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Current mood:.... Groove Me
Category: Games
JAPAN 2009 (1)
We left Heathrow at 7pm on Guy Fawkes night (Nov. 5th) -- ideal time & conditions for seeing firework displays, but nothing much was happening on the ground. Even 20 years ago Guy Fawkes night was a big deal, but as attention spans shorten it's hard to find anyone under 70 who can tell you which side Adolf Hitler commanded in WW2 (Canada? Texas? Viet Nam?) -- let alone explain why Guy Fawkes plotted to blow up Parliament. (The Poll Tax? Global Warming?)...
More impressive was the view looking down 35,000 feet at the Mongolian steppe, By night it's thousands of miles of Nothing, then little clusters of lights; the faintest glow of lights from small towns, each dominated by a single, huge orange flare from the oil wells.
London wasn't cold, but it was definitely November; Tokyo by contrast seems to be enjoying a late summer with clear skies and 20C/70F temp. T-shirt weather. (When we did come here in early summer it rained non-stop, courtesy of a minor typhoon in the South China Sea).
So you get the picture. It's like NYC in September or London at the height of rare, fine summer.
The 2 Tokyo shows were monsters. Good sound, great crowds. Advance sales suggested that Saturday would be busier than Sunday, but both nights were packed. I hope somebody taped Sunday night, for several reasons.
Kellie played what was probably his best ever drum solo in 'Me & My Shadow'.
The show lasted almost two and a half hours; a fairly standard set (tho the proportion of new songs is growing) followed by several encores, all consisting solely of requests. We requested the audience to request the most obscure (or un-played live) songs they could think of.
Among the songs that haven't been played much since we reformed were 'Prisoners', 'Trouble in The World', 'Someone Who Cares' & 'Flowers Die'.
Among the songs that haven't been played at all since The Reformation were 'Language Problem', 'Peter and The Pets', 'You Gave Birth', and 'Oh No' (which kept threatening to turn into 'City of Fun') but went so well I felt impelled to play the coda as it appears on the 'Peel Sessions' - 40 seconds of kicking the guitar round the stage (or the BBC's Maida Vale studio). Peter's Les Paul Jnr. (lent by Gibson Japan) had some tuning problems, but a Fender Telecaster is such a basic design -- in essence it's a plank of wood with a couple of pickups screwed on -- that even after being used as a hammer it only needed minor retuning on a couple of strings. (There was a 6 string Rickenbacker spare, but to paraphrase Pete Townshend, you only have to think about knocking them round a bit and they "explode like a lamp-bulb"...
And the song that's never been played since we first gigged in 1977 was 'Instrumental' (if anyone knows of a definite instance when it was played, let me know, but I'm pretty sure it was a first.)
The Japanese demeanour, outwardly so reserved (*) conceals deep wells of passion - I can't think offhand of any other country where we've been graffiti'd as "Living Gods of Rock" (one might wish for slightly more Divine renumeration since Dead Souls don't need salaries) but once the ice is broken the shows feel like playing in a friend's house.
Combined with the band's two Guiding Principals - 'Always Try Something New: and 'Don't Give A Fuck' - this makes a great atmosphere. It's no coincidence we play the longest sets in Japan.
On to Hamamatsu and Osaka; pictures to follow.
(*) There's always an exception. One girl became so thirsty she was last seen being stretchered out of the club, horizontal on a bench.
"Last seen" isn't entirely accurate. An hour later, wheno we hailed a couple of cabs to take us back to the hotel she materialised from nowhere, sitting in the front seat...
* * *
As Dale mentions below, Shiffi and Miki's pieces Islands of ecstasy
are really worth reading.
12:07 PM
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