Licking their wounds, and with Khan still smarting from the attitude of Opera House staff, King Khan & BBQ Show went to Korea where, after a couple of volatile performances, their musical union broke apart. It was the temporary end of a collaborative partnership that had begun with the formation of Canadian garage trash punk band Spaceshits in the 1990s.
Khan admits there’s a manic side to his personality, which made the Opera House incident almost inevitable. Sultan concurs. “We were on tour just before that for a really long time with Black Lips. It was building and building, and finally we had a Steve Segal marathon in the hotel room, and all of a sudden it just went boom,” Sultan laughs. Even before coming to Australia, things were looking bad. “I was briefly in gaol in Spain, just before we came to Australia, for standing on a taxi cab,” says Khan. “My girth bent the roof and I wound up in a gaol cell for a few hours before we left. That put a strain on everything.” “And what they did to you in gaol with pistachios was fucked up,” Sultan adds.
Fast forward a couple of years, and while listening to a King Khan & BBQ Show record with his daughter while playing the Game of Life, Khan’s daughter lamented that her father wasn’t playing with Sultan anymore. “So the olive branch of reconciliation was really extended by my family,” Khan says.
Growing up as teenagers in Canada, Khan and Sultan were drawn to the excitement of the garage punk scene. Khan, at that time going under the nom de plume Blacksnake, formed Spaceshits in the mid-‘90s; shortly after, Sultan joined. Spaceshits had a reputation for provocative live performance, which led local venues and authorities to limit the band’s opportunities to play. As it were, the resulting mystique furthered the band’s reputation.
“There wasn’t a deliberately shocking element at the beginning, but for some reason we weren’t embraced,” Khan says. “So for some reason it was shocking. People were uptight, competitive on some level, which I found strange because I thought we were playing rock’n’roll, which was traditional in a way. They took it as shocking, although it wasn’t GG Allin or anything. But a lot of the audience reaction to us was pretty crazy as well – in fact, those antics were sometimes more shocking than the actual show.”
Spaceshits broke-up in 1999, after which Khan moved to Berlin and started King Khan and his Shrines, while Sultan formed Les Sexareenos before playing as a one-man band under the BBQ moniker. The animosity that arose between the pair five years ago appears to have abated. “I love Arish’s caring personality – that tenderness,” Sultan says. “On one level I admire that and wish I could live up to that. There might be an injured mouse on the ground on a bunch of rocks, and he’ll offer it some honey water to revive it. And I’ve grown to like all the things that I used to not like for no particular reason, because his heart is tremendous, even though he smells really fucking bad [laughs].” For his part, Khan embraces his own peculiar odour. “I think there’s something endearing about the repulsive odour that’s created. It’s like a brine that unites us, and keeps us enslaved.”
Bad News Boys, the new record from The King Khan & BBQ Show, stays true to the pair’s doo-wop garage punk formula. “We have an oracle that we contact for certain things – it’s very important to us,” Khan says. Sultan points to a more proctological inspiration. “Do you know Tae Bo? The move Nolan’s Finger in Tae Bo is very important. It’s like you focus all your energy into your pointing finger, and then you gently massage your anus.”
When I suggest that When Will I Be Tamed from the new album might be a reference to Khan’s wayward personality, Khan and Sultan demur. “I think it originally had a different title – When Will I Be Maimed,” Sultan says. “I can’t wear certain fabrics, like polyester. Polyester is weird – it can ride on really weird angles. One time I got off tour and one side, perfectly symmetrical, of my penis was really hairy. So I’ve given up polyester.”
As for the meaning behind the final track on the record, Zen Machines – well, who really knows? “I guess it is kind of a reflection on our artistic partnership,” Khan says. “We were really inspired by Zen machines for a long time – we imagined someone really large with a shopping cart full of ice cream and beer walking down the streets, just being really Zen as they brought the shopping cart home and left it front of the apartment building.” “And then they’d put their handicapped son in the cart and swaddle him,” Sultan says.
BY PATRICK EMERY
