Garbage Days Revisited #48: Circus of Power - "Circus of Power" (1988)

 

"Calling all children of electric ages! Calling all the gods, all the fools, all the sages!" - Circus of Power - Call Of The Wild

We seem to have taken a turn down a lesser marked highway marked "biker sleaze" for these last few GDR's (Zodiac Mindwarp, the Four Horsemen, Junkyard etc) but no apologies, this is to my mind an area of the late '80s rock scene that's ripe for re-evaluation. Circus of Power were another such band but there's a bit of a difference here - while the Four Horsemen and Junkyard were very much L.A. bands (in terms of where they had their success even if neither actually came from there originally), Circus of Power were their East Coast equivalent, hailing from New York.

Possibly because of having grown up in the biker bars in the Big Apple rather than the ones on the desert highways of the south, there was definitely a bit of a leaner and meaner edge to Circus of Power's sound - they were more Electric era Cult than, the southern-fried Skynyrd indebted boogie of Junkyard or the G'n'R on Harleys take of the Horsemen. You can hear it on the lean mean menace of the group's lead-off single Call Of The Wild - there's a real switchblade knife to yer throat feel about the thing. When I first discovered this band in my early twenties (I think through a mix of the Sleazegrinder website - again - and Seb Hunter's shout out to them in his excellent Hell Bent For Leather book), it definitely drew me in.

I know I often say that this heavier end of sleaze rock is a very different beast to the whole Poison/Warrant/Motley Crue end of hair metal that most people are familiar with but in the case of Circus of Power's first album it's definitely true - this is less the whole OTT cross between the Sweet and the New York Dolls and more like a cross between the sleazy grind of the Stooges (they even cover Iggy's Crazy on here) and the grinding chug of Steppenwolf or Blue Oyster Cult - listen to the likes of Motor, White Trash Queen or Heart Attack and you'll see what I mean. The likes of Letters Home showed that they could do subtle as well and Turn Up The Jams was a truly triumphant closer. It should have been a huge hit...but, like so many of the bands we cover in here, it wasn't.

The group would stick around for the long haul and their second album, 1990's Vices, was basically a straight continuation of the first album sound and that’s certainly no bad thing. Unfortunately it also failed to sell and soon afterwards, the cold winds of grunge started to decimate the whole sleaze rock scene. CoP opted to stick it out but they made the fatal mistake of trying to run with the times and do a grunge album and 1993's Magic And Madness was a poor effort frankly, sounding like a third division Alice In Chains. I mean, fair play, I've heard worse offenders in terms of the "oh no, we were never a glam band, look we're wearing plaid now!" brigade (Warrant, Dokken and Danger Danger, I may be looking at you guys here) but it still ain't good - there's maybe one half decent song on here (Outta My Head) but the rest just sinks into a swamp of lumbering dullness. By 1995, the band had gone their separate ways.

Pleased to report that this one does have a happy ending though - Circus of Power would do a number of reunion shows as the noughties turned into the teens (normally at biker rallies naturally) and by 2016, lead singer Alex Mitchell put out a new album under the CoP name with a new line-up in the form of Four which was a much better effort than it really had any right to be and can genuinely hold its head up with the first two. The Cult influence is definitely still there but there's a real punked-up ferocity to it which suits them down to the ground with the vicious political diatribe of Blood At Standing Rock being a particular highlight.

Circus of Power were definitely another under-rated band that the world unjustly missed first time out and certainly their first album is well worth a listen if you were unaware of it (Four and Vices ain't bad either). Apparently a new EP is due from them soon and I'm definitely looking forward to hearing it - similar to Junkyard last week, or L.A. Guns’ recent effort, their recent material has shown that they’re a band capable of moving with the times to produce some good hard-edged contemporary rock ‘n’ roll. Long may those engines ride.