CAPGRAS

On a sweltering night last August, the bored, sticky crowd in Webster Hall had started to drift toward the exits when the quartet, CapGras, took the stage. CapGras is named after a delusional syndrome which is, in turn, named after it's discoverer, the French psychiatrist Jean Marie Joseph Capgras. Their debut album on the U.K. label, Q'CAM Music, " You're Not Jack" , has just gone gold and spawned a wickedly addictive hit single, " Concealed Tattoo" .

Lead singer Dolorous Von Bronx, (formerly Sue Ratour of the short-lived Sue Ratour and the Eradicons) is drop-dead gorgeous. Whipping across the stage in her vintage 1930s roller skating outfit (silver-buttoned blouse, short pleated skirt) with her long, silky legs askew, she was a truly rapturous vision: sensuous and scary, like Veronica Lake on a methedrine binge. Guitarist Chef Dahmer kicked off the first tune, "Think Fast, Kevin McCarthy", with a roary, spitting wah-wah riff that alternated with electronically enhanced hoots and tweets. The other two members of CapGras, bassist Boyd Stiff and drummer Rabim (Sonny) Al-Cinder quickly established a take-no-prisoners, bottom-heavy juggernaut of a groove, which seemed to suck the crowd back towards the stage like the viscous mouth of a giant lampray.

Dolorous Von Bronx, or D'Von, as her expanding cabal of fans call her, was originally trained as a livestock auctioneer in her hometown of Oxencombe, Devon County, England. When she's belting out the manic, loggorheal songs that she writes with Dahmer, she could be the unholy love-child of Christina Aguilera and W.S. Gilbert's modern Major-General.

D'Von, like her bandmates Chef, Boyd and Sonny, actually suffers from Capgras syndrome, the mental disorder in which the person is certain that his or her significant other - or parent or sibling or aunt, even a pet or an inanimate object - has been replaced by an impersonator, a doppelganger. A victim of this rare disease finds himself moving through a world of impostors, not unlike the Kevin McCarthy character in the classic horror film, " Invasion of the Body Snatchers" . He may even believe that he, himself, is bogus, an elaborate selfoid, a cunning impersonator with inscrutable motives. While these delusions are unimaginably frightening and sometimes lead to psychotic episodes, psychotherapy and a course of anti-depressant drugs usually allow the Capgras sufferer to become aware of his tainted perceptions and to lead a productive, often highly creative life.

The four members of CapGras met when they were literally thrown together in the Capgras ward of the Queenswood County Asylum southwest of London. D'Von and Chef were still in their teens when they each started composing long raps in which they accused each other of not really being themselves." For about eight months, Chef told me, " I thought Dolorous' body had been taken over by a fiend who came from near the core of the earth named Zog" . Later, he recited a few lines from one of these early
" ward raps" :

'You come up through the dirt
Up under her skirt
This rude Roto Rooty
To capture this Beauty
This Zog from the bog, sandhog
My blog's gonna nail ya
Your powers will fail ya
Now it's no more Nesting
Mind - Body Manifesting
Her whirly-girly soul no longer porous
This Siren, this Silkie, this... Dolorous'

" There may have only been four beds in the ward," Chef continued, " but sometimes it seemed like there was about two hundred people in there."

The band started developing their sound in the music therapy program at Queenswood. By the time they were all discharged, they were, as bassist Boyd Stiff told me, " tight as Maggie Thatcher's asshole". Queenswood likes to maintain a close relationship with their alumnae. CapGras' label, Q'CAM -Queenswood County Asylum Music - was started specifically to record and distribute CapGras CDs.

Of course, no cure is absolute, and there are still hurtles to be overcome out in the big, bad world. The band's latest crisis occurred at the playback party for their sophomore album "Art Is Uncool" at Bar Z Bar, when each band member independently accused producer Billy Dotcom of being " not himself", and the album, which was being played at high volume on Bar Z Bar's powerful speaker system, of being not itself.

Nevertheless, D'Von says that, at this juncture, everything is copacetic. " Let's face it, Sascha - if that's really who you are - the bottom line is, art really is uncool. It's going to be a big relief to put this nightmare behind us and move on".