West Seattle is a No-Go Zone… isolated from the rest of the city, it’s natives endured a parallel evolution. West Seattleites are weird and make a fitting audience for the weirdest band in the world: The Fabulous Downey Brothers, a subgenus of the human species, unparalleled even against the characters of a Kurt Vonnegut novel. Delving into the dangers of Social Darwinism, I’m pleased to present Monarch readers with a Fabulous Downey interview, obtained at great personal risk during their show at The Benbow Room, a pirate themed restaurant/bar in the mutant haven of West Seattle’s Admiral District. 

The pirate motif starts with the dinning room, built from the hull of a converted schooner, but it doesn’t end there. The staff are a surly bunch of old-salts, pestilent and pale, like something that crawled out from the atomic waste at the bottom of Davy Jones’ locker. My first encounter was with a bilge-sucker named Eric. I wanted to phone ahead and introduce myself, to ask whether there were any special arrangements to be made regarding the corking-fee. Eric was obviously busy, because he was too busy to let me finish any of my sentences, his guttural belch splashing into the phone every time I wanted to say something intelligent. “Interview? The Downey Brothers?!? Uh huh. Yeah it’s fine. Corking fee is 10 dollars!” He hung up.

When I arrived it was no surprise that Eric hadn’t spoken to the ship’s crew. He had bilge to suck; after a long day of that he probably wanted to go home to a box of breath-mints, so the staff had no idea who I was, or that I’d be bringing a bottle of Port.

I’m a proud alcoholic, but a poor one. I didn’t want any cut-thoughts hornswaggling me out of my hard-earned doubloons, so I re-stated my case and convinced the feckless-freaks to avast and be friendly. It only took a moment for them to sort things out, so I forgave the scallywags. I gave them their pieces of eight, sat in the lurid green galley, and started drinking before the DT’s set in.

Sean Downey and his wife Chandra were seated at the bar, eating a bowl of gluten-empowered mac & cheese. Those who don’t know might label Chandra as a punk, a goth, possibly even funky, but having seen her in action I can only think of her as a lady. She works a room with the same grace and charm as a Dame of the British Empire. There’s no doubt that she’s a mutant, she’s a Pescetarian, cold to the touch but with a heart warmer than Canadian rum. I let her iron out a few details with the night manager before introducing myself to the couple. “It’s great to meet you. Take your time, finish eating. I’ll be in the galley whenever you’re ready.” I could’ve sat beside them, but the bar was on the wrong end of the venue and I hadn’t braved the wilds of West Seattle to sit anywhere that might fall short of the hull of a converted schooner. Sean and Chandra had a quick confab then joined me for a glass of Port.

It’s wise to have an edge when going into an extreme situation. The Downeys are certainly extreme, and I knew the Port wouldn’t be enough, so I brought a friend to back me up. As deadly as any seadog, but not nearly as wrank, Natalie is my official safety-monitor. She doesn’t carry a cutlass, her weapon of choice is a wrench. I wasn’t sure if a wrench would be enough, so I asked her to bring mace and a tazer. She met me half-way and brought along three wrenches. Ample armament in the hands of a Yoga expert. I introduced Natalie and it wasn’t long before we were talking with the rest of the band: Liam Downey, Louis, Freddy, Alex, and Josh the 6.5th member.

I’m a journalist. Drinking comes with the job and I had been drinking since 11am. A lot of things occurred to me that day and at some point during the binge it occurred to me that there are things in this world that go way beyond human understanding, things that can’t be explained and that maybe shouldn’t. So I had a choice, whether to conduct a probing interview with in-depth questions, or to respect the abnormal mysteries of nature. My first question was for Sean “If you could have any super power what would it be?” Sean understood my rationale and replied “I’d like to be able to psychically beam music into people’s heads.” Not a bad answer to a deliberately dumb question. I wanted to ask how he reconciles the band’s web presence with the lyrics to Get Small, or about his alleged affiliation with the Church Of The SubGenius. But Sean’s a hero, and you never look a gift hero in the mouth. I turned to Chandra.

“Would you rather be smart and ugly, or dumb and hot?” Without hesitation she shouted “Weird and horny!” I had a crush on Chandra (before I knew she was happily married). I had also done my research, and the Port was lowering my inhibition, so I asked “Are you a natural red-head?” She smiled “It depends on where you look.” The hair I was looking at was jet-black, which meant that if I looked hard enough I’d find a hair of different color. “No can do-” I thought. Sean was smaller than me, but he looked like a scrappy fighter, and I wasn’t sure that even three wrenches could take him down. It was time to move on.

Every time I’ve seen Liam up close it’s been with a neon pipe-cleaner pointing out from the top of his head. That night he was wearing a lime-yellow zig-zag antenna. “Why do you wear an antenna?” I asked. Liam looked nervous. Freddy the base player answered for him “He uses it to pick up NPR.” Liam wasn’t going to get off that easy. “Why are you like a mango?” Reluctantly, Liam spoke for himself “Mangoes burn fat.” I asked him who he was burning fat with, he merely blushed. I looked again at his antenna and decided he was an alien. “What’s the deal with cattle mutilations?” “After the Roswell incident in ’47 we had to negotiate a treaty with President Truman… It’s either the cattle or you.”

As a show of strength, Natalie had placed all three of her wrenches on our table. Like many artists Liam is shy, but not too shy to talk to a pretty girl. He asked Natalie about the wrenches. Two of them were earmarked for self-defense against deviant buccaneers, the other was designed to switch off gas mains in case of an earthquake. This seemed to strike a chord with Liam, who was suspiciously well informed about Seattle fault-lines and the state of our continental shelf. He and Natalie had much to discuss.

The show was starting so I had to work fast. Louis diapered but Alex was sneaking bites of Chandra’s unattended macaroni. I had a very important question for him “If you could be any animal, what would it be and why?” He snuck one more bite of mac “I’d be a dolphin, because they’re really smart.” Dolphins are smart, just ask Douglas Adams, I’m sure he knows all about their mating habits as well.

Alex finished Chandra’s mac & cheese then left to visit the little guitarist’s room… Gluten’ll do that to you. The only Downey left was Josh. I didn’t understand why he was the 6.5th member of the band, so I asked. The short story is that Josh is one of the founding members. He doesn’t play an instrument that can be heard. Light is his medium. While the rest of the band is tickling ivories, or strumming strings, Josh is pressing buttons to make lasers sing… An integral part of any exhibition.

And what an exhibition it was. To my chagrin the Downeys weren’t headlining. They were playing second, on a Thursday night, at a miscreant bar in West Seattle. But it only seemed to matter to me. The Downeys give everything they have at every show; passion, poetry and the prospect of divine depravity.

I don’t know if Sean will ever have the power to beam music into people’s heads, but he has stage presence and the power to work a crowd into a frenzy. I started to pogo and I wasn’t the only one. I think Natalie was doing the Shu-ga-loo, or maybe it was the Coo-ca-choo. Maybe we did all 16 dances, because we danced that mess around. Liam broke a string on a non-euclidean guitar, Freddy lost a hexagonal tile from his eye and a West Seattle MILF gripped the edge of the pool-table so she could be spanked by a deck-hand. The scene was rhythmic. Calamitous. Fabulous…

After the show I had a conversation with Sean about his music. I wanted to know what genre it was. It seems so versatile. Is it New Wave? Synthpop? You can play it at a Goth show just as easily as at a rave. By virtue of sarcasm Downey music may be closer to the Punk side of the spectrum, but if I had to put a label on it I’d call it Good… nine out of ten mutants agree.