Tims little magic map directs us through the red light district of Ikebukero to a small deadend alleyway…must be the right place, goth clubs are always hidden in red light districts, but where is it? Ah, theres a small gaggle of goths hanging around outside. Despite the fact that its way gone midnight the club hasn’t opened yet. So we mill around with the others outside, pursuading some of the locals to pose for photos, and letting them photograph us in return.
Eventually the doors open and we descend into the club. On the way in we’re give a CD and a small pile of losable pieces of paper in exchange for a handful of yen.
The venue itself is similar in scale to the Monarch, but underground and with more of the feel of the Underworld in shape and style. Everything is painted black and theres a gantry across the centre for the sound desk. It seems theres a whole bunch of video cameras around as well since theres some TVs showing cuts from one view to another of the stage.
We are treated to a bunch of Japanoise for turning up early, I rather get into this while everyone else is cursing it and praying for a beat or a guitar.
After a while the noise stops, the lights go up and Requiem Dolis hit the stage. They are remarkable for two reasons – they’re a ‘club burns down’ headline waiting to happen and theres not a lot of musicianing going on on the stage.
They also use a load of Christian imagery, which seemed strangely out of place. Back home, apart from being good imagery, this is a splendid way of annoying the kind of selfrighteous easy to annoy christians that its fun to annoy. Here, I doubt thats the purpose and suspect that they’re just using it because its nice strong imagery.
Theres no clapping between ‘songs’ and only a little at the end of the performance.
As the djs come back I start looking at the crowd – and what a weird crowd it is. Theres a large gaijin contingent, mainly Americans but theres a number of us from the UK, a guy from South America somewhere (Brazil or Argentina I think he said) and a chap from Paris.
Odder though is the ratio of guys to girls in the local crowd – theres about five girls to one guy. None of the local guys dance. Well, there was one but if he were taken to a UK context he would be obviously gay (I’m reluctant to say that about him in this context, a country where its apparently normal for a guy to wear a pink shirt and prance around with a seethrough umbrella without fear of being considered even slightly poncy – geez how can I import values like these to Britain? Or do I get stopped by customs on the way in?).
There were a number of explanations for this split between the sexes that I came up with while at the club: that it was really a brothel, that the local scene is just like that, that the person running the club had annoyed a lot of guys, that it was actually a lesbian club. I’ve discounted the brothel concept since escaping with both pride and wallet intact. But haven’t been able to figure out what the real explanation is yet. Not that I’m complaining about a club with a large number of cute girls and not much in the way of competition.
The music was getting a lot more generic, the kind of music you could hear in any EBM club across the world these days, there was the occasional J-goth thrown in to keep you awake – thats not made it to London yet for some reason.
After a while the music ceases again and its time for another show. This time its Seij Minus AC, which appears to be the band of one of the DJs. I think they can be summed up as “Sneaky Bat Machine in Brown Cords and a Silver Codpiece”, you probably don’t need to know any more than that.
I had to stick around until the trains started running again, which meant leaving at about five. I hate that leaving the club and its light outside thing, it is just a precursor to having a bad couple of days getting your sleeping pattern back to something sensible.
When I got to the station there was some people standing around the ticket barrier looking a little unsure of whether they should be going through or not.
Having no idea of what was going on I waited until there was a bit of a gap in the crowd and headed on through. It turns out there was a fight going on on the other side of the barriers, it seemed that the crowd around the barrier didn’t know how to deal with it – no idea whether they were friends of the fightees or whatever – but I just walked past, they’ve got other things on their minds than worrying about some stupid gaijin is getting near them.
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