On Wednesday, Gene Simmons, 73-year-old lead singer and bassist of face painted American squawkers Kiss – who is reputed to have the longest tongue in rock ‘n’ roll and has spent most of his career proving it – visited the House of Commons as the personal guest of the Honourable Member for North Antrim, Ian Paisley jnr of the Democratic Unionist Party.
Given that the Kiss oeuvre includes the albums Hotter than Hell, Love Gun and Lick it Up, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Simmons found some affinity with the son of the man responsible for such old favourites as Devil’s Buttermilk and The Whore of Rome.
The BBC reported that the singer, a lifelong conservative who has described Boris Johnson as “cool as can be”, was grateful to Paisley’s help in securing landing rights for the band’s private jet in the UK in advance of their End of the Road tour. So, he dropped by the Commons for Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday morning, where, in the absence of Rishi Sunak, deputy PM Oliver Dowden was sparring with deputy Labour leader, Angela Rayner.
Asked about the current stalemate in Northern Ireland, he displayed some surprisingly nimble political footwork, expressing the hope that “everything gets back in order in Northern Ireland and the people’s business should be done by their elected officials”.
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He also had some observations about the UK’s constitutional processes. “I think Americans can take a big lesson in civility in how to make democracy actually work and still respect the other side,” he said. “Democracy is the only hope for mankind and the astonishing give and take of the monarchy and existing, working democracy coexisting at the same time is fascinating. It’s almost like nowhere else in the world.”
These sentiments are not too far removed from those of another well-known musician. Nick Cave caused raised eyebrows in some quarters last month when he attended the coronation of King Charles, just around the corner from the House of Commons at Westminster Abbey, saying he “hold[s] an inexplicable emotional attachment to the royals”.
“Surprised? You shouldn’t be,” wrote Fergal Kinney in the New Statesman. “In the politics he espouses and the manner in which he embraces his Christian faith, Cave has, for some time, been a conservative and, sometimes, establishment figure.”
In an occasionally critical but largely sympathetic piece, Kinney pointed out that the 65-year-old Australian has been experiencing a late-career creative renaissance in recent years, during which time he has also endured the deaths of two of his children. Alongside this, he’s been engaged in an often fascinating public dialogue on his own website and in other media about art, belief and life. Much of this isn’t directly political – Cave has always been more interested in the transcendental and the allegorical – but some is.
He told the website Unherd last year that he had never been “against the establishment” and was always more interested in “f**king with people on a different kind of level”. Asked what that meant these days, he answered: “You be a conservative ... you go to church and be a conservative.”
Kinney doesn’t like Cave’s attacks on current progressive self-righteousness but he acknowledges the singer has not fallen into the dispiriting traps of conspiracism or worse that have snared the likes of Morrissey and Van Morrison. The latter, as it happens, was involved in a controversy with Ian Paisley jnr during Covid, when a video emerged of the two chanting slogans against Northern Ireland health minister, Robin Swann, for which Paisley subsequently apologised.
There is a dissertation’s worth of multiple ironies at play here. The rhetorical worldview of Ian jnr’s dad – apocalyptic, retributive, soaked in Old Testament imagery of hellfire and damnation – is far closer to the imaginative universe which Cave has been creating since he first emerged with The Birthday Party in the early 1980s than it is to the spandex-clad mock-cock-rock libertinism of Kiss. What many of the think pieces and research projects into the “two traditions” on this island fail to capture is the often weird interplay between politics, faith, consumerism and pop culture across different generations north and south of the Border. Strange things happen behind the privet hedges of North Antrim; you can easily imagine teenage Ian jnr throwing guitar shapes and sticking out his tongue as far as it will go at the bathroom mirror while his father works on a fire and brimstone speech downstairs.
Cave, meanwhile, continues to plough his own furrow, a figure of real originality and substance (if you doubt this, have a listen to his recent BBC interview with John Wilson). And I have no idea how long his tongue is.
