The Kinks’ Ray Davies hailed them “a cross between Led Zeppelin and Blondie”; Matt Dillon asked them to record a Cambodian version of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now for his directorial debut, City Of Ghosts, and Metallica’s Kirk Hammett picked One Thousand Tears Of A Tarantula for the number two slot on his Rolling Stone Best Music Of The Decade ballot. Dengue Fever, the Los Angeles-based sextet who take ’60s Cambodian psyche rock and stuff it through a blender, are at risk of becoming accustomed to such high praise. The LA Weekly declared the band Best New Artist; Mojo counts them among its Top 10 World Music Releases; their songs have featured on everything from CSI: Las Vegas to True Blood. The band’s beginnings on a dusty road en route from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh in the late 1990s have long been the stuff of legend. And today, this extraordinary ensemble is chiefly responsible for introducing global audiences to a lesser-known Cambodia; the Cambodia long obscured from international eyes by the pall of murderous Maoists. As Mark Jenkins writes in The Washington Post: “Imagine relaxing in a dive in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, circa 1965, brushing elbows with off-duty soldiers, local gangsters and Western diplomats as a hip band plays a mix of rock, soul, jazz, surf music, traditional Cambodian tunes and Henry Mancini and John Barry spy-movie motifs.” Powerful stuff, not just on the global stage but where it all began – as evidenced in the documentary Sleepwalking Through The Mekong, which charts Dengue Fever’s first visit to Cambodia as a band back in 2005. During one sequence, filmed in The White Building where the band jammed with residents, a music teacher turns to the camera and says in Khmer: “When I saw them performing with my students I was just in awe. Nothing could compare to it. I knew they were foreigners, but when they played all these Khmer songs there was no class difference. We were all equal.”
WHO: Dengue Fever
WHAT: Sleepwalking Through The Mekong screening
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 4pm July 11
WHY: “Underground people are getting hip to world music, and the world music side is getting hip to how you don’t have to have a dreadlock wig and Guatemalan pants to be cool” – Senon Williams (bass), Dengue Fever