films, comics...trash culture in that sense."

"You know it heavy metal when your balls start to shake" is Mary's manifesto, but GBOA partake of HM's energy and power without being trapped in its limitations. "We'd be a heavy metal band," says he, "if our guitarist wasn't as shot away as he is. He likes Zappa and stuff like that. He's a twisty guitarist...fragmented. We just want to make some rock'n'roll at this point. If you wanna compare us to somebody, I'd compare us to the idea that music should be fun to listen to and be part of. It's humorous because there's so much excess in it."

It's this very sense of over-the-top humor that is the key to these British lads. It goes hand in hand with their Clockwork Orange-gone-dayglo mode of dress (which they cheerfully dub "anti-fashion") and their supremely wacky world-vision (Mary proclaims they have "no official philosophy apart from the official Batman - Batbook and Star Trek Guide To The Universe"), not to mention their slyly rhyming conversational style (owing a great deal to Monty Python and Spinal Tap). They even had the audacity to make a feature film to along with the album. (Mary's explanation: "We thought we were the Who for awhile.")

Although their moniker and spunky mongrel music might be hard for mainstream America to take at first, the Bykers realize the importance of their mission...that something "different" is actually exciting. "People should adjust their modes of thought," Mary smirks, "if we're gonna create nirvana."

- Greg Fasolino

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