Plastics

Imagine this: it’s 28 years ago to the day, the 4th of January, 1980. A new decade. Hatsumode and the rest of the New Year rituals have been dispensed with. You live in Tokyo and you’re young, marginally hip and hungry for new sounds. Where do you go?

The answer: you need to be in the studio audience for Kinyou-Gourakukan (Friday Amusement Hall) which is having its first ever New Wave special! And here are the Plastics, the band that will most probably change your life. Watch out for the incredible edit at 0:27.

In the ’70s, American industry was caught off guard by Japan’s aptitude for making cameras, cars and television sets lighter, smarter and easier on the eye. Music industry moguls couldn’t have imagined that the Japs would do the same for Devo and the B-52s. Top Secret Man (original promo here) is the perfect synthesis, the perfect sneer, the students beating the teacher on the New Wave chessboard.

But wait a second. If Tokyo’s hip cognoscenti were all there, where were the uncool kids? In fact, they were in the same studio on the same day. To see a different band:

8½ are atrocious, tuxedo-abusing imposters at the New Wave ball and Shanghai Express is their fake ID. They are the aural equivalent of bad sex within inches of a pile of worn socks in a company dorm for new employees of a heavy machinery maker. Despite this, the core of the band would go on to form the more postmodern Taisho-chic act Guernica.

While the witty consumer anxiety of the Plastics is pointing frantically to the new decade, the potato-flavoured cabaret of 8½ is rooted in the ’70s with its muso touches, overall grinding horniness and oblique sexual come-ons to that ‘Shanghai lady’.

So, can you guess which band gets most of the crowd moving? That’s right, 8½. Compare the audience shots in both videos and you’ll see that, though the Plastics may have pulled in the marginally hip, their brand of English-language irony leaves most people bemused and possibly wondering if the joke might be on them. Far safer to solemnly sway to the turgid muso dross of 8½ than try any dangerous new moves to the sound of the coming decade.