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Vice Blog

MY BOYFRIEND IS GAY (Against You)

I have been going out with my boyfriend for a really, really long time. We have pet names for each other. I cut his hair. He cleans up after me. We wear each other's clothes. We have the same friends. His mum likes me (Hi Marilyn!). It's disgusting really. However, there is one stinkingly unfortunate element to our relationship. My boyfriend is Gay. Not gay as in lame or gay as in homo. He's in a band called Gay Against You. They're a spazzy dance duo who started out playing shitty dives in Glasgow but are now attracting wider attention, albeit from Attitude as much as Terrorizer magazine. This is them…

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Listen: Gay Against You - "Hairy House"

Everybody knows bands have groupies. I know you say you don't but I'm giving you carte blanche to tell me about your hangers-on.
Joe: It's always just guys that are like, interested in music.
Lachlann: Yeah. People think we are some really hardcore party band and they get really disappointed when it turns out that we just play the show and then go to sleep.
J: There was a very sweet time in Bristol when a guy came up and asked if I was gay. I said no and he said that his friend really liked me. That was quite sweet but he seemed a bit disappointed.

Your name has got you a lot of gay press though.
L: Yeah. Well, I concealed the name from my folks. I said we were called 'Against You' but they soon found out. My dad did one of those Google image searches and emailed the search off to my entire extended family saying "Look what Lachlann's doing now!"
J: The name nearly got us killed on a bus in East London by a homophobic Jamaican guy who Lachlann couldn't resist goading.
L: I didn't really goad him. I just answered his questions.
J: Dude, you did goad him a bit.

Music reviewers always talk about your PE kit costumes rather than your music. Isn't that annoying after a while?
J: We did this show recently where a woman came up and said, "Where's the sexy PE teachers?" I was like, "What are you talking about?" She goes, "The flyer says there's gonna be sexy men, PE teachers in PE outfits doing a show." Turns out the guy who ran the club suggested we start billing ourselves as mental strippers.
L: It's kind of always what I thought we were.
J: On the flip side, a lot of people said we had some good songs on our last tour.

I'm pretty scared of how mental some of your shows are. What's the biggest health and safety breach so far?
J: I quite regularly hit people in the face with microphones by mistake.
L: It's never usually our fault. We'll start doing something and then someone takes it too far, like at The Old Blue Last when people tore down bits of chandelier when you (Joe) got kicked in the teeth.
J: There was a show we did in Brussels where the floor was so wet that I kept getting electric shocks every time I touched a microphone.
L: It's mostly people getting hit by flailing stuff and broken glass - especially when Joe decides not to wear shoes and I have to pull glass out of his foot.

* Gay Against You play Barden's Boudoir in London this Saturday and tour Scandinavia from next week.

EMMA BALKIND

Photo by Mark West