Uf!
That was something of a palate cleanser…
Spent yesterday mooching around the pubs and record spots of Bristol in the freezing cold of a bitter February day – think I’ll wait for the more forgiving afternoons of summer before I do that again. Picked up a lovely Ewan McGregor & Peggy Seeger record, though (memories of Sea Change, hearing her perform and asking an audience question – Coleser saying “I was convinced you were going to fuck that up”). Also got chatting to a slightly over-friendly and (by the end) very drunk feller in the pub about Gloucester Rugby and Syd Barrett. Lovely burger and drink with The Daughter, and swift trot along to the Fleece to see…
Otoboke Beaver, The Fleece
I’ve been unfeasibly excited about this for a while now, as previous OB posts (both of which I now realise have the same headline photo) will surely corroborate. I’m a great one for over-hyping and then when it comes down to it being underwhelmed in the face of the real thing, and so I half-wondered if actually they might not quite measure up. Support band Drinking Boys and Girls Choir from Korea were pretty good, (maybe a bit like what Otoboke Beaver were going to be like?), loud and enthusiastic certainly but my attention started to wander pretty quickly.
I needn’t have worried of course.
Wandering a little uncertainly onto stage a few minutes early, all four girls fiddled around with the equipment nervously for a full five minutes, like footballers waiting for the ad break to end. The invisible thumbs-up having been given, however, they sprang straight into a break-neck, raucous set of 21 songs (none of them past the three minute mark) in just over an hour onstage (although as Coleser pointed out afterwards, the pace they played at meant a Springsteen-style marathon was never on the cards).
It was crazy stuff, all four girls hurtling themselves uncontrollably through what I like to think was a feverishly foul-mouthed set – although I’m guessing here, all the girls’ English still being charmingly pigeon – they certainly left everything on the pitch (Coleser, again).
Disappointingly, most of the clips on YouTube of the band live, involve rows of people holding phones up (although, frankly I can understand the gawping) but there are these two cracking clips shot in Tokyo, but which were pretty much it, last night – “Love Is Short”:
and “Datsu hikage no onna” (with added “oyoyoyoyo”):
Turned out in cartoonish sixties-cut dresses, they looked like the Shangri-Las although this belied the Shock & Awe they were about to unleash. Singer Accorinrin shrieked her way prettily through the set slinking about centre-stage, energetically striking poses for each line she sang. At times she was almost demure, at others pretty disturbing, and always scarily beautiful. Drummer, Kahokiss, propelled the the whole shebang at unlikely and frankly unwise speeds and yet was still somehow able to provide backing vocals. (At one point, a new song was introduced as “one of our more fast songs” without any apparent irony and surely a weary, deep breath from the back of the stage…)
But if they were giving out medals for catastrophic disorderliness, guitarist Yoyoyoshie would have cleaned up – she was absolutely barking mad. Screaming “We are Otoboke Beaver!!!!!” between songs at throat-shredding volume and bounding about riffing furiously, yet also providing call and response vocals, she was comprehensively “on it” (and at the same time, completely “off it”) throughout. At one point she hurled herself backwards offstage into the mosh pit, without missing a note, surfing clumsily across a sea of hands. In a group of out-and-out nutters, she was head and shoulders the wildest. If you had only one straight jacket…
At one point, before ripping into “6 Day Working Week is a Pain”, Accorinrin announced that they had all quit their jobs to come on this tour (to huge cheers) which was the bare minimum I might have expected, to be frank, but was more surprising for the fact that they apparently live in a real world which involves having regular jobs – hats off to any and all previous employers, I say…
On the floor, there were scenes of unruliness and abandon which this old chap managed to avoid (a series of unflattering strains and spasms would surely have ensued…) – moshing, crowd surfing and general boisterousness to a level I’ve not seen for a while. The kids loved them.
I’ve got some recordings which are far from perfect but which give you a sense of pretty wild and deeply satisfying evening.
Long Live the Beaver!
Partly Porpoise 