Telephone Club (July 17th 2010)

Live music and pre-recorded sounds transmitted via the medium of compact disc to your ears, courtesy of some of the finest musical brains in the metropolis of Tokyo, this Saturday in Koenji.

Place: Koenji Penguin House
Date: 7/17 (Sat)
Open/Start: 6:30/7:00 P.M.
Tickets: 1,800 adv/2,000 door

Live:

tacobonds - Explosive post-punk band, who have been tearing up live spaces in Tokyo and beyond for years. The sound of rock & roll being broken on the wheel.

Puffyshoes - Dirty garage punk poison delivered in the form of honey-sweet 60s girl group melodies. The best tunes, played on instruments wielded like weapons of mass destruction.

Steiner - Sharp-edged, 80s-influenced post-punk, recalling Gang of Four, Einsturzende Neubauten, and The Pop Group, like a disco under the shadow of nuclear war.

Uruseeyo - Losing themselves, like a punk rock Dylan, Uruseeyo are raw power, spat out in a machine gun rattle of sprawling, poetic fury.

DJs:

Fresh from Koenji's regular Fashion Crisis events, James Hadfield of Metropolis fame and Ian Martin of Call And Response Records will spin tunes from the darkest recesses of their record collections, but better than that sounds.

Track list from last Saturday's Fashion Crisis

Since this was one of those rare events where I basically remember what I played, I'm taking the step of posting up the playlist from my DJ set at Bar One last Saturday. Guest DJ Sumire has already posted her sets on the Twee Grrrls Club blog.

It was also a rare set for me in that I dusted off some of my vinyl (mostly for the first set when I could count on being sober enough to deal with it). I don't really like the fiddlyness of playing vinyl, but there are some songs that I only have in that format. If anyone ever wondered (God knows why you would, mind) why I play so many songs off XTC's second album and hardly anything off the rather better first and third albums, it's because the second is the only one of their early releases I have on CD.

I also managed to squeeze in a couple of tracks that bands have sent me over the past few months that I've really liked. The first is the track "Harmony" by Bristol punk/power pop band The Stingrays, who are planning to visit Japan in November; the second is the track "Gesa" by Berlin post-punks Krysmopompas.

Anyway, here it is, to the best of my recollection.

1st set:
Puyo Puyo - Hikashu
Spinning Top - XTC
One After 909 - Laibach
Trouble - The Music Machine
Tout Ce Qu' On Dit - Francoise Hardy
Oo Chang a Lang - The Blue Orchids (60s girl group)
Work - The Blue Orchids (80s post-punks)

2nd set:
Spring Rain - The Go-Betweens
Living a Lie - The DBs
Keep an Open Mind (Or Else) - McCarthy
Original Love - The Feelies
Heads Watch - Josef K
The Lighter Side of Dating - The Monochrome Set
Motorbike Girl - The Would Be Goods
You've Got My Number (Why Don't You Use It?) - The Undertones
Harmony - The Stingrays
Mannequin - Wire
Brave Boys Keep Their Promises - The Teardrop Explodes
Your Turn to Run - Malaria
Thirty Frames a Second - Simple Minds
The Baby Screams - The Cure
Gesa - Krysmopompas

As a bonus, here's Francoise Hardy freezing her arse off in front of Tower Bridge in 1965:



And here's the The Go-Betweens camping it up shamelessly: