Forked tongue stuffed deep in their cheek and rubber baby masks stretched over their heads, Ty & the Muggers bottle the free spirits of the Emotional Mugger tour, then heave them into the audience on this stomping BBC performance from 2016. Gloriously guttural and blown-out sonics support Ty’s all-to-the-wall vocal performances on every song. “LIVE” “AT” “THE” “BBC” puts the ‘sick’ back into ‘satiric’ and the ‘the fuh!?!” back into ‘FUN!’
Flash back, to a time of big men and bigger babies! A time not unlike today — but what, simpler-like? Shit. January, 2016. The times: scary. Tomorrow: kiss it goodbye. This was the headspace for Emotional Mugger’s necksnapping sketch when it dropped that very month those ten fateful years ago. Off the back of 2014’s expansive Manipulator and the months of touring that followed, Ty was down to party with whatever extreme, flipped-script scene came welling up through him. Emotional Mugger, its forked tongue stuffed in deep cheek, landed the jump, putting the ‘sick’ back into ‘satiric’ and the ‘the fuh!?!” back into ‘FUN!’, featuring eleven of the most rancid & monstrous cuts in the Segall catalog EVEN AS OF TODAY — sequenced, as ever, with an almost mystic third eye/ear predilection for the immaculate distribution of album gravity.
The fun didn’t stop there. Ty’d played most of the parts on the album, excepting some key drop-ins from close associates, including Wand’s Cory Hanson and Evan Burrows, The Cairo Gang’s Emmett Kelly, Mikal Cronin and King Tuff himself, Kyle Thomas. The vibes were so right with this crew, he dubbed them The Muggers, stretched a rubber baby mask over his head (with extra space sliced out for his mouth to scream through), and they all hit the road a few weeks in front of the album, rolling over the US through the end of March, then heading to Europe for some more.
That’s when “LIVE” “AT” “THE” “BBC” happened.
They were cutting thru the UK, four shows in five days — just enough time for a Mark Riley session for the BBC! It would be child’s play, in more ways than one. Fifty shows into it, The Muggers were in full-on road mode, their five-headed monstrosity fully backing Ty — who for perhaps the only time in all his years of touring — carried only a mic, to focus all his energy on singing. Here, he leads the charge, his pipes deeply tanned, but otherwise unfettered from their nightly regimen. Hammering out a nineteen minute slice of their regular show, he & The Muggers’ free spirits can be heard in EVERY SINGLE MOMENT, with special weirdness coming whenever Cory, Emmett, Mikal and Kyle all chip in on backing vocals. The room feels like barely enough to contain all their shit as they smash through four choice Emotional Mugger cuts and one ostensible finger-in-the-eye, their telescoped take-out of The Doors’ “L.A. Woman.” Blues, yeah! It sounds, a decade hence, like the Black Flag version that never was. Now it’s The Muggers’ version that will ALWAYS be.
Yup — undeniably hot stuff. What took us so long to get this out? Who knows, maybe the etching? That’s right, one side has all the music, the other side’s got a rendering of the babyman mask that’s haunted so many punters over long nights of the soul since then. Relive the trauma, and yer sure to dig “LIVE” “AT” “THE” “BBC”.
What else is there to say? Other than, all-together-now, “John Wayne was a bad, bad man!”
