“I CAN DO ANYTHING BETTER THAN YOU!”
No wave’s man of mystery: BORIS POLICEBAND.
“I first met Boris at this bar called Barnabus Rex,” says James Chance. “It was where all the artists went. Pool table, spiked drinks, floor black with cigarette butts. Boris didn’t drink but he’d always hang out there. He had this solo violin act. He was like the Suicide of the solo violin.” Of all the musicians who came out of no wave, surely the most mysterious was Boris Policeband. A classically trained New York musician, and former CalArts student, Boris hung around the clubs and bars of mid-’70s downtown New York, listening to classical radio on his transistor radio, and bouncing a pink Spalding Hi-Bounce ball off the walls. “I first met him in Julia’s, the pool hall on 14th Street,” remembers John Lurie. “He was a champion pool player. All the old guys knew him from when he was a kid. I was serious about my pool for a while. Boris said, ‘I can do anything better than you.’ It was kind of true.” Real name Mark Perlman, Boris started busking with his violin in the early ’70s, and briefly played with New York proto-punks Jack Ruby before developing a one-man show, in which he’d monitor a police radio scanner on headphones, and recite the broadcasts while accompanying himself on discordant electric fiddle. “He always wore sunglasses, dressed in black leather,” says Nina Canal. “Very cool. He was doing this all by himself. Mind-blowing.” Short, sharp, and brutal, a Boris Policeband set could clear out CBGB’s in 10 minutes flat. “Boris wanted no part of any success,” says Lurie. “He’d stand outside The Mudd Club, and watch everyone trying to get in. Because of how he looked, and because he was there every night, they’d always pick him. Boris would just stand there, shake his head and say, ‘No!’” “I think he had a weak heart, and I believe he’s dead now,” says James Chance. A 2011 post on the Jack Ruby Facebook page confirms that Perlman passed away in 2001, from “a chronic heart condition”. “He was a real smart alec,” says Chance. “The very essence of cool.”