Private Scandal Party Vol.1

July 2015, I was going to be back in Japan and DJing at a two-day gig organised by Pogo 77 Records and Mangrove Label.

Private Scandal Party Vol.1 flyer and Pogo 77 x Mangrove Label 2 day gig flyer - a busy weekend!

Nothing was happening on Saturday night so I decided to organise something, I thought a DJ Night would be a relatively easy thing to organise from the other side of the world.

I’d decided on the name Private Scandal Party, combining Private Scandal which I had nicked from Last Child, and Viva La Scandal Party as a nod to CRACK The MARIAN. I thought morphing the two was genius and the most Kyushu punk name I could think of! I didn’t find out until later that the band TIFFANY’S from Iizuka had the same idea and organised a series of gigs with the same name in the 90’s! Smart minds think alike, I guess?

Yusuke (GALZE, ex.THE TITS/RECONSIDERATION) were, and still are good friends, being the same age and both obsessed with Kyushu noisecore punk so I asked him to come along and DJ.

Yusuke, he's playing the Punk The World 10" (Kings World Records), probably playing the track Poor by Curse, a somewhat obscure noisecore band.

The previous summer, at NO CUT’s reunion gig I met Loods (ex.The Swankys) and we got on well, went for a few drinks, and hit it off, he’d DJ’d at the NO CUT gig and I loved that he played nothing but punk rock classics.

The final DJ I asked was Packman. Packman was a proper DJ, he knew what he was doing, unlike me who just played punk records! Packman was the mastermind behind Space Invaders, The Robots, and the controversial Vikini brand.

Packman.

The venue was a bar called Macky x Macky in Shimokitazawa. Macky X Macky was run by, funnily enough, a lady called Macky, a former member of SIGN OF LIFE. My friends and I had been to Macky x Macky a few times as it was a reasonably priced punk rock bar, albeit tiny! It was the perfect place for an event like mine, as it was cheap and more importantly, looked packed when you had about 10 people turn up!

The turnout was great, I don’t know exactly how many turned up but as it was such a small bar, it was packed, and everybody had a great night. Members of NO CUT, Spunky Boys, CONFUSE, DUST NOISE, and Tacos U.K turned up, so I chewed their ears off about punk.

Yossy The Vincent, the bassist of RECONSIDERATION, drove us home and drove like a total maniac through narrow Japanese streets, narrowly avoiding people stumbling home at 2 AM but came to a perfect stop to let a cat cross the road and turned around and said: “We stop for cats”.

I later found out that Yossy drove THE UNSEEN and SHiT-FACED on their Japan tour in 2000. It was on this tour that he earned the nickname ‘James Bond’ due to his erratic driving. I never got in the car with him again after that…

The 2-day gig on the days that followed was great, although I did lose my hotel key at the venue and had to get the hotel to call the venue and see if they could find it! That’s a story for another time.

RECONSIDERATION Live at Antiknock.