The 5,6,7,8s, No better way to start a Saturday...
So much pleasure from such a small set, it was probably the most fantastic thirty minutes I’d ever spent. "Herro Leading!" "Whoo Hoo" the crowd replied. Yes, most of them were there for that one song, but they got a lot more than that and were very pleasantly surprised.
The band, propelled to the dizzy heights of fame by Quentin Tarrantino’s epic cinematic triumph ‘Kill Bill,’ after a less-than-epic career on our shores, spanning three decades in relative obscurity over here and being on the verge of breaking up, took up only a minuscule portion of the stage. But the sound and fun they produced was more than a substitute for this minor detail.
And didn’t they look great in their silvery, glittery Christmas-tinsel outfits! Yes, yes indeed. The covers of all the old classics (‘I’m blue,’ ‘I Was a Teenage Cavewoman’) provided great twisting material for the rock ‘n’ roll crowd to get down to. No moshing here, proper dancing, the only way! Like we did last summer!
And then they played it, and I couldn’t hear it, at the very front of the crowd! I couldn’t hear it over the whole entire crowd shouting ‘whoo hoo’ ecstatically behind me. This particular Carling weekend that chant of ‘whoo hoo, ooh ooh ooh’ was more popular than the ever-present ‘Bollocks!’ Everybody knew it and everybody loved it. The 5,6,7,8s had achieved mega cult status, for how long this will last, no one can predict, but for that one moment in time, they were the best thing since bread became sliced!
Let’s hope we see Ronnie “Yoshiko” Fujiyama and the girls on the stage playing their hip surf-rock for years to come. No better way to start a Saturday.