Montag, 3. Februar 2014

Firestarter - From the Ashes of Teengenerate



Hello, hello.

This time I will keep the personal stuff at a minimum but since I promised you that I will complain about London's parking situation, here we go:
Within the last two months I have received three parking tickets - one for overstaying 5 minutes, the other for parking in front of my house while having applied for a resident permit and the other while actually displaying a paid ticket in my front window! 
For a country in which few things work properly, an impressive efficiency!

Alright, that's it already - back to the music:

Japan is often perceived as a place where bands that were once big still have the following to fill huge venues. You know, “Big in Japan”... 

From my experience, this is true to a certain point but not nearly as much as often thought. I find that the Japanese are very loyal to the bands they love and would not abandon them all of a sudden because something new and hip comes along. Also, Japan is still not the closest place for American or European bands to play, which is why most bands don’t play there that often.
But the most important factor is probably the sheer number of people living in the major cities in Japan – there are simply enough people to support any kind of music or band and to give them a little taste of the Rockstar-life.
With 30 Million people in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area alone, it is not necessarily funny that German 80s Metal is still passably big – it’s just maths…

The downside of this is that bands resurface from oblivion, just to do a few gigs in Japan and then go back to whatever else they are usually doing.
The last display of this was a gig by 20/20 and The Records at Shimokitazawa’s (one of the areas to spend a night out in Tokyo) famous “Shelter”: overweight American housewives having their Crazy-Japan-High and behaving like high school girls again, giggling and taking pictures of their equally overweight husbands on stage.
The music was certainly still good but that was one reunion I did not need… also considering that both bands were good in their days but definitely not outstanding in any way.
The place was still packed and the audience kind enough to give them a warm welcome… 

What I am getting at is that there is no need to fly in middle-aged American dads to play their old stuff when you got bands like Firestarter right at your doorstep.

There are quite many Japanese Power-Pop bands that are worth checking out, such as Teenage Confidential but for me Firestarter stand out because of their garage edge.
They got the melodies but never sound too clean to be thrown in with the likes of The Rubinoos. Firestarter is more late 70s UK Mod sound than early 80s American Power Pop.
I guess this is also due to the fact that three members used to be in Japanese Garage Punk legend Teengenerate - they carried some of the “roughness” over to Firestarter.
The extra bit of noise in their sound also brings with it the advantage of drowning singer Fifi’s voice a little, hiding the funny English. However, they were still confident enough to print the lyrics on the sleeve – so enjoy…

It’s been a while since I last heard anything but I believe Firestarter are still around and also singer Fifi has his own bar in Shimokitazawa, called the Poor Cow. It’s a little hidden on the 4th or 5th floor in a building close to the station but if you find it you’ll be rewarded with great music and nice people. There are also shows there from time to time.

Firestarter have two records out that I know of (selftitled & Livin’ on the Heat), both equally great, though I prefer the first s/t one. They have also released some singles.
I guess you should be able to get their records abroad since Teengenerate were pretty big in America/Europe with their records being released on Crypt. Firestarter should have been able to use those connections somehow. 


Dienstag, 21. Januar 2014

The Prisoner - Maybe not Tokyo’s finest but also pretty damn good…




Unbelievable – two uploads within one week! As you can see, my new job is not too busy at the moment…
All the better, since this gives me time to write. 

Still in London – nothing has changed there. Still getting adjusted to the subtle and not-so-subtle differences between England and Germany/Japan. 

Before coming to London, I had heard a lot about how things work over here and had been working for an English company for quite a while but there are still lots of surprises. 

Worst example is definitely the real estate market. Real estate agents and people working for property companies tend to be assholes in Germany and Japan too but what I experienced here is on a whole new level.
First of all, London is expensive. No news there, but even compared to Tokyo, London is expensive!
Of course we could have moved to the countryside, since my company is on the outskirts of London but I had German countryside for a year now and needed some big city again.
Therefore I am willing to pay a bit more but the problem is that you don’t get shit in return:
 First of all houses here are generally very old and run down but still cost a fortune. On top of that you have to pay for all services (water, gas, electricity) and the Council Tax.
The Council Tax bill was already in our post box when we moved in. Considering you have to wait forever if you want anything from an office, things seem pretty efficient when they want something from you.
What I am getting at is that even if you are willing to pay lots of money every month for a dump and crappy service, estate agents and landlords still manage to fuck you over.
I didn’t really have the time to look for accommodation thoroughly, so I had to choose from five places I was shown by different real estate agents. Since the places they show you first are usually the ones they cannot get rid of easily, all of them were shit.
I took the least shitty one on the condition that they changed the carpet (which I have in written confirmation) but later they simply decided that it didn’t need changing. “We had it cleaned real thoroughly”, I was assured. Right.
I could have taken legal steps but since I was still in Germany at the time and hadn’t even received the countersigned lease agreement from the landlord, I was afraid they’d just put me on the street again, so I decided to swallow my pride and take the place as it is.
It didn’t stop there though: despite the fact that I paid everything in time (deposit, rent…), I received demands for all rents I had already paid.
Naturally I didn’t get an answer when enquiring.
Instead I was offered the very house I am renting by an automated mail from one of the big real estate websites.
Available from February 2.
So I still have 10 days left before the new tenants might move in. Hope it doesn’t get too crammed.

I’d never thought I would say this but I have come to value German thoroughness…
Next time I will complain about London’s parking situation… but now back to the music!

Today’s band is Tokyo’s “The Prisoner”. 

At my age it is quite hard to find new bands that make it onto my “drunk playlist”. This is the list of bands/songs I eventually come back to after a few beers, no matter what I was listening to before. Somehow most of the songs on that list are the bands I grew up with and I do not get tired listening to even after decades. “Going underground” by the Jam is on there, as well as about 20 Pogues songs, The Churches “Unguarded Moment”, Ramones’ “Poison Heart, Chasing the Night, Real Cool Time”, Eddie and the Hot Rods’ “Do Anything You Wanna Do”. “Younger” bands on the list would probably the Caesars with their “Paper Tigers” album and The Sounds with “Something to Die for” and “Crossing the Rubicon”.
As you can see, I lean a little towards melancholy when drunk…
However, The Prisoner is one of the bands who made the list and not only with one song but with most of their last two records “Rats and Crows” and “Believe”.
They have some really well made videos on YouTube of three of those songs:

Stay Free
Rock and Roll People
Letter

But getting the albums is obviously the better option! 

The Prisoner’s singer Junichiro comes from an Oi background with his former band the Avoided but the Prisoner take in much more influences, such as Mod, Soul and Beat. I’ll call it Punkrock based Rude Boy sound with a melancholy edge…
For me the Punkrock song work best, so I eventually skipped the others… but to those songs I have been listening to on heavy rotation. My wife’s comment would simply be “again!?”
The Prisoner are playing quite frequently in Tokyo and are liked by people of all backgrounds. They fit into a pure Punk show as well as opening for a Soul all-nighter. 

There is a downside however: avoid the English songs! I don’t want to come across arrogant but Junichiro sounds like a frog when singing in English.
I don’t know why the Japanese insist on putting English into their lyrics / sing in English, when most of them really struggle with the language.
In many cases it sounds quite funny and the grammar looks like copy and pasted from Google Translate.
There’s two bands that really start to suck when they start singing in English but are brilliant otherwise and that are The Prisoner and Last Target. I guess the reason for that is their fake American accent.
I am not a native speaker so it might seem nit-picky to go on about it but I would not want to sing in English if I weren’t a hundred percent sure it sounds at least decent and is grammatically ok. 

Nevertheless, the Prisoner’s albums are well worth buying. I have to admit that I started with “Rats and Crows” and do not own any of their older stuff but considering how great their latest two albums are, those can’t be too bad either.
Here’s their homepage: 


By the way, if you are wondering why you can’t find much about Japanese bands when googling, try google.co.jp. On European Google versions you might have to look on page five or six before being referred to “The Prisoner”.


Freitag, 17. Januar 2014

The Ryders - Tokyo's finest



Happy 2014! 
It’s been quite a while since I have last upped anything here simply owed to the fact that “Old Fashion” is no longer issued. Apparently it simply didn’t add up in the end. Not that any of the people involved were into it for the money but if you invest that much work and money into something, you want at least your expenses covered.

The reason I didn’t just up something by myself is my private situation. The last months have been full of changes: having only just moved to Germany from Japan a year ago, my company called on me to work at their London headquarters. And despite the fact that I was not necessarily eager to work in an open plan office, the opportunity was just too good to turn down.

So here I am, in Walthamstow, East London, getting adjusted to UK life.
Walthamstow, proud home of 90s bad-boy-teen-idles East 17, is quite a fun place. Up till now all I had seen of London was posh downtown or almost-Essex-suburbs, where my company is located. Although not too far away from those suburbs, Walthamstow has its own feel. More like a city of itself, in which residents are required to wear track pants and honk at least once every five minutes when driving. Even at Driving School vehicles (yes, I did actually experience that). 
The track pant guys are called “Chavs” and they are ethnically as diverse as it gets – not just the average English hooligan. This ethnical and also religious diversity results in street lined with shops offering either Halal food or fried chicken, the one food followers of any (meat-allowing) religion can agree on.
Lining up at the register of the local Lidl, you see orthodox Jews waiting in line behind Takiya-wearing Muslims. I’m sure there is a catholic priest around here somewhere too, so we have the world’s three major funny-hat-religions represented, all in peace and harmony.
More or less at least – when I moved here I bought a local newspaper reporting on the “Muslim Patrol”, a gang of three guys in their twenties who believed their mission from Allah was to abuse and hit drunks for “polluting their body” and girls for “indecent” clothing - and if you pick drunks as a target you will be one busy patrol in England, for sure. The same goes for “indecent” clothing, considering the fact that 5 degrees Celsius do not stop English girls from wearing a mini skirt (nor do 50kg overweight).
One thing I like about the area is that it is quite easy to socialize. We have met more people here in two weeks than in one year in the German countryside. And mostly more interesting people too.
I do not so much like the next door crazy cat lady’s feral creatures peeing on my motorbike and that I am not supposed to keep my bicycle in the front yard, since everyone keeps telling me that it will be stolen.
At the moment I am pushing my luck simply because I don’t have anywhere else to put it and eventually everybody will probably tell me “I told you so”…

But anyway, since this blog is dedicated to music, back to subject.

Up until now I have merely written about German bands, since the texts were published in a Japanese fanzine and to most readers they were probably new. However, publishing in English now I might as well pick some Japanese bands to introduce… and to start I will go with one of the big names in the Japanese Punk scene: the Ryders.

In the early 90s Punkrock in Japan experienced its biggest boom up till date. Street Punk with sing-along choruses was as big as it gets with Oi-band “Cobra” as forerunners, even making it to MTV Japan and some international acknowledgement.
Some other big names of the time were Laughin Nose, the Star Club, the Strummers and the Ryders. All these bands have been around since the 80s and in The Star Club’s case since the 70s (they even claim to be the first Japanese Punkrock band at all).
Anyone who visits Japan and looks at the gig listings will be surprised that all of these bands are actually still playing. 

One of my first shows in Tokyo was the Strummers in Shibuya and I was afraid I wouldn’t get a ticket since on a live-DVD I have, they were playing a huge hall with about 1000 people.
However, getting the ticket wasn’t a problem at all and there were only about 40 people at the venue they played at. So things had changed since the early 90s obviously…
To be fair, the show I went to was especially poorly attended but it’s like with most of the bands I mentioned above: there’s a loyal following and apart from that it depends on the day how many people show up. Still, I know for a fact that for some of the original members the live shows are a regular income. 

During my time in Japan, the bands I saw live on a regular basis were the Ryders and the Star Club, because of our common circle of friends. I would eventually have stopped going to Star Club shows if I would have had to pay, but would happily have bought tickets for the Ryders even for seeing them the 10th time.
This is simply because Ohno, the front man is such a great entertainer and the general atmosphere at their shows is very relaxed. There are always the die-hard Ryders fans in the front who will start to pogo as soon as the first chord is played, but while there is a lot of tough-guy posing at Star Club shows, Ryders shows just offer the better party.
Musically all those bands are straight forward Punkrock but The Ryders are just perfect at it. They have their fast 1234-two minute smashers as well as mid-tempo melodic songs with sing-along choruses and a romantic rebel feel to them.

So the show is fun and like with most Japanese bands the looks are right too, including Mohawks and spiky hair.

Let me clear up a widely spread prejudice here: Japanese Punks are as “real” or “fake” as their Western counterparts. Over the years I have heard over and over again that for the Japanese it’s all style over substance and that they were only copying the English or American originals, which is just rubbish!
When bands like the Ryders sing working class songs it’s as real as it gets.
Most of the Punks in Japan consciously turn down any chance of getting a regular office job or “making it” when they get their first tattoo or bleach their hair - Japan is in that respect still very traditional.
The two remaining original members, Ohno and Kouji are both Tokyo working class and this is a lot tougher than in most industrialized societies due to the working hours that are expected from you.

It is true that the Japanese are very style-conscious but I certainly prefer that to fat and bald English guys on stage.
Yes, superficial, I know. But the show is also part of the entertainment and it is ok for me if band members only do their hair for the stage. I don’t expect to meet a fully dressed up Michael Monroe in the supermarket but I don’t want to see him on stage in track pants!
Also, the fact that there are bands like “The Tokyo Sex Pistols”, “The Tokyo Cramps” and so on has to do less with copying than much more with paying tribute.
To me it seems that double standards are applied to Western and Japanese bands, which are easily accused as copy cats who never come up with anything original, be it musically or fashion related.  

That said, the Ryders have style and substance and as far as I know (and I do not know all since there are quite many) any of their records is definitely worth checking out. 

Musically they were going steady over the years, just their 1988 self-titled album was a bit more on the rocking side.
My yet to beat favourite is definitely “Bringing out Myself” from their 1993 album “All the Way”. Check their homepage for the whole discography:

http://www.the-ryders.com

Unfortunately, as with most Japanese Punk bands, their records are probably not easy to find outside Japan. They are easily ordered from Japan though.

That's it for now - if I keep getting my two klicks a day, I will keep posting stuff from time to time. 

Tada, 

Chris