...The Fields of the Nephilim are back! They're playing the Shepherd's Bush Empire on the 12th and 13th of July and I'm going to be there.
Ah, the Neph... How cool were the Neph..?
Well, in keeping with virtually all of my record collection, the answer is not very.
Over three albums, they developed a form they called 'spaghetti metal' - left-field psychedelic rock with shades of Ennio Morricone and indeed laterly Pink Floyd, thrown in for good measure. They wore Sergio Leone-style dusters and wide-brimmed hats, covered themselves in flour and sang about pagan concepts such as Sumerian and chaos magic and appeared to genuinely believe the Necronomicon was a real book. After the release of a live album in the early 90s, singer Carl McCoy went his own way. He released an industrial-metal album under the name 'The Nefilim' in the mid 90s, to much indifference, then had an album of FotN demos released by a pissed off record company after he took too long to deliver the finished article. Finally, in 2005, FotN managed to deliver a new album, Mourning Son that built on the legacy of the original band.
And now they're playing live in London again. The Neph live were wonderful. Despite my own atheism, I Ioved the sense of ceremony and mysticism at Neph gigs. They were always tighter than a gnat's proverbial, swathed in preposterous amounts of dry ice and their audience would literally go into raptures, hands held aloft, like those ridiculous evangelical types. Best of all were the human pyramids, sometimes four goths high, waving precariously in the smog as the band conjured these portentious soundscapes behind them.
They were stupid. They were so very, very stupid, but they were magnificent with it.
I can't wait.
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