[Reader-list] Black Lips Chased out of India by Police

[Rahul Asthana]

Hilarious!
http://www.pitchfork.com/article/news/148715-black-lips-chased-out-of-india-by-police
Black Lips Chased out of India by Police
Their tour is cancelled, the cops are after them, and their label has no clue where they are. But it sounds like they had fun!
Black Lips Chased out of India by Police

When garage-rock knuckleheads the Black Lips smash beer bottles over their guitars or piss in their own mouths onstage in the U.S., the worst that usually happens is they'll get banned from another venue. But when they bring that anarchy to their tour of India, they incur the wrath of all sorts of authority figures.

That's what reportedly happened Friday night in Chennai. According to the Indian music site Indiecision, the Lips got themselves in deep shit while playing at Sir Mutha Venkata Subbarao Concert Hall. Guitarist Cole Alexander stripped his clothes off, dove in the crowd, then got back onstage and made out with other band members. This kind of thing does not fly in Chennai. As of right now, the rest of the Lips' Indian tour is cancelled, and the band's label, Vice Records, has no idea where they are.

After the show, the band sent Vice an email detailing all the crazy shit that happened to them after that onstage stunt:

    After the fiasco, which the kids seemed to like, the financial backers of the event were furious and threw us off the tour. They tried to get security to restrain us until the Tamil police arrived. We locked the door while they were kicking and banging on it. Meanwhile, we slipped out the other emergency exit.

    When we got to the hotel our tour guide informed us that the that the Campus Rock Idols sponsors were pressing charges and that the police would make their arrest. At that point our tour driver informed us we would have to drive six hours to get to the next town and cross state lines where we would be out of the Tamil authorities jurisdiction, because apparently the jail in Chennai is no joke. Word on the street said that it was teeming with tuberculosis, violence and live maggots so instead of risking going there we fled the scene. The drive ended up taking 10 hours because of a horrific accident on the road. We were also informed that all of the shows on our tour had been canceled effectively fucking all funds for the trip. This was a cultural clashing shit storm.

    When we got to the next hotel a mysterious man and someone who worked for our Indian booking agency tried to run off with our passports they got to the car when we caught them. That's when our VBS.tv documentarian Rob went postal on them. We surrounded them until they gave back our passports. After that we booked the first flight to Berlin to instead work with another Indian, King Khan, on an upcoming EP. We are flying out as soon as sunrise hits this far away land and we have to have the US embassy's phone number on hand in case any more troubleshit starts popping at the airport or something. We would like to thank the four Hindi speaking tour guides, and Rana Ghose for helping us get through these enormous trials and tribulations, and for future reference we really enjoyed the people of India and we hope western rock bands will be able to tour there in the future."

As of this moment, the folks at Vice have received no contact from the band since that email, so there's no word on whether or not they escaped Indian police and made it to Germany. Reached for comment, Vice Label Coordinator Creative Director Christopher Roberts says, "I'm concerned but am confident they'll be fine."

This Indian tour had always seemed like a pretty nuts idea. The Lips were topping the bill at a Battle of the Bands, playing after a bunch of Indian metal bands. And the first show of the tour, in Pune, found the confused crowd pelting the band with plastic bottles. In an interview with Time Out Mumbai, Lips drummer Joe Bradley said that the band would be tuning down their live show for this tour:  "We want to respect the people and places that provide these shows for us." The weird thing is that the Chennai show actually sounds fairly low-key as far as Black Lips shows go.

If they've managed to make it out of India unscathed, the Black Lips have a run of shows starting up in Germany next week, followed by a huge U.S. tour that'll run through May. Vice will release 200 Million Thousand, their grimy next album, on February 24.