Staff Blog
Max Tundra, Junior Boys fire back at Weekly’s Steven Wells onstage
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| Photo | K. Ross Hoffman |
Max Tundra, attempting to play Grand Theft Auto but mistakenly playing |
British electronic pop screwball Max Tundra's performance at the First Unitarian Church last night — his first ever in Philadelphia — was, as I promised, a thrilling, goofy and unpredictable ride. But the most memorable moment may have been what he described as another first for him: reading a review on stage. Holding a copy of that morning's Philadelphia Weekly, he recited aloud the full text of Steven Wells' "preview" of the gig, printed under the "Week's Worst" heading.
The piece is worth reading in full, but here's an excerpt:
For decades, mincing Eurofags, slack-jawed cockneys and gender-ambiguous foreign musical dweebs of all stripes have been flooding Philadelphia to piss undiluted gayness down the gaping throat of American rock. You know the drill: Some Perrier-sipping anorexic swine in a rakishly angled beret mumbles, "Hello, Philly," into a mic, flicks a switch on his Mac and then stands there for the next four hours pretending to "play" his synthesizers while actually playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas or reading an extract from The Big Book of Eurogayness in The Guardian or Le Monde online.
The screed ends: "Damn you to queenmotherfucking hell, Max Tundra."
As he read, Tundra gestured ironically toward his hardly anorexic gut and his ostensible "Mac" (actually a glockenspiel; there were no computers visible in his set-up), and paused to point out that Wells (a former scribe for NME whom he recalled as a poison-penned writer whose reviews were feared) currently writes for The Guardian. But apart from calling out the "fucking horrendous" use of "gay" as an insult, and joking mildly that one could substitute "failed writer" instead, Tundra was restrained in his response to the piece, which was — especially in the context of Tundra's engaged, energetic and personable performance — self-evidently wrong, in addition to being wrong-headed.
It's one thing to be brazenly homophobic and outrageously offensive in a knowing, tongue-in-cheek manner, which seems to have been Wells' intention — particularly in light of the strongly pro-tolerance slant in his article on bisexuality from the previous week's Queer Issue. But to apply this comically bigoted party line to Tundra's unconventional and idiosyncratic music and performance style seems ill-informed. To file it under "Week's Worst" makes the whole thing far more difficult to gauge (not to mention Wells' use of the gratuitously topical word "swine").
Shortly afterward, during the Junior Boys' headlining set, lead singer Jeremy Greenspan echoed Tundra's insinuated outrage in a much more direct fashion, calling Wells a "fucking retard." His next comment was a bit more oblique, however, as he grumbled: "It's shitheads like that who are responsible for Chumbawumba." Hmm. Leaving aside for a moment the (presumably unintended) slight to actual retarded people (not to mention actual shitheads), what exactly was he trying to say about Chumbawumba? I'm slightly concerned.
I saw Max Tundra read the article on stage and I have to agree with him. It’s no secret that the press is loaded with jerks but that was a wee bit of a personal attack on a school-bully level. Also, he was playing the Mortal Kombat theme ;)…which was followed by a wacky Sound of Music cover that made me want to hug him.
I was at this wonderful show - it was incredible! Steven Wells is very far off the mark with his bizarre guess at what Max Tundra does. He obviously had a bee in his bonnet about a particular strand of crappy trendy music and pinned this review on the first British electronic act he was asked to write about. We should blame the billions of trendy scenesters who come from the UK - it is unfortunate that their world dominance caused Steven Wells to assume Max Tundra was just another one of these sunglasses-at-night-wearing losers. There are very few people as talented, musical and criminally overlooked as this fella!
Steven Wells is a euphamism of ‘cock’. Yet another small person with vile jealousy and rage who cannot help themselves but fire off on all cylinders in the hope that someone out there finds it charming.
Pafetik. Get a real job.