It came from Japan - Hyperkinako

Although Martin C. Strong says a band from Lewisham called ‘Japan’ had a Japanese hit with ‘Life in Tokyo’ a full year before their first UK chart placing, there are no Japanese bands in The Great Rock Discography (6th edition).

The most famous East Anglian contained within its pages, probably the East Anglian that has had the greatest and deepest impact on UK pop music, is John Peel. A Liverpudlian. Peel contributes a foreword to Strong’s book, in which, unsurprisingly, he tells a brief anecdote about his mother, mentions The Fall and Captain Beefheart, and is mildly, knowingly, self-deprecating and wry.

Earlier this year, I heard the Peel session that woke me up the most. Hyperkinako, two Japanese people, a Yorkshireman, an Australian and a female bassist from Sussex, all based in Norwich, were astounding. They sounded like heavy metal, if metal bands wanted to sound tiny and battery powered rather than elemental. They had plinky-plonky keyboard effects and a Japanese girl ‘wassailing’ about ‘tadgers’ as if ‘tadgers’ were computer generated archaeological artefacts. She used verbs and constructions of grammar as if she’d been asked to conjugate ‘deconstruct’ in an English class. They were, unlike far too much of the music I listen to  - and for reasons I can’t fathom - in and of themselves, simultaneously and unsimultaneously, funny and moving; moving parts like a doll, like those tacky/clever plastic Freud figurines.

If it’s not about where you’re from but where you’re at, Hyperkinako were at East Anglia and Japan, transmitted across the frequencies, both on radio and on their self-made demo/single and the song on a GoJohnnyGoGoGo compilation.

The band is kind of based around the University of East Anglia. An Anglo-Japanese pairing of music PhD students; a female bassist from Sussex with a masters in culture and communication studies. Hyperkinako therefore almost certainly make ‘intellectual’ music. Journalists, if they are so inclined, can semi-reasonably hint at ‘deconstruction’ in features on them. But of course they’re better than that. They deal with intellectualism the only real way possible – agree and laugh, then laugh and agree.

Phil from Hyperkinako says:

‘I love lots of Japanese music - Melt Banana, Buffalo Daughter, Takako Minekawa etc etc, and so does Lisa. Toko and Shigeto hadn't come across a lot of these bands that I thought would be really famous in Japan, and instead were more interested in Western bands. So we have a strange mix of Westerners trying to make music like they think the Japanese do, and Japanese people making western music.’ Imagine what that would sound like. Then forget the shrieking cacophony of Boredoms et al. Or the faux-naïve Japanophilia of Flaming Lips etc. Sure, you can hear all this kind of stuff in Hyperkinako, but this a band more attuned to something pre-post-modernists might call ‘universal’. A band to which Hello Kitty is a pretty stuffed cat. They’re as fun a band as I’ve heard in many a celestial rotation: ‘we don't have plans for world domination, and we want to keep it fun’ they say. As touching a band as I’ve heard in as long. A band that have the good sense to prick any delusions of ‘universality’ by answering a question thus: Me: What is your favourite place? Them: Hmm, tricky. Dunno. A band that not ‘only serves to stress the lack of liveliness for young people already swept into self-conscious Angst by fashionable teenage convulsions’ but also gets busy ‘introducing newness to a contentedly somnolent public’. A band that could well be much more than something to hang a limp socio-geographical thesis on.