THE KING CHEETAH IN LOS ANGELES by ENRICO LUCE writer and friend
I met The King Cheetah in Los Angeles shortly after they completed their successful 2002 US Tour with that other English exile about town: Morrissey. It was a strange combination perhaps, but Morrissey wanted them and it was a chance for The King Cheetah to leave their adopted city for a month of adventures elsewhere.
Who are The King Cheetah?
Just three more English musicians who had wound up in Los Angeles and decided to stay? Well in a way ,yes: they found it cheap and welcoming, this bohemian boomtown of wild energy and manic desperation, and London was not home anymore, just a place they had left behind. LA was the necessary antidote to London’s repressive damp gloom, but it was more than that. LA in the early 21st century appears to them as Berlin of the 1920s or Paris of the 30’s: the world’s elected art colony – a magnet for experiment and insanity. LA is a city where all languages are spoken and all possibilities are open, too fragmented for fashion, all pasts exists simultaneously with all futures. That’s perfect for The King Cheetah. It’s the summing up – no it’s the sweeping up on the morning after the orgiastic riot of the 20th Century, yet Los Angeles is also the future, and a promise of trouble to come.
You need a label for their sound? It’s Militant Rock’N’Roll.
I frequently hear them described as the best band in Los Angeles, to which these eternally modest Englishmen smile, and murmer their reply: ‘Really?….so what!’
The King Cheetah want more, The King Cheetah aspire to be the Caesers of furiously raging apocalyptic musical prophecy. The western world is going down in flames and they will serenade its fall like three English Neros.
Don’t think for a second that you’ve met something like this before. This is new, this is brilliant.
And this is trouble in depth.
E. LUCE – writing in winter 2005
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