Braving the Typhoon For Lucy and Plectrum 3

Akky Fujita of Plectrum.

The final act tonight at the Que was Plectrum.

What more can I say about Plectrum? I’m always recharged fully spiritually after I listen to this outstanding Tokyo rock quartet.

Someone once said that Plectrum may be the band that most seasoned Shimokitazawa scene rock musicians secretly consider their favorite live band. Whether that’s true or not, there’s no doubt a lot of people love Plectrum.

They played a lot of old songs tonight (Plectrum has been around for about ten years), because lead guitarist Akky Fujita felt the band was getting too comfortable playing numbers from their latest album, Prom Night, and they needed to keep their edge by playing a wide variety of rock music. For we audience members, it was a chance to hear how good the old stuff was, songs from records that are now mostly hard to find.

The best moment of the night was a mini-jam session that ended their song ‘Les Paul Master’. Singer Taisuke Takata left the stage with his Fender Jazzmaster on the floor still ringing distortion. (But he soon returned and turned it off to do a ballad for an encore.)

Listening to them rock, I forgot that my socks were still wet and my jeans chilled and moist because of the typhoon.



Plectrum at the Que.

Also performing tonight was a good trio called Sparky (they were one of those bands that might have brought down the house if they playing anywhere other than Tokyo, but people here are spoiled by the abundance of top-notch groups), and playing solo, Toshiaki Yamada of Gomes the Hitman. Yamada played an acoustic guitar and sang. I’m not usually interested in that sort of thing, but his music was good.

Yamada said he’d been in a hospital until a couple of months ago, undergoing surgery after they found a hole in one of his lungs. He said breezily that he thought he’d be able to write more songs while he was in the hospital recuperating, but he became obsessed anytime he ran across words like ‘lung’ and ‘death’ while he was reading magazines in bed, and so, wasn't able to focus on song-writing. But he did write one song about looking out the window from his hospital bed, and played it tonight. It was a moving song.