The King Khan & BBQ Show is something of a garage-rock supergroup, despite only having two members. The King Khan half of proceedings is Arish Ahmed Khan, while the BBQ part of the equation is Mark Sultan. The Montreal-bred pair have a long musical history, having played together in Spaceshits in the late ‘90s, but it was in the early ‘00s that they started writing for a two-man project and The King Khan & BBQ Show was born. It hasn’t all been plain sailing, however; they actually had a messy split following their last Australian trip in 2010, when a show at Vivid LIVE turned sour. A couple of years later the pair reconciled and have just released a fourth album, Bad News Boys, as if nothing untoward had ever happened. “For something that we hadn’t done in years I think that we tapped into an old energy,” Sultan offers. “We really found this energy and tapped into it, it was cool.”
"There was a lot of absinthe involved. We revisited the Green Fairies – they’re the nice fairies.”
“We did most of it in Mark’s basement in Berlin, in the ‘Sultan’s Cave’, then some of the guitar stuff was done later in my studio,” Khan recalls. “But we did it all pretty naturally and pretty intoxicated – there was a lot of absinthe involved. We revisited the Green Fairies – they’re the nice fairies.”
“We were basically laughing like giddy school girls,” Sultan chuckles.
“We had a mix of everything,” Khan continues. “We had songs that we’d written separately that made sense for the project, and then when we got together we just made stuff up because we were in this great mood, and everything just kinda fell into place.”
Bad News Boys continues the band’s penchant for fun-packed garage-rock with flourishes of punk, soul and doo wop, and has apparently been going over well on the live front. “We just played the Burger Boogaloo with The Mummies and John Waters and The Gories, and we did a bunch of other shows since the record came out,” Khan enthuses. “We’ve been playing four or five songs from the new one and they’ve been fun.”
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“But people like the old stuff too so we can’t play too much new stuff,” Sultan interjects. “If I went to see the Ramones back in the day I’d want to hear all the classics, not all songs from their new album Pet Sematary. Or whatever, that never happened.”
And the pair are even looking forward to their Australian return, despite their last sojourn not going entirely to plan. “We have one day off at Ayers Rock,” Sultan deadpans. “We’re going to stand on it – it’s called ‘King Khan & BBQ Take A Stand’, and it’s a protest against the internet.”
“We’re protesting against the beds that burned,” Khan rejoins. “I’m shaving off all my body hair; it’s next level.”
