You know in Blade where down a back alley, behind a nondescript door there is a vampire rave where everyone is going crazy to some Chemical Brothers tune and blood spurts from the ceiling? Well that sort of stuff happens all the time, you lot just have your heads shoved too deep in your London Lites to see it. This is the fourth in a regular series where we stick our snouts in the dirt to snuffle for buried cultural truffles. This time James Read takes bohemian funk band Captain Strange to Bassline Circus’s street performance event, Estimated Time of Arrival.

A circus in King’s Cross can’t be a common occurrence. I’m a bit dubious. We’re told to meet near King’s Cross station, from which we will be led to the circus’s secret location via means of a parade. I hook up with Captain Strange and their funk-filled ska ship and sail through the paper lantern-strewn crowd.

Ben and Jem look confused.

We reach an open yard where it seems the festivities will be taking place. We are guided from high above the crowd by a chap wearing a top-hat. Front man Ben gets a little agitated at the prospect of being herded into the enclosed arena, wondering aloud if we are about to be ground down, tinned and labelled as cat food (it seemed less obscure at the time). If he was to be fed to felines, he announces that he’d only settle for being sold as Sheba, which he views as the classiest chow, despite Whiskas alleged 80 percent market stranglehold.

Just as the whole thing is beginning to reek a little of the coerced carnival atmosphere of Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island, the main event begins. Men clothed in animal skins gyrate around a kind of un-powered Ferris wheel, slightly over enthusiastically dubbed The Wheel of Death. This is kind of impressive, but after a while the repeated attempts to juggle while running in what is effectively a man-sized hamster wheel start to wear thin. Halfway through the trapeze act that follows, the boys are itching for a pint. Having completed a three-day stint in the studio that afternoon I can’t really blame them. So we headed off to the pub for a chat about all things Strange…

Juggling in man-sized hamster wheels. It never gets boring.

Ben tells me that the band’s got something of the circus in their attitude. They confess however, that they “don’t do any tricks, and don’t have any animals," but insist that it’s a “kind of burlesque experience all the same”, and that they’re “considering an investment in some top hats.” When I ask what roles they would play in a real circus, they become quite animated. It’s obviously something they have put a lot of thought into:

Ben (guitar/vocals): “I’d probably be one those elephants on a big ball.”

DP: "Being whipped by a tamer?”

Ben: “I should hope so, yes. That would bring a lot to it.”

Alfie (Sax): “I’d be a performance girl in really improbable clothing, looking like I should be in erotica, and doing not very much. Or at least I might be a sex pest.”

Jem (drums): “I might be that ball which the elephant stands on.”

Oli (bass): “I’d be a contortionist, like the one out of Circus of Horrors, inside the glass. Otherwise, I wouldn’t mind just running round naked. In the future I think I’d like to be a nudist.”

Freedom...

We discuss Oli’s girlfriend Poppy’s possible role as a Yoko-type figure on the band’s sidelines. She seems happier with a Linda McCartney comparison, telling me that she used to be a fan of the veggie food range, but eats “sausages with meat in them” now. The band declare that vegetarianism is “strange”, and it seems appropriate to ask where their name originates from.

Ben fields this enigmatically, claiming that he doesn’t remember, but that it was better than the other possibilities, which included Nuclear Lesbians, Pig Fetus and the Butthole Bleeders. They also had, as a literary option, Geneva Bomb Party. However, their name is Captain Strange, and their new album will be available very soon. Meanwhile, we have an exclusive free download of Dress to Kill, recorded mere hours before this interview took place. Hot shit.

Download Dress to Kill here.

Find out more at www.myspace.com/musicofcaptainstrange 

Additional performance photography by Stuart Emmerson