Trash Blog: TRASH CAM: Billy and the No Mates at BSTV Episode # 4, 28/08/14

Billy and the No Mates is an incendiary and esoteric jams band with a fluctuating line-up that circumnavigates around the central figure of Joe Moon, a regular performer and stalwart of the New Cross music scene over the past ten years.

Billy and the No Mates draws upon a diverse set of influences as broad as the plethora of musicians that enter into the line-up, many of which are of a garage rock persuasion – though it is a little reductive to distil them to such a regimented rubric. Especially since Moon will often produce a notebook before the beginning of a set and request the titles of ‘songs never written but that you wish had been written’ for him to perform with his assorted cohorts.

In recent months, Billy has taken an ever more noir-ish direction to include theatrical interruption and drama into its set, as demonstrated by recent outings at the New Cross Inn and the Montague Arms.

The band kicked things off at BSTV's Summer Rock-a-luau donning tiki heads, disappearing into the audience and generally causing mayhem, and the New Cross Inn also saw Cindy and the Bride make a surprise entrance, and they promptly started to hit on every available male in the building, including members of Billy and the No Mates, New Cross Inn staff and garden variety pool players.