Balloon Shapes By Cops » Music

Wonderstuff Hup! 21st Anniversary Live CD

Silentjim — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 06:44:23 +0000

It’s been 21 years since The Wonderstuff released the legendary (in my opinion) album HUP! in 1989, which I spent vast amounts of my teenage years listening to and tryin gt oplay (with limited success) on my guitar.

They’re actually on e of the bands I’ve seen most live along with The Cure and bizarrely Ozric Tentacles (bizarrely as although I was a fan I wasn’t obsessive and seemed to end up seeing them live more by accident than anything else, and who seemed to be constantly playing at my university back in the day).

Anyway to celebrate the anniversary the Stuffies plated a special gig at the O2 Academet in Birmingham back in December 2009 where they played the entire album (in the track order they wanted it to be, not the track order on the album according to Miles Hunt).

Unfortunately, being in Japan, I was unable to go, and I haven’t seen them since, I dunno, 2004 perhaps, and I was unable to get to Tokyo when they played in Japan last year either. Luckily they recorded and filmed the gig and have just released a 3CD box set (CD, DVD and Iphone disc) of the event.

As an extra special treat, the first 1000 pre-orders from NyQuest got their name on the packaging so imagine my cheeky grin when this arrived in the post last week…

Hup Live

After frantically scanning the 1000 names, on the second run through with my hopes flagging I found my name centre stage (well, not quite…) in the middle fold.

Marvellous.

(And it’s a good gig too).

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Post tags: Gigs, Music, The Wonderstuff

The Neatbeats Shangri-la Osaka Dec 20th

Silentjim — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 05:22:57 +0000

Last Saturday, checked out the Neatbeats at Shangri-la in Osaka (previously saw Scouting for Girls there – kinda different gig, especially in terms of numbers! This time I was definitely the only gaijin there).

For those not up on Tokyo based Rock’n'Roll bands, the Neatbeats are a Tokyo based Rock’n'Roll band. Replete with slicked back quiffs, smart black suits, skinny ties and speakers turned up to 11.

The Neatbeats

Apologies (as usual!) for the poor quality, but taken with my phone and they wouldn’t stop moving!

As I mentioned before I managed to pick up a couple of this lots cds at a market in Ashiya for about ￥100 (an absolute bargain!) – didn’t know them at the time but you have to buy an album called “Japanese Rock & Roll Attack” don’t you?!
(...)
Read the rest of The Neatbeats Shangri-la Osaka Dec 20th (242 words)

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Post tags: Gigs, Live Music in Japan, Music, Shangri-la, The Neatbeats

Woah o wo-oh, yeah yeah yeah, we’ll see you in Osaka next year!

Silentjim — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 04:42:16 +0000

The next on our list of live bands was Scouting For Girls. A favourite of Aki, in particular “She’s so Lovely” (mine is “Michaela Strachan“), we were very excited and a bit surprised when they cropped up on the Osaka gig list.

The venue was the “never been to before but great venue”, Shangri-la, a tiny one room venue with the bar in the middle and a capacity of maybe 100.
Took me back to the days of seeing Contempo, Gene, and numerous other bands in dingy pubs in Egham, Staines, etc.

Ironically, at this concert there was only 2 gaijin (me and another English guy – no relation), although we didn’t stand out as much as there was only 50 people at this gig.

We like Scouting for Girls but have never actually seen any pictures or videos of them, so had no idea what to expect, and were a little bit shocked when 4 geeks came on, hyperactive and looking very excited at being allowed to play instruments on stage! I don’t mean to be rude, as I’m a geek myself (or otaku as they say here), but at least I’ve learnt not to tuck my lumberjack shirt into my jeans!

Anyway, the initial shock was very soon replaced by joy when a blindingly fun gig kicked off. Lots of singing along and chanting (amazingly nearly every japanese person there knew every single word! there’s something magical about hearing a room of mainly Japanese women shouting out “She’s a pain in the ass!” )

The lead singer danced like a lunatic and they were all obviously have a great time, and as one of their new songs goes as we all sang along, “We’ll see you in Osaka next year!”

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Post tags: Contempo, Gigs, Music, Scouting For Girls

Ulfuls and a Month of Music

Silentjim — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 04:38:14 +0000

It’s been quite a good few weeks as far as concerts go for me recently. Typical, nothing for ages and then 3 come along at once.

The first was back at the end of August, when the “occasionally lovely” Andy, took me to see the Ulfurls in Osaka. (Told you I’d write about it eventually Andy!) It was a belated stag-do/birthday present as we never got a chance before my wedding.

Ulfuls (urufurus ウルフル in Japanese)

are a HUGE Osakan band and every year they have a big outdoor concert, this year was near Expoland (think I may have blogged about expoland before, not sure).
Don’t know what the name means, but it has the marvellous characteristic of being almost impossible to pronounce in English and Japanese (unlike Dragon Ash, Doping Panda, SMAP and other more “sensibly” named bands)

It’s obviously extremely popular and tickets are gold dust, and we had “guest” tickets so could skip all the thousands of queuing Japanese people (we only saw one other gaijin there) and jump to the front, which was nice.

A great, fun concert ensued with much drunken dancing (by 2 scary gaijin), and lots of crowd singing. One amusing highlight for us, is upon returning from a trip to the toilets on the other side of the field, we couldn’t find our place. But were added by some nice Japanese people who pointed and said “You’re over there”.

Guess everyone knew where the 2 gaijin in a crowd of 50,000 were
I highly recommend checking out the Ulfuls (lots of videos on YouTube), good fun tunes. Have a listen to “Sun Sun Sun“, “Osaka Strut” and “Ashita ga aru” – my karaoke favourite.

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Post tags: Gigs, Music, Urufurus, ウルフル

Kings Arms and the Cavern Club

Silentjim — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 08:10:56 +0000

Now this might sound like a night out in Liverpool but in fact it was Osaka! Near my work is an English looking bar, the Kings Arms, and just around the corner, The Cavern Club! So with a National Holiday the day after my lady and I went for a night out.

First off, the Kings Arms.

Traditional-ish looking English pub on the outside, tiny Japanese/German style bar on the inside. Run by 3 old Japanese fellas who were very attentive (read: watched us most of the time), but very pleasant. We ordered some food (pizza, pasta) and it was marvellous. I had a Carlsberg to start with, not that I would drink it in England, but it’s surprising the things you do in foreign countries sometimes, then switched back to the Japanese beers.

Bit pricey, mainly because of the annoying table charge system that exists in Japan. Not sure if other countries have this (so prevalently), I know England doesn’t, but nearly every bar you go to, charges you for the privilege of being there – between ￥300and￥700 – for which you get some edamame (soy beans in pods – delicious!) or some other tiny dish.
Admittedly the Kings Arms did give us an osyster on a cracker and something else I can’t remember, but charged us ￥500 for that, PLUS ￥500 table charge. So that’s ￥200 between us just for going in to a bar! And you have no choice over this.

The number of bars I’ve been to in Japan which have been great, but I won’t go in again as it’s to expensive because of this practice.
Not sure why they do it, think it might be a catch-22 situation. They don’t get many customers so they have to charge people to drink there to make up the profits, but because they’re charging people, they don’t get many customers. Or maybe I would just rather spend that money on beer whereas Japanese people don’t drink much so it’s how the bars can survive…hmm.

Anyway, off to the next venue, The Cavern Club.

This was a great Beatles cover band bar (did you guess that already?). Pretty authentic inside (not authentic like the Cavern Club, but looked like an English pub – even down to the bar stools with flowery, wallpaper looking covers). Beatles posters everywhere as well as memorabilia that you could (and we did) buy.

I’ll just quickly moan about the table charge here aswell, to re-inforce my point. This was a live band venue, so obviously we had to pay, no problems there. But then we were forced to buy one food dish, each! So we ended up with a bowl of chocolates and some edamame for £4 each! Grrr.

Still, I have to say it was a great night out, and we will definitely go again (although we discovered the cheap bottle of wine as the best drink on a budget a little too late).

The band (tonight it was the strangely named The Bambies) were excellent, and “John Lennon” even looked a bit like him (the others looked more like “The Spiders” – Japanese 1960′s Beatles rip-off band, they hadn’t made much of an effort apart from the clothes). They all sang, including Ringo, and they all sang the appropriate songs (songs the real Beatles individually sang on the albums), so we got Ringo doing Yellow Submarine, and my favourite, Octopuses Garden.

The great thing was, they did 3 sets while we were there, and would take requests!

We bought some coasters on the way out, deciding not to buy the genuine brick from the Real Cavern Club, maybe next time, and headed home.

I would highly recommend it as a great fun night out in Umeda, although if you are too precious about the Beatles (…thinking of you Andy…) then maybe you might find it a bit stressful Especially when you can’t work out what Paul McCartney’s singing even though you know the words to the song.

On a slightly related note, if you’re ever in Ashiya I highly recommend Petit Emilion. Our local wine bar, that is very good value, does great food, and DOES NOT charge you for being there!

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Post tags: Drinking in Japan, Gigs, Music, Osaka, The Bambies, The Beatles, The Cavern Club, Umeda