“Are you ready to be possessed by the spirit of rock’n’roll?” Jesse Hughes demanded as he arrived on stage. It quickly became apparent that anyone unready for such an experience was in the wrong place. A larger-than-life character, with a moustache that deserves a credit in its own right, Hughes, 39, has achieved cult-hero status as the singer, guitarist and mainstay of the Californian group the Eagles of Death Metal. Touring under his alias Boots Electric, Hughes was here to promote the album Honkey Kong, an entertaining collection that finds his usual bullish rock style dressed up with a modish splash of 1980s soul and retro-electronica.
While the record has taken him down slightly different musical avenues, the Boots/Jesse stage show was a familiar mixture of manic, guitar-driven rock’n’roll and affectionate tomfoolery. The music was a raucous, rough-hewn blast that captured the original garage band thrill. Oh ... Girl, a clattering anthem was followed by the similarly uptempo I Love You All the Thyme — both thwarted love songs. Hughes’s love of the ladies is well known, and much of his attention during the show was focused on his bass-playing partner Tuesday Cross, one of America’s top porn stars.
Things were beginning to cook nicely as they swung through the country-punk song Swallowed by the Night, followed by a super-dirty, funk-rock groove called You’ll be Sorry. But then Hughes dismissed the rest of the band and invited requests from the floor, prompting a succession of impromptu performances, which he hacked out with varying degrees of competence alone on his open-tuned guitar. As the banter and the performance became ever more frantic, there was a worrying sense of a man flying through a rather limited repertoire by the seat of his pants.