Acid Mother Temple
Grocer’s Apostrophe Ragamuffins. That’s what I called the playlist I made to prepare for last night. If I’d have listened to it twice, changed it to Grocers Apostrophe Ragamuffins, it would have been in tribute to Acid Mothers Temple, who, since they dropped the apostrophe in 1997, have apparently released a further 98 records, to add to the two they put out as Acid Mother’s Temple. It’s intriguing to imagine the deliberations that took place leading to that apostrophe’s deletion. Was the decision taken by AMT’s bandleader and guitarist Kawabata Makoto alone, or did he consult the others? Or were, perhaps, a series of focus groups convened? We may never know the full story, but one thing seems clear: it was a good move. There is something tawdry and pathetic about the image conjured up by Acid Mother’s Temple, as there would be by, say, Meth Aunt’s Shrine.
Acid Mothers Temple, on the other hand, attempts to veer away from such miserable associations by invoking clean living Frank Zappa and his famous Mothers. Calling up musical ancestors by means of ludicrous nomenclature is something that seems to come easily to AMT. This is, after all, the band responsible for: ‘Son of Bitches Brew’, ‘Electric Heavyland’, ‘Grateful Head’, ‘Ziggy Sitar Dust Raga’, ‘St. Captain Freak Out And The Magic Bamboo Request’, ‘Starless and Bible Black Sabbath’, ‘Dark Side of the Black Moon: What Planet Are We On?’ and ‘Absolutely Freak Out (Zap Your Mind!!).
But while there is a tradition of Japanese bands copying the Western acts that inspired them (from the twangy, instrumental guitar music of the ‘Eleki’ bands, through the ‘Group Sounds’ movement that developed after The Beatles performed at Budokan in 1966, to the heavier Futen bands of the 1970s), AMT, deranged and derivative album naming aside, don’t really fit this template.
Judging from last night’s performance, they’re strive for something else, not the reproduction of a specific Western style but, instead, the melding of two disparate influences to create something new. And the nature of this quest was apparently identified by Makoto nearly two decades before AMT was even formed, when he resolved to create something that combined the hard rock of Deep Purple with the electronic music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, since this is what he wanted to listen to, but couldn’t find elsewhere. He started his first band (Ankoku Kakumei Kyodotai) in 1978 with this idiosyncratic aim in mind.
Incredibly, 44 years later, he is still chasing the same goal, in a gig that was equal parts Stockhauen, Deep Purple and AMT’s own ‘Pink Lady Lemonade’, which appears to be their ‘Dark Star’. I’d heard them play ‘Pink Lady Lemonade’ before and I thought it would be sensible to familiarise myself with it in advance of tonight’s gig, with the hope of increasing the probability that I’d be able to recognise at least one of the pieces performed. And it worked! Or at least, I think it did - I’m pretty certain that they played ‘Pink Lady Lemonade’ twice. The first time near the start, the incongruously melodic refrain giving way to some thrillingly jarring staccato guitar, before things exploded into the pulsating wall of noise that is the band’s default setting. The reprise was probably two thirds through the concert, and this time it was the drums that dominated, forcing their way through the clamour to hold my attention for several minutes, as I imagined hundreds of cowbells in sacks being walloped with lumps of wood.
There were a number of stretches throughout their performance when I was mesmerised like this – they are slick band, expert at what they do, and fully committed to their performance; when everything falls into place there is an amazing grandeur to their racket. When Makoto ends the gig by holding his guitar above his head before dropping it onto the stack of amplifiers behind him, it’s with the kind of self-assurance that might lead a man to devote nearly half a century of his life to the creation of elusive music he can conceptualise but can’t otherwise hear.
