Punk was a four letter word in the 70's and 80's. Ageing rock stars, record companies, the government, and, most importantly, your mum and dad, all of them hated punk. It was violent, subversive, loud and just downright dangerous. As the 90s found every indie band in the world trying to claim punk credentials for their prog-rock noodling the term became increasingly meaningless. The vile Sex Pistols reunion of 1996 was a kick in the teeth to all those who still carried the flame of hope. Finally the dominance of west coast MTV-punk, skate-punk, melo-core and whatever else you want to call it, with all its fat gurning bass players, big shorts, tit jokes, cleaner-than-thou harmonies and horrible horrible major chord progressions, made "punk" a dirty word for different, worse, reasons.

Tonight is a punk night and Banana Slider are a punk band. You go to any gig in any veal-crate-with-a-bar venue in Tokyo and there is at least one band who sounds like this. They rock hard and fast, they punch the air un-ironically, the audience gets into it and they have a special 'bye bye' song to close their set but they're still crap.

Lesser Panda come out of the traps with a pretty similar sound but much better hair, clothes and moves. They thrash around the stage, all scissor kicks and wild, staring eyes and with special credit to their Alan Cumming look-alike guitarist for actually miming along with his own absurd guitar solos. They stretch every song to breaking point, there's a guitar/harmonica duel somewhere in there and the bass player spends a whole song down in the audience playing to a group of three terrified girls. More rock and roll spirit in one bryl-creamed hair of their heads than Banana Slider will ever have in their whole bodies. No tunes but then that might have been asking too much.

So, the reason we're here. In what will probably be their last ever gig in Tokyo (and after we've only just figured out how to read the kanji of their name) Keihan Girl are here to say farewell. They're too punk to actually call themselves punk which is, of course, a totally punk thing to do, especially since Keihan Girl aren't a punk band. They're a pop band. A pop band like The Ramones and like Girls At Our Best and like The Rezillos and like Kenickie. They explode into life in a shower of glitter, glamour, buzzsaw guitars and ragged yet sugar-sweet harmonies, they grin, sway and rock out with more than a hint of the Yamano sisters but they remember the hooks, choruses and dynamics that most bands tonight have forgotten. Maririn is the older and more garrulous of the pair, the smile never leaving her face even as she sets about the Herculean task of organising an audience participation corner with a somewhat embarrassed audience (maybe it's just one of those Osaka/Tokyo things). Yukarin, by comparison, does that demure Kyoto thing without compromising on the smiles, the shouting or the wisecracks. They say they want to go back to being normal girls which is of course their right but let me just be selfish for a moment and say their loss is a terrible, terrible shame.

The Turtle Heads come onstage in baggy t-shirts and truckers' caps and I make ready to leave. I don't want to waste my own words on them so as the NME once said of a less deserving band: "They're very good at what they do. But then so was Hitler." -Ian Martin, Mar.19.04