Content Hangover No. 7 by: Garrett Crusan

A First Date With Dry Cleaning and Snooper

On May 7th, I bumped into a sleazy, heavily cologned French man who appeared to be on a first date. We collided while I was positioning myself in the photo pit at a Dry Cleaning show. It was my first time in front of the barricade, so I was clunking around awkwardly for the hour or so between when doors opened and when Snooper's opening performance began; I pulled up my cross-body bag to retrieve my camera, and it brushed against the jumbo tequila soda that the guy was lazily dangling over the railing. He scoffed at my movement, turned back to his date, and continued their what-do-you-do-for-work conversation. They stood positioned perpendicular to the barricade while he shot quadruple-take glances at other women walking in and out of the venue, drifting in and out of attention. "I've learned a lot about leftism since I've moved here, and I think I resonate with it a little more." "I guess I have a lot of bi friends, too, but you can never tell with women." "[...] he was just lathering lube all up and down his arms." "I don't understand people who dye their hair." He nuzzled his face into his date's neck and she flinched. He went in again, and she flinched again, more overtly. "God, I didn't know you'd be so stubborn.”

I'll admit it: in the spirit of Dry Cleaning's frontwoman, Florence Shaw, I was eavesdropping on this meathead’s one-sided dialogue. Shaw's spoken-word one-liners have always been an integral part of the South-London group's sound, pairing jagged post-punk with deadpan delivery and, in their earlier work, mundane phrases captured from found text and overheard conversation—the Frenchman's eye-rolling anecdotes could’ve fit snugly onto a project like New Long Leg. Dry Cleaning's tendency for intersections—of found text, nervous rhythm, left-field guitar vocabulary, and observational poetry—was amplified so intensely that night that several kinds of junctions bled over into the world around them: specifically, the intersection of who art is “made for” and who ultimately ends up digesting it, chewing on it, or just spitting it out. Do the people that exude this sleaze later become the butt of the joke for the art itself? 

Snooper, Dry Cleaning’s Nashville tour openers, lauded more conceptual intersections. The idea of egg-punk freakazoids commanding a venue that touts $13 beer is a crossroads in itself: they found themselves thrashing around at the interchange of DIY and indie pre-stardom while dead-still voyeurs observed from the VIP balcony. The spirit of their roots was alive, sweating, and hand-made; a heavy-duty cardboard backdrop adorned with circular tin-foil windows; a projector displaying frantic, fast-cut flashing videos of their infamous homemade papier-mache characters writhing back and forth on rural park benches; and, fittingly, a shoddily constructed traffic light positioned on the drummer's left. Frontwoman Blair Tromel never touched the same part of the stage twice, spinning and sprinting across the stage like an ungovernable wind-up toy. 

While this DIY-to-big-leagues showcase didn’t quite translate sonically (not at the fault of Snooper, but rather the room’s high-ceilings; Snooper is music for a leaky-pipe basement), it didn’t hinder the vibe from approaching fluency. Super Snooper (AKA “the mosh-quito”), a towering green papier-mache character adorned by Tromel, invaded the audience for the last track and thrashed around clunkily and casually, as if it were just another person on the dancefloor that happened to be 10-feet tall. Snooper is notorious for this beloved mascot, but I didn’t get the schtick until I witnessed it myself; its presence metamorphosized Snooper’s frantic and bug-eyed sonic universe into something purely physical and equally as strange as the music. 

Before Dry Cleaning’s set, I met someone who we’ll call Doug. Doug singled me out for having the photo pass slapped to my bag and struck up a conversation with me that I could half-understand. I couldn’t stop staring at the droplets of Bud Light trapped inside of his yellowing grey beard while he white-knuckled his half-full plastic cup. Doug told me that he makes art that hangs from ceiling fixtures like chandeliers, or at least that’s what I could infer while piecing together bits of his fractured sentences. I smiled and nodded, as if I knew exactly what he was talking about.

Doug continued to tell me that he has seen Dry Cleaning in the flesh a few times now, and that he went to see them at SXSW several years ago. At that show, he said that he “bum-rushed Florence” with a piece of his artwork so he could give it to her; he told me this with a half-sinister smile, as if he were doing her a favor with hidden intention. He placed particular emphasis on “Florence,” making sure to underscore his parasocial first-name basis with the frontwoman who he “bum-rushed.” I snuck out of this conversation to “go set up in the photo pit,” which was a lie. 

During that time, I found myself staring into the Secret Lovealbum cover, the stage’s massive backdrop: Florence Shaw’s pried-open eye was staring back at me, through me, completely expressionless, about to be flooded with eye-wash. When Dry Cleaning finally took the stage and opened up with “Sliced by a Fingernail,” I started pointing the camera awkwardly, futzing with settings, running around clumsily. In those moments, I interrogated the thought of Doug and whatever assumed importance made him feel as though accosting Shaw would be a welcome act; I felt like it was an overstep to even be photographing her despite the express permission.  That wide-eyed stare and expressionless face crawled out of the album art behind her and became all too real, her hands contorting towards the sky like twin church spires. Attempting to capture this felt forbidden, like I was witnessing a private ritual through the window of an apartment building across the street. Her gaze was affixed far past the audience, as if she were locking eyes with another part of herself at the other end of the room that she didn’t recognize. The crowd was naive in thinking that Shaw was directing her monotonal, yet unabashedly poetic speech at them; it was more like she was trying to explain human conversation to an alien in the most alien way possible, clueing it in on the fact that, at least here on Earth, life is “a series of memorials and signals, telling us this or that.”

One of the few times that Shaw addressed the audience was an invitation: “I am a shy dancer, as a rule,” she said, “but here’s one I’d love you to dance to,” which was a green light that everyone was anticipating. A crew of women beside me adorned with sunglasses, thick wallet chains, and multi-colored wolf cuts were whipping out 70s moves and internalizing the grooves as pure disco, shouting back every word to tracks like “Her Hippo”—it was a striking pleasure to see the remnants of eavesdropped words mummified, spoken by another, and shouted right back to the speaker, phrases three-times removed. The guitar work was jagged and snug, like a shirt cropped with a knife; the bass and drums were glued inseparably. The heartbeat syncopation revealed that Dry Cleaning is, beyond the poetry and crystallization of the mundane, a kind of dance band.

After “Conversation,” we were left with a pitch-black stage, a squalling drone of guitar feedback, and flashing funnels of strobing red light while the band exited the stage, an effective attempt at hypnosis. It could’ve been seconds, minutes, or hours until Dry Cleaning arrived on stage again to build into “Hit My Head All Day”—and when they did, we all danced under whatever spell was just cast upon us. I shot a glance to my right, and the Frenchman wasn’t there, but his date was still positioned at the barricade, closely surrounded by others and dancing carelessly, surrendering to the synchronized swaying organism the crowd was formulating together. I breathed a sigh of relief and chuckled at the irony; her escape from the shackles of a sleazy first date was a faultless personification of the forthright feminine bluntness Shaw so often exudes. She says it best on “Unsmart Lady”: “If you like a girl, be nice / it’s not rocket science.”

Listen to Dry Cleaning’s new album Secret Love