The lobby of the mid-west American hotel, normally crowded, had all but emptied in a few minutes flat – requests for the ear-splitting “noise” blaring from the portable cassette player to be turned down, repeatedly ignored. Only when the manager threatened to call the police did the offending guest return to his room. Two minutes later, he re-emerged – followed almost immediately by a devastating dynamite explosion coming from the bathroom. Keith Moon turned to the horrified innkeeper and calmly explained: “That, my friend, is noise.” He turned on the cassette player again. “This, on the other hand, is The Who.”
The antics of ‘Moon the loon’, The Who’s legendary drummer and resident crazy, have for decades been considered the benchmark for rock ‘n’ roll eccentricity. Of his penchant for toilet pyrotechnics, rock’s premier hellraiser once told biographer Tony Fletcher: “All that porcelain flying through the air was quite unforgettable. I never realised dynamite was so powerful.” Long after his death in 1978 at the age of 32, Moon – permanently enshrined on Holiday Inn’s Ten Most Wanted list – was described by Allmusic.com thus: “Moon, with his manic, lunatic side, and his life of excessive drinking, partying, and other indulgences, probably represented the youthful, zany side of rock & roll, as well as its self-destructive side, better than anyone else on the planet.”
Almost as famous as Moon’s off-stage excesses were his on-stage machine-gun-like drum outbursts. Flying bass pedals; wild cymbal crashes; savage licks tearing drum skins from their supports – all were hallmarks of his exuberant kit-smashing style. Some 40 years later, more than 8,300 miles from where Moon drew his last breath in the same London flat Cass Elliot had died in four years earlier, a dilapidated practice kit creaks and groans under an equally ferocious attack. Perched atop the wobbly stool in The Shark Cage, the rehearsal space at Sharky Bar on Street 130, is the two-tone-haired drummer with Cambodia’s ‘original’ all-Khmer rock band. Above the thunder, preternatural screams.
Cartoon Emo, currently working on their second alternative/heavy metal/rock album, signed with Svang Dara Entertainment in 2010. The band’s commitment to writing original material is a rare thing in the local music market, and their debut album, Shadow, sold in the region of 1,000 copies – “but we don’t need the money,” says manager Vuth, 22. “We just want to promote our music on the internet so that everybody understands us.”
Music graduates from the Royal University of Fine Arts, this band of 20-somethings – Boy (vocals), Tom (lead guitar), Din (bass guitar), Dan (guitar), and La (drums) – cite Iowan heavy metal icons Slipknot, and Massachusetts-based metalcore group Killswitch Engage as among their influences. But they’re not altogether unaware of their English forefathers. Mention The Who, The Sex Pistols or The Rolling Stones, and five heavily stylised heads – all crowned with spiky technicolour hair – nod in approval. Mention K-Pop, and they explode in derisory snorts.
As Svang Dara’s executive director Meng Sok Vireak noted at the album launch for Shadow, “Rock music is not popular in Cambodia nowadays, so our company is introducing this original Khmer-style rock music to the people of the country.” Chiu Seila, director of Sabay, chimed: “The formation of the band shows that our arts scene is developing, even if a little slowly.”
Today, Cartoon Emo are regular staples on Khmer TV and make their living exclusively by playing in the country’s nightclubs – although they save their own music for the rowdier foreign-owned bars. “With rock music, it’s usually high-class rich people who listen to it,” says Vuth (during the interview, he intercepts every question – occasionally rewording the band’s Khmer-language answers in favour of his own). “We’re not poor and we’re not rich, we just have enough of everything – time and money, our own studio. We want to be famous rock stars in Cambodia and help people to understand rock music.”
During more than an hour spent backstage, the band barely drains one pitcher of beer – hardly the stuff of rock ‘n’ roll hellraisers. In the West, screeching guitars and deafening drum rolls have long been synonymous with sex and drugs, but what of Cartoon Emo’s self-penned lyrics? “When we do something bad or wrong to our parents, like a shadow that follows us, we try to think about how bad the experience feels,” volunteers Vuth. “So we try to do something good, to make a balance. We also sing about lovers, about women, about drugs, but everything is a lesson; education. We try to teach people to be good. Many people in Cambodia are gangsters, or playboys. You see how we are dressed: we may look like them, but we are not gangsters or playboys in our hearts.”
Quite how true this is may be a matter of debate (when Boy appeared with his manicured blue Mohawk and stretched ear lobes in the mosh pit at Equinox during last month’s Anti-Fate/Sliten6ix gig, rumour had it he’d given his manager the slip for a rare unchaperoned night out), but on stage Cartoon Emo are one of the rowdiest ass-kicking bands in the country – something Roger Daltrey’s band of degenerates would surely have appreciated. And though Cartoon Emo may not share Moon’s terminal lust for the wild life, they’re a damn sight more likely to survive their thirties.
WHO: Cartoon Emo
WHAT: Cambodia’s original rock band
WHERE: Sharky Bar, St. 130
WHEN: 9pm June 29
WHY: They’re going to be HUGE