Concrete Playground

King Khan & BBQ Show is not a cooking show. King Khan is the Berlin-based, Canadian rocker that just messed with our heads for Falls Festival with his soul band King Khan & the Shrines. While he and the Shrines do melodic, garage/rhythm and blues party jams — like the Animals and Sam Cooke getting sweaty and disregarding any of their technique — this project is much more punk.

The 'BBQ Show' bit of King Khan & BBQ show is in fact a man, not a cooking implement or method. This man, BBQ Show (Mark Sultan to his mum) played with Khan in a band called the Spaceshits. King Khan was then known as Blacksnake, and BBQ has had more pseudonyms than you could poke a stick at — Needles, Krebs, Von Needles, Skutch, Creepy, Bridge Mixture, etc. Confused? Yeah me too.

So when King Khan and BBQ Show get together, besides being unsure of how to address each other, they make straight-ahead punk with dashes of soul, obtuse and weird lyrics and more messed-up stage antics than you could imagine; their band the Spaceshits were banned from playing live in their hometown or Montreal, and recently the duo were jailed while on tour in the US. I'm not sure about Lou and Laurie letting them unleash their show on the Opera House as part of Vivid Live.