9. Caroliner
Caroliner started as this performance art/busking/let’s go out on the streets and freak people out thing, but basically they’re one of the first bands that truly had a storyline that they were adhering to. Sure, you had The Residents and the Mummies and whatnot, where you don’t know who was in the band exactly and they’re all trying to be anonymous, but Caroliner’s thing was based around US ergot poisoning, so there was this dreamy narrative going on that they tried to tie to actual events in US history. Ergot poisoning did actually happen and entire cities would have group hallucinations, but the band itself was a lot of costumes, home-made instruments, like The Residents but all very organic sounding, not necessarily electronic.
They set the whole club in black light and then they wallpaper the entire club with hand drawn tapestries. It really, really changed how I looked at performance. For a while – I’m talking when I was like 17/18 – I really wanted to emulate this sort of full experience. I wanted to transform a club into a fairy tale land based on ergot poisoning in North America!! Dayglo paint everywhere.
