I’d never been out to see any bands play in Japan before, so April 18th proved an exciting Friday night for me, regardless of how much of a same-old, same-old it may have proved for other attendees and participants.

Pointedly named after ‘60s London’s legendary psychedelic scene HQ, Tokyo’s UFO Club is a venue I have mixed feelings about. Perhaps you know The 100 Club, on Oxford Street in London? If so, you’ll know how the entrance lurks behind what looks like (and indeed is) the glass-doored foyer of a conventional office building, complete with lift, listing of offices occupying the different floors and so forth? Well The UFO Club has a similar set-up, common to many Tokyo bars/shops/miscellaneous places, only much, much smaller. Downstairs, and it really is a tiny bloody place, just a single square room, maximum capacity well under 100 I woulda thought, plus a bonus smoke-filled stairwell . Very much going for that ‘60s basement club vibe, we’re talking black on red psychedelic swirls on the walls, DJ in the corner blasting his Nuggets collection, smoky air drifting around with zero ventilation. I like it! I dunno why, but I always feel very much at home in these contrived ‘60s style basement joints… somehow they seem to have an appeal that goes beyond mere retro-ness, I hope. It’s like The Buffalo Bar in London; ostensibly, there’s nothing particularly good about it, but it just feels like a comfortable place to be; a suitable environment for music to happen. Just like the singer in some Brazilian Who covers band the DJ is probably rocking somewhere at this very moment, I can’t explain.

There are a few people milling about at The UFO club when we arrive early-ish. We meet an enthusiastic label owner / promoter guy who tells us excitedly of gigs and such that are going down. Nice one man, good to meet you! The DJ has brought some friends, and they’re having smoke, comparing records. In the seats on the other side of the room, several girls are decked out in their mod/punk finery, sitting silently and frowning, apparently alone. Well it must be difficult to interact when you’re wearing sunglasses in a darkened basement. Cue The Cramps! We don’t really get many of those absolutely determined, THIS-IS-MY-STYLE, I-AM-MAKING-THE-SCENE-TONIGHT type people (Fowley-Children?) back in the UK, so it’s kinda lovely to see, in a way.

The UFO Club serves beer in big cardboard cups, like you might get at an amusement park. And why not! I can get with that. Generic Japanese lager might not exactly be the best brew in the world, but nonetheless it has a certain kinda.. clean?.. feel to it that serves well for music venue drinking – it lacks that sorta nasty, greasy feel you get with your plastic pint at most of the UK’s shittier cattle-pen entertainment establishments. So that’s nice.

The absolute best thing about the UFO Club though is that it has a set of red velvet curtains in front of the stage, which are closed between acts, meaning that instead of going through the tedious ritual of watching groups setting up – scrutinising and pre-judging them before they’ve hit a note – you simply have a few anonymous amp clicks, tuning up noises and snare rolls to alert you to the fact that things are afoot, before the curtains part, and BAM, the visual and musical totality of the band hits you all in one go. A simple change to yr standard gig-going routine, but a very fun and effective one, I think.


On first, shortly after 7pm, Mule Team seem a bit out of place at The UFO Club, I think. A new-ish band comprising both members of fantastic blues-punk duo D/i/s/c/o /s (whose one recorded track to date was one of the absolute best things I heard last year) alongside a couple of guys whose past credits include the band Blotto (whose totally killer cuts you may recall finding on the flipside of that Hard Skin 7” I reviewed on here a few years back), Mule Team seem atypical within Tokyo’s garage/whatever scene, in that they are modest and easy-going, as well as being extremely good at what they do. Offering no Big Style, no ‘performance’ moves, no big headlines to make what themselves stand out, they’re just four likeable guys playing some fun, non-denominational rock n’ roll, with a solid groove and fair bit of fuzz and clatter. And lo and behold, it’s great.

The older I get I think, the more fed up I get of all these bands trying desperately to be a “one listen will BLOW YOUR MIND” type proposition. I’d far rather listen to some group like this, just quietly knocking out some good shit, any day of the week. Toes are tapping, and I’m just starting to think “y’know, these guys kinda remind me a bit of Creedence”, when right on cue they launch into a cover of ‘Bad Moon Rising’. Nice one! It feels good to be momentarily on the same wave length of these guys – they are A1 in my book. They seem very proud that their set was only 13 minutes long, but I could’ve listened to them wailing away all night.

(No recordings or web presence yet, but you can watch a video of Mule Team performing back in January here.)

Tellingly, the members of Mule Team swiftly disappear post-set to have a drink elsewhere, and the next time the curtains part, I can very much understand why. It would be an overstatement to say I ‘hated’ the redundantly named Vivian Boys – they were perfectly alright, really – but they do very much represent the polar opposite of everything I liked so much about Mule Team. A contrived and slightly toxic-seeming style-over-substance type outfit, the group’s Big Style moves seem somewhat confused (the guitar guy has Beatles haircut, a mod suit & tie outfit and a Charles Manson sticker on his guitar, the bass player is a leather-trousers rockabilly), and their music is a sloppy, one dimensional mess of distortion and repetitive shouting.

I hope I will never be one to bag on people for poor musicianship, especially given that I’ve put in some hours playing terrible, cack-handed bass in public myself, but I’m afraid it is impossible to move on here before we discuss the bass player, who… well, he needs discussing, let’s put it like that. Sometimes he does manage to perk himself up to what you might call a Sid Vicious level of proficiency, but for long sections of the band’s set, he acts like a man who has never even seen a picture of someone playing bass before, randomly running a finger up and down the fretboard completely out of time with the beat, whilst strumming across the strings like he’s playing a chord. Astonishing. Dude, I don’t mind that you’re mainly up there to pose, but please stop doing that, or at least turn your volume down - it makes an awful, stupid noise, and just makes your band seem ridiculous.

So that’s Vivian Boys. They play far, far longer than a band operating in this style really should, especially when appearing fourth on the bill, and the most memorable moment besides the bassist’s chronic Walk-the-Walk failure is a cover of the Velvets’ ‘There She Goes’, which they render in totally flat, identikit punk style, but… it’s a good tune, y’know? I know I shouldn’t be too harsh on these guys - after all it’s just a load of crappy old punk fun at the end of the day and people seem to enjoy it, but this sorta snotty, narcissistic, dress up attitude is really not very appealing to me right now.

With than in mind then, it’s just as well we choose this juncture to pop out and get some noodles, because when we return…. well, you know when you open the door to a room and just involuntarily exclaim, JESUS CHRIST, what is going ON in here? Well, an outfit called Young Parisians is apparently what was going on in this one. A “glam band” quite evidently, these fellows seem to have got together according to the logic that, hey, Roxy Music were a bunch of mismatched weirdos, and things seemed to work out ok for them, right? Bad move. In brief then: the singer is a large gentleman (as in, tall and kinda bulky, not fat) who very much wants to be Ziggy Stardust. He has home-made silver-plated cycling gloves, looking rather like the woman with the silver hand in ‘Repo Man’, which is quite sweet. The drummer looks pretty Roxy (quiff and Elvis shades matched with a fur coat (who the hell plays drums in a fur coat?!)), and the bassist looks like he could’ve been in Rocket From The Tombs or something. My favourite member is the rhythm guitarist, who is playing a 50% scale guitar, has a face that suggests a hard life poorly lived, and wears a small straw hat and scuffed red motorcycle leathers. I think I’d like to hear that guy’s band.

I don’t wanna seem like I’m writing them off out of hand, but Young Parisians’ music is a bit of a turgid mess unfortunately, and I fear their main drawback is the lead guitarist, who seems to have spent twenty years locked in his bedroom learning to play Jimmy Page solos note for note, and now he’s out in the wild, he’s damn well going to make sure we feel every minute of it, regardless of the needs of whatever song his colleagues are trying to do something with. Their closing number has a passable ‘Rock n Roll Suicide’ kinda vibe to it, but all the bloody bombast and pastiche is making my teeth hurt.


After all that, it’s a happy moment when gig organisers The Fadeaways emerge from behind the curtains next. Still heavy on the pastiche, but this time round we’re looking at a no nonsense boilerplate retro-garage band of the kind that I often wish could be installed on every street corner, in locales where they are not present already. These guys have the matching striped t-shirts, the Vox guitars and about 148 songs that all sound like slightly rewritten Standells numbers played at double tempo. But within these strictly defined limitations, they know their shit and they OWN it, allowing no hint of so-called ‘originality’ to sully their dream. They play hard, with much capital letters ENTHUSIASM, and when the time comes for synchronised jumping, even the drummer leaps off his stool as if it were fitted with an ejector seat. Fun for all the family.

After such a brisk demonstration of cheery rock n’ roll professionalism, it’s a bit of a jarring tonal shift that brings us to tonight’s headliners, who are – who’da thought it? – a band from London! Billed as a kinda spin-off from considerably-better-than-the-name-would-suggest outfit Mean Bikini, whom I’ve seen a few times back home, it’s difficult to really know what to make of Bikini Bandits, such is the aesthetic disjuncture between the slick rock n’ roll fun that tonight’s Japanese bands have by-and-large been offering, and the ragged, cynical, post-punkoid mess these cats appear to be bringing to the table. Comprising three blokes and two ladies, their performance was an utter, ale-ravaged shambles that briefly made me feel a bit homesick.

Stretched across a dusty skeleton of early Fall, ‘Flies on Sherbet’ era Chilton and disjointed Prolapse grue, songs seem to ramble on to no very clear intent as instruments and vocal lines rise and fall in the mix apparently at random, and basically the group seem to be having a fairly dreadful time of things, ala Comet Gain on one of their blurrier evenings. A grim business and no mistake, but I kinda like it despite myself. God knows what the assembled crowd make of all this, but, if only my language skills were up to it, I felt a bit like turning to people and saying; “yeah guys, this is the way we roll back in London! We got fed up with GOOD bands - now we all listen to this kinda shit!” The whole thing is kinda perversely funny, really – a very obscure cross-cultural car crash for the ages.

Upon chatting to some of the band members afterwards – they all seem like very nice people, btw -certain facts were revealed that very much helped me to put Bikini Bandits’ somewhat mystifying performance into its proper context. To wit: 1. Following an apparent melt-down in the line-up of Mean Bikini, this new band was thrown together with only a few weeks’ notice in order to fulfil these pre-booked Japanese tour dates. Perhaps this was even their first public appearance? I’m not sure. 2. The band members had arrived at the airport only a few hours beforehand, visiting Japan for the first time, and were totally jet-lagged. 3. They were borrowing other bands’ equipment, and were largely unable to communicate with the soundman. 4. As you’ll appreciate, they REALLY, REALLY did not want to be headlining. 5. And as you might expect from British people faced with such trying circumstances, a substantial amount of drink had been taken.

Taking all of these issues into account, I think Bikini Bandits got through their set extremely well. In fact I think their conduct was positively heroic. I very much hope that the rest of their Japanese tour went well, and that, following such a baptism of fire for a new band, they’ve been able to keep on playing and fuse their musical vision into something of lasting substance – for the promise was definitely there, even on this crazy evening.

And so, I guess that brings us to the end of my first experience of live music in the Eastern hemisphere. Late night drinks at a peaceful, back-street izakaya with the wonderfully friendly and generous guys from Mule Team followed. A pretty strange night all in all, but one that I very much enjoyed. Here’s hoping for more such antics the next time I’m over in Tokyo.

Labels: Bikini Bandits, Japan, live reviews, Mule Team, The Fadeaways, Vivian Boys