* not strictly true - but almost

One of just three UK music festivals I give serious consideration to attending each year, I took the plunge and went to All Tomorrow’s Parties a couple of weekends ago.

My system of going every other year (because the ones in-between are always rubbish) worked once again.

I ended up seeing Broken Social Scene, The Lilys, Mt Eerie/The Microphones, Teenage Fanclub, Sleater Kinney, Joanna Newsom, Radar Bros, Black Heart Procession, The Shins, New Pornographers, Destroyer, Clinic and Electrelane, among others.

The biggest surprise of the weekend, however, was that Japanese noise quartet The Boredoms weren’t the music-less waste of space I expected them to be. Quite the opposite: I was hooked from the first minute of their set.

Any band with 75% of their members simultaneously playing drums were always going to be a totally different experience live, but after hearing just the odd track, their performance’s energy still came as a great surprise.

If you don’t believe me, here are a couple of clips:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV8qO6OE3SA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=457nNdODQx0

A few days after coming back, my long-term patience with Manchester’s Freecycle community paid off when someone delivered a box of The Wire magazine back-issues right to my door.

The first one I picked up has an interview with The Boredoms from September 2002. It talks about the band’s early days and some of Yamataka Eye’s more erratic performances:

“Another time, Eye took an electric saw to a dead cat which he had found in an alley just before going onstage.

“The live reviews read more like despatches from a war zone: ‘Ten minutes after the show begins, the room is full of broken glass,’ describes the shaken reviewer.

“‘The fence set up to protect the audience was the first thing to be destroyed, and they are throwing pieces of the fence around. The audience are huddled like refugees in the corners of the hall. A broken pipe spewed water into the room. A gas burner was flaming. So much metal and glass and concrete was being thrown against the walls that I got cut just watching. The fire extinguishers were smashed. There was no applause, or indeed any sound from the audience. The fire alarm went off. The room was getting too smoky to see. There were little bits of dead, dry meat stuck to the walls and ceiling from the animal cutting.’”

Though Eye has thankfully calmed in recent years (this account was from way back in the late 80s/early 90s) The Boredoms are a band I’m now very keen to put on in Manchester. Watch this space.