Punk Rock Classics

You might know Henry Rollins. He’s that big bad guy, quiet and imposing in the background.  especially if you watch bad blockbuster movies. From being a bit player in crime classic Heat and a macho sergeant in the ludicrously over-the-top Bad Boys II, to being a one man publishing house, jazz fanatic, record companyTv presenter, actor, author, punker, vocalist and stand up comedian, Henry Rollins is nothing if not – as always – over busy. So much so, simply because he hates holidays and time off. Which is something he reminds us a lot of tonight.

And there is a lot of him tonight. A man and a stage and three and a quarter hours of material that is occasionally hilarious, sometimes touchign and heartfelt, and zipping across topics like a human yo-yo. He talks and talks and talks…. And even though he laments his down time when he isn’t working, its certainly the case that if he didn’t have time off he’d have nothing to talk about. Damn, this man doesn’t have down time – he does research. So when he is on holiday in pakistan in the midst of rioting, or when he is in South Africa, his mind still collects data, analyses, processes……As the man himself sung in 1994 ; “No such thing as spare time, No such thing as free time, No such thing as down time, All you got is life time”.  And a vast portion of the night is spent discussing his singing, which is something of a part time hobby for him these days.

From pointing at a map and sucking in the experiences of life in places he’s never been, wandering out of securly guarded hotels in the middle of Rioting season and crawling over barbed wire in Pakistan, to a 40 minute retelling of a Ted Nugent concert in 1978 where the mighty Van Halen blew them off stage and meeting lead singer / rock god Diamond Dave Lee Roth and his human beer dispenser in an art gallery, to discovering just how starnge Christopher Walken is in real life, this racounteur follows the overall pattern of his own personal adrenaline rush to cram in as much of life as he can. Plunge into that with  alongside a little bit of politics (George Bush), the occasional diversion into Monty Python, the labyrinthe insanity of American customs officials and Heathrow International,  his love of punk rock, his experience making rubbish movies with Cuba Gooding Jr., how to defeat man eating alligators, and taking tea with refugee taxi drivers in Stockholm, its all autobiography, wrapped up in a package of a man, a microphone, and deep sarcasm. And dammit, its not like you don’t get value for money – 195 minutes of it.

But for all the laughter – and lets face it, Henry is on occasion tears-inducingly funny much to the chagrin of his own self-built of myth of pain, misery and worse - there’s an intensely intense seriousness underlying this. Especially so when he talks about his experience last year with seminal punkers the Ruts, reformed for a one off show in London with him singing as a tribute to the terminally ill guitarist Paul Fox who only had months to live. Describing him watching someone he has got to know whose music he has loved slowly wasting away isn’t an easy experience – but it’s a moving one.

Impassioned and intelligent, incisive and often full of invective, Henry is an one man punk rock stand up classic. Fast, funny, furious and full of facts, he’s the man. No, really….

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