Hey F*cked Up

Gay For Johnny Depp release career-spanning retrospective
‘Manthology: A Tireless Exercise in Narcissism’

released november 30^th on cd + download

Less a greatest hits set and more a badly-edited VHS clip compilation of your favourite squirt-shots, New York quartet Gay For Johnny Depp return to release career-spanning retrospective Manthology and tour the UK’s tawdry grief-holes.

Gay For Johnny Depp formed in New York in 2004 with the sole mission of healing the wounds of a city that had been rocked to its very foundations. Sexual healing was the method deployed and soon their abrasive sound and deeply spiritual songs about fisting went global. They band are Marty Leopard (vocals), Sid Jagger (guitar), Chelsea Piers (bass) and JJ Samanen (drums).

They toured the UK and US many times and made lots of friends and also some enemies. Their music was a machine gun rat-a-tat fire of short, sharp songs with a very well hidden yet deeply intellectual core, and described as “hardcore – in all ways”. Shock! Outrage! And Boys! followed them everywhere. Some people wanted to punch GFJD (which has happened, frequently) others want to love them deeply.

Their live shows soon passed into mythical status – sometimes before they had even happened. Which is weird, but good-weird. Gay For Johnny Depp’s 2007 debut album The Politics Of Cruelty gained almost blanket positive coverage in publications such as NME, Q, The Guardian and Uncut, and also received multiple plays on Radio 1 – a triumph given the abundance of curse words and subject matter (Johnny Depp, mainly).

The band’s approach has been consistently unflinching. Promotional records have come with ‘gay gift hampers’ featuring bottles of amyl nitrate, surgical gloves and visual ‘sauce material’ to aid the listening experience. They have also been known to circulate letters from their most ardent fan, a teenager called Bradley, whose love of the band is matched only by his love of banging sailors in downtown YMCAs, and whose angelic face can be seen in the front row of all their shows.

Gay For Johnny Depp are the perfect symbiotic melding of GG Allin, Marquis De Sade, Quentin Crisp, Jeff Stryker, The Germs and, as Ramon so succinctly just intimated, their music clearly represents that point at which the nihilism and paranoia of the late 90s/early 00s consumer-driven milieau dissipates and gives way to post-recession, pan-international feelings of ‘hope’ and ‘change’, and ‘more sex’ for everyone.

Rare it is that the innovators and pioneers get recognized in their own time, yet Gay For Johnny Depp are changing opinions concerning sexual politics, censorship, public in/decency, international relations, gender and religious divisions and the capacity for the human ear to accept music at deafening volume levels one by one. At this rate the sky it the limit. Maybe not even that.

Yet as we prepare to enter the second decade of the third millennium, one glaring question remains unaddressed: is America ready for its first gay commander- in-chiefs?

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