WHEN WE THINK of singer-songwriters, certain cliches spring to mind: tortured troubadours with battered acoustic guitars; unlucky in love and uncomfortable in their own skins; a lifetime spent busking in the rain catching coppers from strangers.
Of all the many things that you could accuse Scottish multi-hyphenate Momus (Nick Currie), however, lack of originality isn't one of them. In his 44 years, Currie has courted controversy as a musician, film composer, conceptual artist, producer, photographer, interviewer and essayist, churning out new material at an astonishing rate, maintaining a healthy distance from the mainstream and distorting his profile with his trademark eye-patch.
Momus held his first Hong Kong shows last night, and plays again tonight, at the Fringe Club, with local DIY pop star Dejay Choi (left), better known as The Pancakes.
His muse is a little more contrary than the average lovelorn singer. Referencing everything from Renaissance bad girl Lucretia Borgia, surrealist artist MC Escher, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and Kurt Cobain, Currie's lyrics buzz with a sexual frankness that borders on the obscene. After all, it's hard to picture the likes of Nick Cave, Bob Dylan - even the famously priapic David Bowie - writing such heartfelt songs as Coming in a Girl's Mouth or Everyone I Have Ever Slept With. Even more innocent-sounding fare like Tragedy and Farce - a song detailing a lifetime of unrequited love for a girl 'so pure' the singer can't even 'picture her nude' - ends in Vaseline-smeared nastiness.
If the intellectual and sexual content of Currie's songs is surprising, the music itself is positively insane. Eschewing the delicate acoustic meanderings of his peers, Currie's songs feature distorted voices, found sounds and idiot savant synthesisers.
The effect is somewhere between electro, gauche new romanticism and tinny Gameboy music - a kind of cross between the synth pop of Gary Numan and German composer Kurt Weill that Currie calls 'analog baroque'. It's no wonder he describes himself in one of his many thought-provoking essays as 'the man who collected things that other people didn't want'.