Sounds From The Junkshop #118 - Crystal Pistol

 

"Now they're all watching me/Who did I used to be?..." - Crystal Pistol - Rockstar

Ohhhh boy. Crystal bloody Pistol. Now HERE'S a cautionary tale about misrepresenting yourself for the unwary if ever there was one...

Crystal Pistol were another one of those groups who kind of ended up surfing that post-Darkness/The Dirt wave that led to the sleaze rock revival of the early to mid-noughties. Hailing from Canada, they were a Backyard Babies influenced mob of scuzzy glam-punks who were clearly intending on following the likes of Robin Black and Crash Kelly to sort-of-infamy.

And yeah, I'll admit it, the group's self-titled debut (and as it turned out only) album wasn't bad at all - a full throttle angry snarl of a record that tapped into that whole "piss broke, pissed up and pissed off" vein of anger that had informed the Backyards' Total 13 with songs like Locomotive, Watch You Bleed and Teenage Parasite being angry howls of rage at being young, dumb and skint. However, there was one obvious stand-out song which became the obvious single off the record, namely Rockstar. A strutting sarcastic piss-take of Crue-worshipping cock-rockers like Buckcherry et al ("Swimming pools and rehab bills/All my favourite colours come in little pills"), it quickly picked up heavy rotation and was a mainstay at rock clubs around this time.

There was just one problem - literally EVERYBODY missed the point of the song. It was the sleaze rock equivalent of the old Charlie Brooker sitcom Nathan Barley where the irony goes so far out the other side that it actually collapses in on itself and it ends up being lauded by the very people it was supposed to be ripping the proverbial out of. In this case, the Sixxlings who the song was meant to parody instead just took it to heart and claimed it as an anthem for themselves with its "I'm a rockstar baby! Rockstar baby, come on!" refrain and chorus of "Everybody hates you when you looooove rock 'n' roll!" being pretty much ever-present at every '80s sleaze revival night in this era (and lord knows, I went to a LOT of 'em around this time). The band suddenly found themselves being the new favourites of the exact same crowd they were supposed to be taking the piss out of while more rarefied scuzz-rockers wrote them off as blatant bandwagon chasers a la Red Star Rebels et al and it basically left them in the mother of all Catch 22's.

Inevitably, Crystal Pistol weren't long for the world afterwards - having ended up being so massively misrepresented by a song that wasn't reflective of their output there wasn't really anywhere else they could go and they'd end up combusting after one more release (the Serpentine River EP) as the noughties wound to an end. I remember reading an interview with them around this time (in Bubblegum Slut I'm pretty sure) where singer Mik Ireland came across as being pretty pissed off about how much of an albatross around the band's neck the whole Rockstar song had become.

I have no idea what happened to Crystal Pistol after they split - they don't have an entry on Wikipedia and the interweb seems to be pretty quiet in terms of info on what they're up to now. It's a bit of a shame really - if you had them down as a one trick pony because of Rockstar then their album's actually well worth a revisit as it shows that they were actually very different from that song - I saw them live just the once around this era (inevitably at Bradford Rio's) and they put on a good set (from what I can remember in my VERY drunken state that night) which backed up that they had a bit more piss and vinegar than a lot of the sleaze-by-numbers Johnny-come-latelys who were already clogging up the scene by this point. But I guess it's that old favourite of suddenly hitting paydirt with a song that doesn't really reflect what your band is but ends up becoming the thing that you're best known for (as anyone who remembers Wake Up Boo by the Boo Radleys or Runaway Train by Soul Asylum or that terrible dance remix of Tequila that took Terrorvision into the Top 3 will tell you). Ah well, at least there's a bit of an amusing irony looking back and remembering all those Sixx/Axl wannabes shouting along to the lyrics "I make love with a plastic queen/She's been dipped in vaseline" without any sense of self-awareness when the DJ put this on on a Saturday night at Rio's or Rock of Ages back in the day. If I'm honest, I kind of miss those times of being, young, drunk and daft in the days before staying out drinking after midnight meant 2-3 days of existential crisis hangover hell...