Definately the most memorable of the 4 Anoyo parties I’ve been to. We knew that typhoon was coming. Saw the satellite maps showing it making a beeline for Niijima, but for some reason it never sunk in for any of us that camping in a typhoon was a bad idea ………

Anoyo are a Japanese “collective consciousness” group who organise and promote trance parties all over Japan. Every year in Autumn they throw a big outdoor party somewhere in the
wilds of Japan - usually an Island. I’ve been to four of these. The Great Sprayer
in 1999 on Niijima - an Island around 300 Km Southeast of Tokyo. Then in 2003 I went to Rolling Thunder, which was held on Sadogashima - an
Island famous for its Earth Festival and Taiko drumming, and also last year when the party returned to Niijima.

This year promised to be good. Darina and Masaki were over from Ireland, Andy was coming down from Sendai
and all the usual suspects were up for it. It was on a long weekend, so we caught the overnight ferry out on
Thursday night, along with 1400 other partygoers. The boat was the usual craic. Everyone getting pissed and having
a laugh except Dave who was fairly seasick despite his magic Chinese wristbands which were supposed to mitigate
the affects. Mini got her photo taken with System 7 which made her night, and it was all good.
We arrive into Niijima port early on Friday morning, and those of us still awake get the rest of them up - having the usual trouble
with John, who eventually stands up and stumbles of towards the toilet. A few of us manage to jump the queue, jump
into a taxi and are the first at the campsite so we mark out the best spot, stick up our tents, open a few beers and wait
for the rest to turn up.

They arrive about an hour later, we look around and realise that John is nowhere to be seen. Feck ! this is same the
John, who for New Year on his way to see Basement Jaxx last year at Yokohama, managed to end up spending the night in a hotel
at a Japanese wedding - dancing with the bride ………… Knowing John it didn’t take a genius to figure out what happened.
The boat had sailed merrily away, with John peacefully asleep in some corner, away from all us bad, loud people who were trying
to wake him for some stupid reason. Man - he was so lucky ! The boat goes down to another Island and then comes back and docks again
at Niijima, so a few of the lads head back to the dock to see if he’s on it. The boat arrives back and there’s John up on the upper
deck leaning on the railing with not a care in the world. First words off the boat - “So I was supposed to get off the first time around ?” Fair play John ! - only you could manage it !

So with John safely back in the fold and the weather being lovely, the rest of the day was spent drinking beer, wine, sake and whatever
else was to hand and discussing and solving all the worlds problems. There was a bit of a discussion about the typhoon.
It was due to arrive early Saturday morning but no-one was taking it too seriously. I think maybe the reason for this is that when typhoons
hit Tokyo they’re nothing - a bit of rain and some wind, but thats it.

Around 7pm music starts booming out from the main stage down beside the beach so we head down there. Wild Marmalade were playing. A
digeridoo band from Byron Bay, Australia. Two drummers and a digeridoo player - absolutely brilliant. You really have to hear them live to get the full effect. Everyone was going stark raving mad.

I dropped a load of acid and all I can remember for the rest of the night is a series of snapshots
…… System 7 playing and the whole stage floating about 10 feet in the air ……… rain - heavy rain ……. meeting Dara, who
gives me a rain-poncho to wear, and getting completely lost trying to put it over my head ………. more rain, really heavy. I’m
convinced at this stage that the typhoon has arrived and that we’re all going to die, and I’m completely baffled as to why no-one else
seems too bothered. I end up in some sort of a wigwam looking at what I thought was people making clothes with bright colors, but this doesn’t ring any bells with anyone else who was in there. It was really windy at this stage as well, and the whole Island seemed to be rocking under my feet to the wind. This phenomenon stayed with me until we left the Island !

I finally started coming back to my senses around 5am, when it getting bright and made tracks back up to the campsite. Darina, Masaki,
Andy and John were there so I sat in a tent with them out of the rain and drank wine for a while and tried to get my head back together .

Dec turned up about an hour later, and tells us that the party was rocking down on the beach, so myself and John head down with him and
join Denny who’s loving it down there. The weather is really atrocious at this stage. You couldn’t face into the rain it was so heavy and
the wind was howling. There was maybe 150 people down there just loving it. It was brilliant - the weather just added to it. Masaki and Darina
turned up a bit later. Masaki was funny. He’s not too fond of getting wet, so he spent the morning crouched down behind the speakerstack
and managed not to get a drop of rain on him. Darina stuck with him until the DJ announced that they were going to have to stop soon because the weather was just getting too bad, and when she heard that she couldn’t control herself and plunged out dancing into the rain and got herelf completely soaked.

We headed back up to the tents and the weather started to improve a little, so we were all convinced that the typhoon was over. Then some emergency rescue lads come into the campsite with loudhailers and tell us that we’re going to have to evacuate the campsite, and the rest of the weekend party was cancelled. The typhoon was still way south of us, was stronger than anyone thought, and was due to arrive that afternoon. The bad weather that we’d had, was just a mild precursor. All bad ……….

There was a lot of discussion and vacillation at this stage. Some people were dubious about the whole thing and wanted to stay in the campsite. I was still under the partial influence of a head full of acid, and was imagining worst case scenarios similar to Karina. Typhoon and hurricanes are the same thing. They’re just called typhoons in the pacific (and cyclones in the southern hemisphere - and the Aborigines called them Willi Willis). In the end an Anoyo guy came, and told us that he had organised with the Island Council that we could stay in two High school gyms for the night and that there would be buses shuttling people there for the next few hours.

So the tents came down, we packed up and headed to the school, and spent the rest of the day sitting around drinking, waiting for typhoon and trying to make up excuses for why we wouldn’t make work on the Monday - All boats were cancelled until early Monday morning so no-one was going to make work until Tuesday. The typhoon still hadn’t arrived by 11pm, by which time most of us had conked out in the gym.

The weather was really nice next morning. Still really windy but very sunny. The typhoon had arrived around 6am in the morning apparently and had woken up a lot of people trying to tear the roof off the building. Even Masaki and Darina - the two who thought staying up in the campsite for the typhoon was a good idea, were glad they ended up in the gym. I didn’t hear a thing. John - predictably - was the other one who slept peacefully through it all.

It was Sunday morning at this stage and there were no boats leaving until Monday morning so we still had another day on Niijima. Anoyo people came in and told us that we had to be out of the gym by 3pm and that there was no party planned for that night - the whole thing was cancelled, which pissed a lot of us off. A lot of the DJ’s had to be stuck on the island along with the rest of us - fair enough all the sound and lighting equipment was taken down, but they didn’t have to put the whole extravaganza up again - we would have been happy enough with a gettoblaster if that was all they could do. Lots of bitching going on about Anoyo at this stage.

The rest of the day was spent down in the onsen, then bringing all our gear back up to the campsite and putting the tents back up again. There was only maybe 600 people left at this stage - a lot of people saw the writing on the wall early Sat morning while we were busy dancing in the howling gale, and had caught the boat to Tokyo that morning. This included 4 of our gang - pussies !!

Rumours started flying around the campsite at this stage about a DJ rebellion within Anoyo. Some of the DJ’s and Wild Marmalade were willing to play, and eventually Anoyo were pressured to organise some sort of a party for that night. This really lifted everyone and everyone started to wake up a bit.

I’m not sure how much of these rumours are true, but if its true that Anoyo had to be pressured into setting the party up, it really reflects badly on them. They already had all the necessary planning permissions, the DJs were there, we had all paid a lot of money to be there, and the only reason for not doing something would have been pure laziness.

Anyway …….. everyone was happy now. Wild Marmalade (fair play to them) confirmed that they would play at 8pm and there was a slew of DJs lined up after that to take us to 7am next morning - perfect. The weather was playing its part as well - still very windy, but the skies were clear, which was all we needed.

So Wild Marmalade played at 8pm. The whole thing was on a much smaller scale than what was on Friday night but it was perfect for the number of people there. We were all dancing right up against the little platform they were playing on - brilliant …….. The rest of the night was excellent. Everyone was in top form, releasing the pent up tension of the last two days. The music was really good - a lot less trancey and more technoey than what what you’d expect at an Anoyo gig, but that suited me better - I prefer techno. We met this English dude at one stage, who’d been camping beside us - he told us that he’d spent the typhoon down in the onsen off his head on acid !! Jesus !! - An onsen is an outdoor natural hot water spring bath. The onsens on Niijima were right down in the rocks beside the sea …………. and the sea which is pretty wild around Niijima at the best of times had been raging all weekend. Thats a good recipe for a bad trip if you ask me, but different folks - different strokes.

And that was it for another year. We staggered up to the campsite, brought down the tents wh hadn’t actually slept in, hopped onto the boat and slept all the way to Tokyo and reality …….

I’m not used to being awake during the day on Saturday. It’s a weird feeling. I had all sorts of plans - buy a new phone, maybe go look at some snowboards in Ochanomizu. Predictably I ended up spending the day sitting in front of the computer organising my mp3 collection and downloading new stuff. Junior Boys - Last Exit is being sucked onto my harddrive as I type. It got the thumbs up from Jackuzi so it can’t be too bad - can it ??

Anyway from a gigs and parties point of view it was a good year in Japan. Radiohead arrived in April and rocked my world. Then Wire was on mid-summer. This is Ishino Takkyus party. He’s a really popular techno DJ, and once a year he gathers the best techno talent from Japan and overseas and throws the biggest indoor techno party in Japan. The big draw this year was that Orbital were playing their Farewell Japan gig there. It was a two day event but we only made it along for the second day. It was a great laugh - Orbital were a bit of a disappointment though. I think they picked the right time to finish up. I never thought I’d say this but their music sounds a bit dated. Their last album - the blue album was crap. Fair play to them though. Their tracks were the anthems for the 90’s clubbing generation.
Jeff Mills was the standout DJ. He played the early morning set, when everyone was a bit jaded but he got the party going all over again.

Late summer the Fuji Rock Festival arrived. This is the Japanese version of Glastonbury in England, and Witness/Oxygen in Ireland, and this year it had a very similar lineup to those two events. This was my first time going to the Fuji Rock festival. It’s fucking expensive - the ticket was 40,000 yen - 287.503 Euroes ! Then you have to pay for the Bullet train there and back, beer money and all the other necessities, and well ……… it’d better be a good weekend !!
It turned out to be a great weekend. Its on up in the mountains in a really beautiful location. Predictably it rained for a while, but lets face it - outdoor festivals would be boring without a bit of rain. The way Fuji works is that during the day the bands play, then around 9 or 10pm the “transition” groups - like Chemical Brothers and Basement Jaxx play, and then there are various parties all over the place until the morning - take your pick - trance, techno, house, ambient - its all there somewhere. Standout music - Basement Jaxx, and Pixies were brilliant. Franz Ferdinand, Simple Kid, Ash, The Stills, PJ Harvey, the Streets and Keane also put on some very impressive shows. Dizzee Rascal is an idiot - during his set he made a comment that went something like - “you don’t have to be Chinese to like my music ” - I’ve no idea what he meant by that but he came out of it looking like a pratt. Courtney Love was very entertaining. She was in a very aggressive mood and kept on stopping the music and giving out to the crowd because they weren’t making enough noise for her taste.
Best moment of the weekend - losing my wallet, then heading down to the headquarters to the lost and found section and getting it back with every penny still in it !! only in Japan. The finale was funny. Morrissey was supposed to play but cancelled at the last moment, and the place was rife with rumours about who might be replacing him. The Chilli Peppers had played in Tokyo the week before so people thought they might step up. I was clinging to the hope that it might be Radiohead. In the end who walks onto the stage - These Charming Men, an Irish (!!) Smiths tribute band - I think their biggest gig before this was in front of a half empty Olympia theatre in Dublin, and now they were playing in front of 50,000 - 60,000 people !! I was so drunk that I actually thought it was the Smiths so I was happy enough ………..

Early Autumn and the Annual Anoyo party came up. Last year it was on up in Sado but this year they moved back to their original location at Niijima Island. Another great weekend. The boattrip there and back is always good fun, and its a really beautiful Island - It seems more like a South Pacific Island - with Easter Island style statues and monuments dotted all over the place - than a Japanese Island. Outdoor trance and techno parties in Japan - they’re just great. Everyone is on the same wavelength.

Other big nights out included seeing John Digweed playing in Yellow. A very hardcore night. We got there around 12 and the party went on until 1:30pm next day. As tends to happen to me at these kind of parties I was actually talking to John - as I like to call him - for a while. He came down onto the floor late on and a Japanese girl went up to him and tried to talk to him in Japanese. He looked around and saw me - I was the only gaijin left in the club at this stage, and came over and asked me if I could speak Japanese. Of course I said yes - even though my Japanese ability could charitably be described as minimal. He asked me to translate what the girl was saying but I hadn’t a clue. I just made something up about her wanting to sleep with him and everyone seemed to be happy with that ……

Then two weekends ago was Electraglide 2004 out in Makuhari Messe. Another big techno ravey thing. Another great night. The place is so big that everyone lost everyone else early on and then we’d keep bumping into each other during the course of the night and losing each other again. Great fun ……….. 2 Many DJ’s were great, and the prodigy put on a very energetic show. I assume Tim Deluxe and Darren Emerson were good. I missed their set - I was at the “wandering around talking shite to strangers” phase of the night.

That’s it really for now. Happy Christmas to all - have a good one.

Sat, April 17th. At last. Radiohead arrive in Tokyo. I’d been looking forward to this day since last November when the gig was announced. As I think I’ve mentioned before in other blog entries I love Radiohead with a terrible passion - I want to have Thom Yorkes babies. Sad I know, but these are the emotions they inspire in me. I’ve only seen them live once before, back around 97ish. They headlined at the Big Day Out in Galway while on the bends tour. It was lashing rain that day and all the preceding acts had been shit, so the crowd was pretty depressed by the time Radiohead came on stage, but they blew everyone away - absolutely amazing. Ever since then I’ve revered them.

They were on the Hail To The Thief tour this time. The two preceding albums were Kid A and Amnesiac - two difficult albums, which sounded bloody awful initially, but if you gave them a chance they grew from being ugly ducklings into beautiful beautiful swans. Hail To The Thief is a lot more accessible, but does fade a bit after listening to it for a few weeks, Though ‘Wolf At The Door’ just gets better and better. All in all though, I think both Kid A and Amesiac are better albums.

The gig was on a Saturday thank God. I’ve gone to a lot of midweek gigs here after work and its just not the same. It was starting quite early - 5pm and they didn’t have any support bands, but it was a really nice day so the plan formulated was to go out to Makuhari Messe really early, get good and drunk outside and go from there. That plan backfired a bit though, because by the time the gig started I was roaring drunk, was having severe trouble walking straight and I have huge gaps in my memories of the gig. Ooops !! I do remember that they opened with ‘Lucky’, played a lot of songs off Amnesiac and were absolutely fucking brilliant. I’m not sure if they toured for Amnesiac - if they did they didn’t come anywhere near where I was living, but they made up for it here.
The thing with Radiohead, is that even though their albums are amazing, the songs just sound so much better live. The highlight of the show was ‘How To Disappear Completely’ from Kid A. A song that didn’t particularly stand out on the album for me, but live just blew me away. Other songs which stood out (and that I remember) were ‘High And Dry’, ‘Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box’ and ‘Myxomatosis’ - another song which I didn’t think was all that good on Hail To The Thief - but really did the business live.

I don’t have much more to say really, except that if you haven’t discovered Radiohead yet - not likely I know if you read b00mb0x - then please go now and discover them, and if they’re playing anywhere within a 200 mile radius of you, go see them. Next time I go see them I’ll be as sober as a judge.

On a slightly different tangent I saw UNKLE recently - with Ian Brown doing vocals. I didn’t know their music at all before I saw them but I was very impressed. Never Neverland is a great album, and Thom Yorke does vocals on ‘Rabbit In Your Headlights’ from the Psyence Fiction album, which automatically makes it their best song. Apparently the video for this song was banned for extreme violence.

I haven’t written anything here in ages - I kept on meaning to write some sort of a review of 2003, before 2003 actually ended, but people I meet for the first time this year are still saying “Happy New Year” to me so I figure I’m still in the New Year zone where reviews are acceptable …………..
(more…)

Mini-chan sent on the link a few weeks ago : Anoyo - Rolling Thunder. When I saw the mention of Anoyo I nearly wet myself !! About 4 years ago a load of us went out to Niijima Island, about 200km East of Tokyo for a trance party thrown by Anoyo and as detailed here . had an absolute ball. I didn’t find out until recently but that Niijima party has actually gone down in the annals of Japanese outdoor parties as one of the best ever - and thats saying something !!
Anoyo are a small collective and their parties are small and cosy, rather than the huge parties thrown by the likes of Vision Quest or the Rainbow 2000 series. They have awfully bad luck with forces of nature though. They’ve had 3 big parties on Niijima Island and they were clobbered by a typhoon the first year, The second one, which I went to was the big success story, and the year after they were scheduled to have another, but a few hours before the party kicked off, the Island was rattled by a huge earthquake. 6.5 on the richter scale !! I had been planning to go but had to cancel for some reason, and I actually felt the earthquake in Tokyo 200 miles away …….. after that they decided to move location to Sado Island - up off the North West Coast of Japan. A pity really - as its expensive to get there from Tokyo, and its a long trip. Also one of the great things about Niijima was the overnight boat-trip out. A big ferry full of young genki Japanese party-goers, thats always going to be a laugh. Unfortunately though, the locals were getting a bit annoyed with the whole thing and asked Anoyo to stop throwing parties there.

So Sado it was. They had their first Sado party last year, and the forces of nature struck again. The party was hammered by gale-force winds and the big speaker-stacks were blown into a gully a few miles away ….. bloody hell !!!
Anyway weather shmeather - It wasn’t going to stop me. Mini and her friend Kaoru-chan were on for it. Ciaran - a free man after ridding himself of the shackles of a yearlong relationship was raring to go, and John and Simon completed the gang. Everyone except myself and Ciaran took the Friday off and headed up early on Friday morning. Myself and Ciaran got the bullet train up later that evening after work. We got absolutely hammered on the train - lashing the Asahi beers in.
So we got up to Niigata at around 8:30 and made our way out to the ferry port where we had another 2 hour ferry journey before we got to Sado. While we were waiting for the ferry we met this old hippie couple who were heading out to the party as well. The had a load of wild hokkaido grass so we had a laugh with that. We nearly missed the ferry even though we were there half an hour early .- that grass was good stuff.

The rest of the gang had hired a car, which was handy as the party site was miles away from the ferry port. Mini and Kaoru-chan came down to pick us up and had to put up with the two of us talking absolute shite in the car on the way back to the party. We brought the hippie couple with us as well. They did really well actually. We had to get out to exchange our tickets for wrist bands. The two huddled down in the back and got away without having to pay 7,000 yen - a fair chunk of change.
So we dumped our gear and wandered up to the main dance floor. It was a small field with a natural hollow in one corner where the DJ dome was located so it had a natural ampitheaterical feel. Its great how everyone is so friendly at these gigs. There wasn’t a hint of regulation. No policemen, no uniforms no nothing just loads of people having a good laugh. The great thing about Anoyo gigs as well is that the Anoyo crew and all the DJs are all wandering around as well. I kept meeting one of the DJs - Jet More. A really interesting guy. I actually missed his set, but I told him that I saw him and that he was great - he would have been gutted if I told him I was off having a dump and got a bit sidetracked on the way back ………

The friday night went really well. The weather stayed nice, the music was really good and everyone was in great form. All my gang conked out early though at around 4 or 5 am. I kept going - accompanied by Andre - a JET teacher who we’d met at some stage during the night. We headed down to the lower stage at around 5:30 to catch the sunrise - it was absolutely brilliant. After that we chilled out there. The music was really really good at that time. I was half considering going back to the tent for some sleep but the music was just too good. Then around 9 in the morning I spotted Simon striding from the campsite through the dance floor with his swimming gear, on the way to the beach for his morning swim. The whole gang arrived then - refreshed after their nice sleep -………. wimps !! Their plan was to go for a swim and go for a drive around the Island. My plan was to crash for the day. It didn’t happen though. The tent was too hot and I was attacked by a swarm of ants so after about 3 hours of tossing and turning, I got up and wandered down to the lower stage. There were two Isreali DJs spinning and a bunch of Isrealis were going mad in front of the DJs - off their heads. Very entertaining to watch.

Mini-chan and Kaoru-chan looking genki.

The rest of the crew arrived back from their drive at around 5 O Clock which was just about time to start gearing up for night two. I’d brought a bottle of Thai Sang-Som whiskey up with me. This is savage stuff. I’ve heard, that amongst its more exotic ingredients are formaldahyde and amphetamines !! Whatever ….. it does the trick. Before we drank it everyone was quiet and withdrawn. Afterwards everyone was ready to rock. We took a load of shrooms and at around 9 or 10ish off we went back up to the main field.
Ciaran was the star of the show for the early part of the night. There were some really impressive firedancers there and Ciaran really caught the bug. He was like a 10 year old kid. - “thats me lads - I　reckon I’d be an absolute natural !! ” He went over to talk to the dancers and they gave him a a set of glowsticks to play with and he was like a pig in shit - I’ve never seen a man so happy !! The best part was when he was in the middle swinging away and the two fire dancers went to either side of him doing their thing, and everyone was cheering him on - it was absolutely priceless …………

That was when the curse of Anoyo kicked in. It started lashing rain - really lashing now - sheets of it just pouring out of the sky. I ended up taking shelter in the wigwam where all the lighting stuff was being done and was talking to the main lighting guy. He was Isreali I think. Called Squid or Octopus or something, because of the mad dreads he had. It was from him that I heard about all the travails Anoyo have had with weather and nature in general. He didn’t consider the rain we were having at the time to be any big deal …… I suppose it wasn’t after 2 typhoons and an earthquake !!
In the end the rain actually added to the party. It would stop for half an hour, then pelt down for half an hour and on like that, and everyone started to get into it. Down in the hollow in front of the DJ dome turned into an absolute mudpit, and the slopes down into the hollow were like ice. I fell early on trying to climb out of it, and got plastered in mud - after that I didn’t give a shite.
The lads all crashed again around 4 or 5 and I was left to carry the flag which I think I did with distinction. I kept going until about 8 am, which was when I finally crashed, and got a whopping 3 hours of sleep. I basically didn’t sleep at all from Thursday until Sunday, and all I had to eat all weekend was a one bowl of noodles ……. hardcore.

Feeling a bit wasted after no sleep or food for 3 days.

After that we had to pack and leave. It was a pain in the ass. The lads had given the rented car back the day before and the busses to the port were really irregular and disorganised. If we missed the 3pm ferry the next one wouldn’t be until 6pm which would have meant arriving back in Tokyo at 1 in the morning - not a pleasant prospect. There was no fear though with Mini around. Off she went - saying she was going to find us a lift, and came back 10 minutes later. She basically forced these two ramen stall attendants to offer to give us a lift. They weren’t even going there themselves !! Fair play Mini - you’re a star.

Thats it really. Anoyo - you’re great !!!

In memory of Gormo
RIP