5.6.7.8's, music a real scream

By REBECCA BARRY


If you ever accidentally hack your arm off, don't panic - just put on an album by the 5.6.7.8s, music that goes down a treat with sword-fighting or blood-spurting limbs.

At least that's what director Quentin Tarantino thought when he asked the Japanese rock trio to star in his film Kill Bill Vol 1.

Now they are immortalised in a scene at the House of Blue Leaves, doing what they do best as one of the Bride's bloody rampages breaks out all around them.

"Kill Bill is so nice! I love it!" says bass player and second-time band member Screaming Omo, who wasn't actually in the film but rejoined the band for a world tour and to play the party at the film's premiere.

"When we finished playing, I told Mr Tarantino, 'I love your movie!' Then he told me, 'Thank you. I love your scream!"'

Omo, whose shriek is a trademark of her time in the band from 1990 to 1996, is communicating by email because she found it difficult to understand the questions posed to her over the phone.

She quit the band to concentrate on her day job as a graphic designer for magazines and comics but returned at the end of 2002. The band were about to go on world tour to promote Bomb the Rocks, a compilation of 27 tracks of their early singles released between 1989 and 1996, and so now she is preparing for her first trip, but the band's third, to New Zealand.

She might be sad at having missed out on the film, but, as she explains, using her favourite English phrase, "It's no use crying over spilt milk".

Anyway, she's thrilled at the attention it has given them since. Among the many emails that have inundated their inbox from new fans wanting to congratulate them are a few from journalists requesting interviews.

They have come from far and wide, from the usual suspects of British music mag NME to bastion of style and cool Italian Vogue.

Fans of the band will know their legacy goes far beyond the hype. Kill Bill was not their first time on film. In the 80s they appeared on the amateur-band TV show called Ika-ten, for which they won a special prize.

They wanted to turn Elvis, Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys into punk gods by deconstructing rock'n'roll with noise and distortion. More bizarrely, they parodied their culture, sang about extra-terrestrial boyfriends and "fruit bubble love" and wore all-leather catsuits and bouffant hairdos at their shows.

But the band's founders, sisters Yoshiko "Ronnie" (vocals, guitar) and Sachiko Fujiyama (drums) were misfits in Tokyo and their fame lasted a short 15 minutes. "Japan is too stuck in its ways to embrace garage rock the way Britain has," Yoshiko once said, and their tastes were too eccentric.

Ask Omo who her favourite musicians are and she'll rattle off a list of 30, spanning the likes of Led Zeppelin, Roy Orbison and Iggy and the Stooges as well as more subversive acts such as the Cramps, the Butthole Surfers, the Dead Kennedys.

Her favourite bass players have Bs and Js in their names: John Paul Jones, Jean Jacque Burnel, Bruce Foxton, Jack Bruce and John Bonham because he is "powerful, strange, funny, cool and hot".

Which is the same impression the 5.6.7.8s leave, with their chic, loungey instrumentals and screaming vintage trash'n'roll.

"At times," observed one critic, "they sound like a drunk bag-lady who has hijacked the microphone at a karaoke bar." It's not the kind of sound that goes down well in the Japanese mainstream.

And so they have cultivated their biggest fanbase in the West, touring the United States with the White Stripes (and later signing to their label) and playing across Australia and Europe. About 10 members have come and gone but all have been female - other than guitarist Eddie, who went on to front the Japanese garage band, Mad 3.

That Tarantino would stumble across them was almost a given. A fan of quirky vintage rock'n'roll, he was looking for a band who made a similar statement to his vision of Kill Bill.

In Japan for a Kill Bill meeting, he was browsing in a thrift store in Ebisu.

The shop assistant happened to be a 5.6.7.8s fan and was playing the new record so he asked her to sell it to him. She refused and told him to buy his own. He left the store to look for it but ran out of time. When he came back to Ebisu he visited the shop again and begged her for her copy.

She finally gave in and let him have it but not without charging double the price.

* The 5.6.7.8s play the Kings Arms on Monday.