Go Chic At Formoz Festival

Anyone heard of Go Chic?

I saw this 5-girl, Taiwanese disco-punk group at the Formoz Festival in Taipei, and was quite blown away.

They're like Japan's Perfume, but in another life, gone bad—kicked out of talent training school after getting caught smoking, or staying over at the boy friend's house, or sniffing thinner, they decide to form a punk band instead. In Taiwan. And they recruit two more girls.

All the heat and sweating might be what caused this murky fantasy to pop into my head, but they WERE all dressed in different-colored plastic cocktail dresses, outfits that Perfume might conceivably be seen in, and from far away from the stage where I stood, Go Chic's vocalist looked vaguely like Nocchi and the synth player like A-chan.

Except this Nocchi lowered her pink dress to reveal the black bra underneath, and danced that way for the rest of the show... OK, they have more in common with wild-girl vocalist Japanese punk groups like Limited Express or Midori, and I was a bit surprised to see something like that in Taiwan; while I know almost nothing about the music scene here, the groups I have seen up to now have mostly seemed earnest and understated, and not at all in-your-face like Midori. I also read here that another Taiwanese group, White Eyes, is the same sort of deal, and I was sad to find out that I missed them when they played earlier in the day...

Go Chic call themselves an electronica/hyphy/psychedic group, but there were also early punk, new wave, slow hard rock, funk and synth/disco sounds at the Formoz show. During the faster numbers the crowd in the front pogo-ed and slam-danced, while the Go Chic girls splashed beer on them and the black-bra vocalist kicked stage divers back into the pit... What would have the planners of Formoz's venue, a park with exhibits aimed at teaching kids Chinese and Confucian values, have thought if they'd seen this debaucherous spectacle on the premises??

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P.S., I love how Go Chic say in their MySpace page: “BTW: it's go "sheeeeekkkkk" not chick, duh!”