Bruno Wizard

Last week, I sat for an hour to speak with Bruno Wizard, the madman, frontman and songwriter of the obscure but inspired British post-punk band The Homosexuals, originally disbanded in 1986 but recently formed again by Bruno with new members, and about to embark on their first US tour ever. Two days after the interview, I saw them play in Manhattan (Bruno’s “spiritual home”). The following article consolidates those experiences to attempt explanation of why I believe this band is so authentic and original. But if you think you lack the time or interest for all that, I want to first say this:

GO AND SEE THIS BAND PLAY. It is something fiercely original and you won’t regret it, I swear. This first tour is limited to some East and West Coast dates, listed below, but keep an eye out for when they tour again in a few months. You won’t forget the name.

Both on stage and off, Bruno Wizard left me with two overwhelming impressions. The first is that this guy is the real thing, authentic as hell, and anything he has in common with punks or hipsters is only tangential. He is now a 58-year-old man playing energetic post-punk, and yet the spirit of youth is all about him. He is a strong-minded idealist both in his ideas of the world and of music, his jaded streak matched by consistent optimism – “Everybody has love and fear in their hearts,” he says – but in performance, he consistently asks the audience to nurture the former and transcend the latter. Nothing about him reeks of an obsolete rockstar trying to regain some quashed youthful ambitions; instead, he has fresh and profound ambitions for his music, which he believes “can articulate not only my life but the dreams and aspirations of other generations.”

The second impression I got, and this one is hard to miss, is that this guy is floating on air. He confesses no dream of great commercial success, and in fact eschews it, lamenting, “[The] position of being Queen or Rolling Stones where you’ve got 20,000 people there in an auditorium and you know that none of them really fucking know you, they are just living up to whatever part of the image the record company and the media have fed to them.” But now, with a committed group of hardcore fans spread throughout the country, Bruno Wizard is about to determine what power a rockstar actually has, and he’s poised and ready for it.

The Homosexuals circa 1977

The band’s history (as he tells it) makes it easy to understand why this occasion is so momentous in its own way. In 1976, Bruno, “already disillusioned with how [his generation’s] revolution had been sort of stolen from us by the establishment in the ’60s by the industry controlling the means of production and distributions of the media” and equally pessimistic about the chances of success for punk’s “potentially revolutionary energy” (he says it was over “in about 6 months”), went one day to famed British punk club The Roxy, which was then known for booking unknown bands. He signed up to play five nights later with his band The Rejects (named on the spot), and then set out to find musicians to play as The Rejects. Fueled both by the revolutionary spirit he had seen co-opted and also by the authenticity of Jamaican reggae, he performed under that name until meeting guitarist Anton Hayman and forming The Homosexuals. Along with bassist Jim Welton and various drummers, they created music that is certainly indebted to its time (evoking Television, Wire, sometimes even a bit of Talking Heads in Bruno’s yelps), but that is also sophisticated, jam-packed with dynamic ideas, songs that seem to evolve before you, all the while grounded by infectious vocal and guitar hooks, and by Bruno’s unmistakable vocal rhythms. It’s garage rock and it’s art-punk, and it’s made to be played loud. Its intensity is fueled partially by Bruno’s expectations: for him, “The Homosexuals was always a writing outlet,” and as an artist, he believes his duty is to awaken people “to what’s really going on” – to let others know, through his life and work, that it is possible to say to the established order and systems, “Look, these things that you bring to me, that you’re telling me are healthy, like music industry education — you’re force-feeding me concrete and I refuse to take it anymore.” The Homosexuals sporadically released a series of EPs (all pressed personally as limited editions by Bruno himself, never released commercially) until 1986 when, tired of his lifestyle and unsure of whether he could accomplish his goals while living the solitary life of a writer and performer, he “made the decision to close the door to the studio in [his] head” and set out to disseminate his ideas in other ways. 

The legacy of The Homosexuals was one LP’s worth of material compiled from various limited-edition EPs. They have never crossed the Atlantic as a band. They had never been signed. So when, in about 2003, Bruno was informed there was a fanbase for The Homosexuals and that the Internet has consolidated that community, he was floored. It took over two years for him to fully accept it as truth, during which time Anton declined his offer to re-form the band. But the fans were there, and through the loyalty of some proactive ones, he re-released the LP (as The Homosexuals’ CD), a three-disc collection of everything he still had (Astral Glamor), and he began to play with a series of groups until he finally landed with his current four-piece, ready to both record new music and to actually tour the United States, playing to people for whom this 20-year-old music was still important and meaningful. It’s downright inspiring and enlivening to hear this guy, so clearly 58 years old and proud of his “elegantly wasted cocaine cheekbones,” to hear him share, “I’m getting 16-year-old kids from San Francisco and all over the place e-mailing me and saying, ‘Wow you sound like my favorite nine or ten bands; I’d have to go to ten concerts to get what I get just from one of your songs.’”

The Homosexuals on the set of 'Pink Pony' (2008)

It was that sense of joy that pervaded The Homosexuals’ show at Manhattan’s Mercury Lounge. No doubt that Bruno, as a live performer, has grand ambition of forcing his audience past enjoyment, having them “take another look at themselves” and subsequently move into progressively greater ecstasy. But what enlivens his personality and songs is that his band rocks. A loud, aggressive and dynamic four-piece (including Travis Harrison, “the best fucking drummer in New York or wherever we are”) equally adept at deconstructing a song into feedback or assaultive noise as they are at nailing Bruno’s hooks, they provide a powerful foundation from which Bruno communicates with his audience. It’s fascinating to watch him onstage because, while he enhances his show through frontman posturing and theatricality, he is, to some extent, a bit oblivious of the crowd. In the interview, he addressed that dichotomy: “I’m doing it for the right reasons — for myself — but it’s nice to have that vindication [of audience appreciation],” as well as the sense that “everybody is important…I teach what I need to learn, and I feel that with audiences, everybody has love and fear in their hearts, and the ones who are loving it, that’s who I’m doing it for.”

His stage presence morphed consistently throughout their roughly hour-long show. There were times when the songs seemed to turn him inwards and he stared intensely and vacantly above our heads. But he was also the guy who opened his show taking photos of the crowd, who eventually tossed the microphone stand from the stage, who collapsed into a moaning pile in the midst of a song, who on occasion beat on one of the drums, and who, at one point, stepped from the stage, not a showy or aggressive punk-rock leap, but simply stepped off the stage and turned to watch his band play alongside the crowd. It was as though, in the same way that his music shifts constantly — undercutting itself, finding new avenues of expression within the same song — Bruno Wizard is, as a performer, uninterested in staying in the same place for too long. Was any of it actually considered frontman posturing, or was it just where his impulse took him? He was dressed in a raggedy black outfit (the left sleeve was safety-pinned together) with glitter glued over his pants legs, and with his white hair gelled into spikes and colored green – a far cry from the hipster get-up he wore when we spoke days before. Yet, after his first song, he insisted that he was not dressing like a punk – “punk is an attitude” and was “manufactured,” he shared, and he wasn’t interested in doing the same old shit. While he was never shy of harshness or vitriol, speaking of George W. Bush as a baby-killer and sparing no opportunity to say “fuck you” to imagined opponents, his tone was uniformly positive, optimistic and uplifting, and he likewise never spared the opportunity to remind us to live a life of love and to nurture that in our own hearts. He said to me, several times, that his songs are about the same things now as they were back in the early days – “don’t imitate people, learn to walk your own walk before you do” – and watching him lead this band, it was easy to tell that, for Bruno at least, that was less a philosophy than an actual lifestyle.

Bruno Wizard on the set of 'Pink Pony' (2008)

All the while, he sings as powerfully as on the old records, showcasing his pronounced sense of vocal rhythm. His band plays like it’s the last show on Earth — his guitarist with dynamite solo work and his bassist, on occasion, throwing his instrument to the ground. All the while, the crowd grows progressively more ignited as Bruno grows more unhinged, and I wonder whether, for some of them, he is actually accomplishing his messianic goals of invoking something in them, bringing them to another place. He told me that in his mind, “the voice is the doorway to the spirit” and that through the spirit, he has, on occasion, been able to lift himself above the world, a vantage to which he wants to lift his audiences, to inspire them past the weight of petty concerns. Watching this crowd energetically respond to this man exuding joy in droves, it was hard not to be optimistic, not only about life or The Homosexuals, but of the power of rock and roll to change or affect a little part of our world. Maybe that’s silly and it’s just great rock and roll – in either case, I know what Bruno would say about it, because he did say it, about halfway through a show that I recommend without reservation: “For those of you who think that music is nothing, that it’s all prissy, prissy – fuck you.”

TOUR DATES

March 24, 2009* Bottom of the Hill – San Francisco, California
March 25, 2009 The Pink Mailbox – Isla Vista, California 
March 26, 2009* The Prospector – Long Beach, California
March 27, 2009* The Casbah – San Diego, California
March 29, 2009* The Echo/The Silver Apples – Los Angeles, California
April 4, 2009 Princeton University — Princeton, New Jersey
April 5, 2009 Death by Audio – Brooklyn, New York

* PART TIME PUNKS presents