Give him a wall, he’ll scale it like Spiderman.
Give him an air conditioning funnel in the ceiling, he’ll crawl it like Alien.
Give him a balcony, he’ll launch himself from it like a suicidal base-jumper.
Give him an audience, he’ll mosh his way through them like a human cattle-bar.
Give him a pop song, he’ll croon it.
Give him a gig, he’ll tear the living, beating heart out of it and eat it whole.
He is Nick Johnston, the mini-Iggy whirling dervish at the front of New Zealand’s most visceral, vital and vibrant pop-punk band since, well, forever. And he’s a victim of his own showmanship. “Our pop sensibility has come lately,” Nick explains.
“We started listening to a whole bunch of different music than that earlier stuff. We’d been listening to Phil Spector and Brian Wilson and Roy Orbison, all sixties and fifties pop. I can relate to that quite a bit. And The Buzzcocks are quite important to us, a lot of energy, what they’re doing is punk rock but it’s so obviously taken from sixties pop tunes. "
We do know one thing about Cut Off Your Hands though: give them rock’n’roll, they’ll devour it…