My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult: Still Riding The Mindway

by Jane Roser

Back in the late 90s, my sister and I attended several Thrill Kill Kult concerts at the 9:30 Club and told each other that if we ever got out of the retail industry, we wanted to be BOMB GANG GIRLZ (My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult’s hot female singers/dancers who had cool monikers such as Cinderella Pussie and Jacky Blacque.) Well, that life-long dream disappeared faster than Miley Cyrus’ britches, but I still get a helluva joyride attending their shows and dancing to my favorite tunes.

Formed in 1987 by vocalist Groovie Mann and multi-instrumentalist Buzz McCoy, MLWTTKK have been conjuring up tales of blasphemy, sexcapades and kitschy horror for over 25 years to the delight of kids everywhere and to the displeasure of their parents who just don’t get it. Combining  the sounds of disco, rock, new wave, lounge and glam, they’ve created a unique niche in the music industry, although the original concept of MLWTTKK was a trashy B-movie, that idea was soon scrapped and a band was formed, instead.

McCoy started off his musical endeavors by attending the prestigious Berklee College of Music back when it was just a jazz school. McCoy wasn’t a huge fan of jazz, so he left after two semesters and started playing bass in a few punk bands around Boston before moving to Chicago. “I really didn’t think I’d have a career in music,” he says, “but it just fell into place. I was casually writing songs with my neighbor Groovie Mann/Frankie and Wax Trax Records was interested in our work. I didn’t think that what we were doing sounded anything like what was on Wax Trax at the time- it was Front 242 and Ministry and they were kind of hard and dance-y and we were more off-beat and quirky, but they really liked what we were doing and the rest is history.”

Thrill Kill Kult recently celebrated 25 years of music with a tour they cheekily entitled Back From Beyond. It reunited them with former BOMB GANG GIRL Jacky Blacque much to the delight of those of us at the shows who’ve been around since Carter was President. McCoy says of touring that “it’s just exciting to meet new people every night and to talk with the fans who’ve been supporting us for so long. We’re not hushed away in the backroom somewhere, we hang out in the club and go to the merch booth to sign stuff.”

McCoy says that constantly recording and touring has just become a way of life for them. “It’s a certain breed of person who digs our music, you know? But those who do are very passionate about it and are always wanting more, so we try to deliver.”

If you ask McCoy how they decide on a set list with such a large catalog of music and so many fan favorites, he says, “well, that’s tricky. The tour set list doesn’t change much. We sit down and pick out about 20 songs before the tour even starts; we pull about 10 that we haven’t played in a while that will translate well live, then we pull 10 songs that are classics and faves that if we didn’t play at least a couple of them,” he laughs,”the kids would hate us.”

These favorites include “The Days Of Swine And Roses” and “A Daisy Chain 4 Satan” plus, “Oh God, like “Sex On Wheelz”, we played that for our 25th anniversary [tour], but we tend not to like playing that so much, so we try a good portion of the old, some of the new, some obscure and the faves and just mix it all up.”

Spooky Tricks, which was released May 6th on the band’s own SLEAZEBOX label, is MLWTTKK’s 13th studio album and their first in five years. When collaborating on an album, McCoy usually comes up with some grooves and beats, then Groovie will come in with lyrics and then they both arrange the tracks, working on refrains and choruses together, but their formula has always stayed the same.

“We write the songs just to entertain ourselves in the studio,” McCoy explains. “We have a good time writing and laughing our asses off, and whoever gets the joke and laughs along, well, all the better. Take “Bella Piranha” [and the lyric] “why is everybody staring at my body?” I think we laughed for like an hour thinking of all the different scenarios; it could be a woman walking down the street wearing bright day-glo colors wondering why everybody’s looking at her.”

Thrill Kill Kult are known for the creative and hilarious ways they weave spoken words into their songs that sound a lot like lines from B-movies, such as this gem from “Devil Bunnies”: “And then he predicted a double suicide/And he was going to do the same so he could be with me/Then he picked up an oil can and threw it at me, almost knocked out my teeth/And I told him that’s crazy, I’ve gotta race in 20 minutes!” However, McCoy explains that a lot of these recordings come from court TV shows or the radio, “we hear something and it just sparks us, the idea of taking it out of context. Samples have always sort of come to us, we don’t go searching for them.”

The artwork and graphics that the band uses are eye-catching, nostalgic and horrifying. I purchased a poster from their 25th anniversary tour and didn’t notice until I got home that it depicted a woman being sacrificed on an altar (takes me awhile, what can I say?). McCoy and Groovie come up with most of the images and themes, then piece it together with Photoshop.

“The artwork is just another extension of the music,” McCoy explains. “We actually didn’t have the artwork for Spooky Tricks until the day before it was mastered, which was about two weeks before the album came out. Groovie sent me over a file of pictures he’d taken over the past three years, so I sat down and looked through hundreds of photos, then all of a sudden, this one just popped out and I thought-that’s Spooky Tricks, so I mocked it up and Groovie was like, perfect! Let’s go with it.”

Thrill Kill Kult’s albums all have a very cinematic quality about them, so it’s no surprise they found themselves included on an assortment of movie soundtracks over the years, including Showgirls and Cool World, but their most well-known moment came when they appeared in the hit 1994 film The Crow starring Brandon Lee (Bruce’s son). They performed their song “After The Flesh” for the film’s wild, shoot-em-up boardroom scene (the band portrayed themselves playing a concert below the action) in a cold and damp cement factory in Wilmington, NC.

“We wrote that song the day before we were going to film it. We didn’t have any lyrics written, so we stole them from the song “Nervous Xians” and I wrote the little guitar riff and beat. We flew out there and they dragged us into the studio to record it and we were up until about 2am. We went to the set the next day and it was minus 15 degrees, it was horrendously cold. They put us up on the stage and had us playback for two days, even though the scene is, like, three seconds long, they filmed us performing the song over and over again. The poor audience! I’m surprised no one got pneumonia. There were people shirtless and in their club wear. We got to wear leather coats and pants and sit by a heater when we weren’t onstage, but we were all freezing.”

Thrill Kill Kult will be performing at The Barbary on Thursday night and we’re lucky to have them here since it’s a quick tour this time. “We’re doing the whole country in less than five weeks,” says McCoy, “so we’re skipping a lot of places we would normally try to hit. There’s little pockets that we might hit in the Fall, plus we want to make a video for the new album; we had hoped to do something before the tour, but you know, you can plan out an album five years in advance and at the last minute, you’re still trying to get stuff done before it’s released,” he laughs, “it never fails.”

Before we hang up the phone, McCoy and I chat for a minute about our mutual fondness for the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack (“Groovie and I have always loved that album and we’ve used some of the sounds in our music. We’ve got a whole bunch in different languages, Groovie is always finding them somewhere!”) and then he tells me what every former goth girl longs to hear: “if there’s ever an opening for a BOMB GANG GIRL, we’ll let you know.” And that’s just, well, you know, kooler than Jesus.