Julian Cope’s Album of the Month
Friction'79 Live
AOTM #92, January 2008ce
Released 2005 on Pass Records
- Automatic-Fru (4.35)
- Pistol (3.17)
- Big-S (3.23)
- Kagayaki (4.28)
- A-Gas (2.43)
- Cool Fool (3.15)
- Cycle Dance (3.00)
- I Can Tell (3.51)
- Out (6.51)
Note: Friction was a late ‘70s Tokyo band that missed a place in JAPROCKSAMPLER on account of their having commenced their career just over a year later than that book’s self-imposed time limits. However, two of the band’s members – Reck and Chico Hige – featured in earlier bands 3/3 and , both of whom appear in the book’s Top 50 Album Reviews, at #43 and #48 respectively.
Whatever
When this excellent live album first surfaced a coupla years ago, I gots to admit it was a delightful revelation to me to experience Friction sounding as I imagine their leader Reck had originally intended. Indeed, with three decades and several oceans between us, and the dryness of their original studio sound herein replaced by the inevitable sonic spillage of a cheap concert recording, the catchiness of Friction’s racket finally made perfect sense, as Reck’s driving bass melded together with Chico Hige’s drums and Tsunematsu Masatoshi’s splashy-scratchy guitar to create a triple-headed post-punk behemoth. Heck, even Reck’s overly arch J. Rotten vocals now sounded less like Butler Rep’s dental drool and more like a genuine lead vocalist proposition, as really fucking catchy Japanglish choruses – admittedly often of barely more than a coupla duplicated words’ duration – emerged from the dungeonous gloop. But whereas the repeated vocals of songs such as ‘A-Gas’ (‘Gas mask, gas gas gas, gas tank, gas gas gas, anarchy’) and ‘Cycle Dance’ (‘Red light switch, black light switch, white light switch, switch, switch, switch, switch’) added little more than a glimpse of humanoid personality to Friction’s dislocated ‘Cloud 149’-meets-NO NEW YORK muse, elsewhere Reck’s still highly minimalist vocals contained choruses catchily hefty enough to corral momentarily some of the wild atonal funk tableaux into which they had been released1. For example, however much the jarring skronk of ‘Cool Fool’ tried to alienate the listener with its bombardment of Japanese verse lyrics, Reck was smart enough to render the song unforgettable after just one listen with his ultra-sardonic repeated English pay-off: “Oh baby, you’re so cool, fool”. Similarly, ‘Automatic-Fru’ followed the same formula; Reck belly-aching on in Japanese for a coupla minutes before tying it all up in English again with the gloriously catchy so-called chorus: “Style, style, Japanese style, style, style, Japanese style’. Even better, ‘Big-S’ captured the on-and-on-and-fucking-on nihilism of the time in the most poppy (and weirdly translated) manner imaginable:
“You wanna suicide in your room,
You wanna suicide in your city,
You wanna suicide in your country,
You wanna suicide on your TV set,
You wanna suicide on your planet,
You wanna suicide on your phone.”
Man, if Richard Hell’s BLANK GENERATION LP had managed even just one chorus as memorable as that sucker, we’d all still be spinning the disc2. Even the live versions of Friction’s boringly derivative debut 7” single (‘I Can Tell’ b/w ‘Pistol’) gain considerably from the graininess of this concert recording, ‘Pistol’ sounding especially fucking riotous here. Get your mits on a copy of this live album and pronto, Tonto… 35 minutes and 9 songs is very Van Halen and very AC/DC, dontcha thunk? But does the success of this live record mean the first studio LP is now worthy of a re-appraisal? Back in 1980, as well as being busy with my own career and in light of that first Friction 7” having been such a big disappointment, I really hadn’t paid much attention to it. At the time, the LP had to me sounded far too much like an admittedly ingenious but cynical case of cultural kleptomania, a too simplistic ploy to conflate the crankiness of 1978’s PIL/Banshees and New York No Wave noise with the punk ramalama of the previous year’s Pistols and Void Oids. Fabulous if yooz the only purveyor of such a sound, but being at that time a Liverpool snotbag of epic proportions, I felt that Friction were peddling precisely the same formula as that which 90% of my then contemporaries were barfing out (yeah, I’ll admit I was wrong wrong wrong, but I think you can forgive my mashed brain for misreading the overall sitch as I’d spent most of late ’78 and all of ’79 on the same bills as scratchy guitarmeisters A Certain Ratio, Joy Division, Crispy Ambulance, Wire, Gang of Four, Scritti Politti and the Bunnymen3). However, with 20/20 hindsight and my continuing fascination for the manner in which the Japanese send every Occidental trend through their own rigorous Nihonese filter, much of that Friction debut LP now sounds remarkably fresh and inventive. And although ‘I Can Tell’ and ‘No Thrill’ (a wholly pointless ESG copycat instrumental) still bore me stiff, the LP versions of ‘Cool Fool’ and ‘Big-S’ positively vibrate with an ectoplasmic energy all their own. Moreover, the studio versions of ‘Cycle Dance’ and ‘Out’ are a whole new thing, both being suffused with sub-sub-sub-Junior Walker sax, courtesy of drummer Chico Hige. Indeed, ‘Out’ concludes the album beautifully and artfully, like Van Der Graaf Generator during their NADIR’S BIG CHANCE-period playing Flipper’s ‘Sex Bomb (My Baby)’ in a Berlin disco. Git down!
History
I Can Tell 7" (1979)
FRICTION (1980)
FOOTNOTES:
- Okay, they still weren’t exactly real pop choruses. But they did truly inject structure into the songs, somewhat on the lines of the Rolling Stones’ Uber-linear and Germanic disco song ‘Shattered’, released one year previously on SOME GIRLS.
- Better still, all those ancient TV punk pundits wouldn’t have to keep mentioning Hell’s brief role in Madonna’s vile movie DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN just to remind us who he was.
- Fucking hell, just goggling at that list of Keith Levine-o-philes, it’s no wonder I kicked out Mick Finkler in June 1980!
- The Murahatchibu story is protracted but essential to early ‘70s Japan, and is told in detail in JAPROCKSAMPLER (pages 117-127).
- These three LPs were released in 2003CE as a 3CD set by Tokyo’s Captain Trip Records. The set appeared at #48 in my JAPROCKSAMPLER Top 50.
- Even sartorially, this Reck druid was smart enough to keep away from the dreaded and Soon-to-represent-only-the-Knack’n’the Cars skinny tie.
Selected Discography
‘I Can Tell’ b/w ‘Pistol’ 7” (Pass 1979)
FRICTION (Pass 1980)
’79 LIVE (Pass 2005)