Anyone who knows anything about garage bands in Tokyo knows that they only ever play gigs with other garage bands and they only ever perform in front of garage fans. The Bergamots have come all the way from Nagano in a typhoon to play their set of fashionably-attired cover versions to this particular audience of garage fans. They pay particular attention to The Creation and The Pretty Things, which is pretty hard to fault in terms of pure riff-spanking rock and roll fun, but the feeling that they're just a little bit too nice about it remains as an uncomfortable backdrop to the set.

French Blue's rock the house with a lot of good humour but precious little variation. They obviously love what they're doing but they focus too narrowly on a particular kind of 60s R&B (think "I Got My Mojo Working") and add very little in the way of spice and garnish to the meat and potatoes of their rock and roll.

Did someone say spice? Well That's A No No!, apart from being an identically dressed foursome of stupendously pretty girls, provide lashings of spice for the oestrogen-starved audience. They've toughened up their sound a lot since we first saw them last year, with Saori's guitar having become a far more potent weapon, and Yoshi-kei sharing vocal duties to a greater extent. Their set contains a higher than average quotient of original material, all of which strives, largely successfully, for a kind of chirpy, irrepressible, early 60s pop buzz, and which is enlivened by some furious guitar that kicks them into a late lead over such breezy pop peers as The Pebbles.

Nevertheless, the really big guitar guns are being wielded with wild abandon by The Outs. Like That's A No No! they cover "Cool Jerk", and like That's A No No! they have four members, but that's where the similarities end. The Outs are a big, hairy, black-clothed rock monster, sporting matching Iron Cross medallions and the loudest, dirtiest, hardest, fuzziest garage riffs this side of The Monks. Again, there is a wealth of original material here (although perhaps "original" might be stretching the word just a touch) and it sits alongside covers like The Sparkles/Swamp Rats' "No Friend Of Mine" with nary a crack of daylight between. It's a relentless attack that leaves the audience sweat-drenched and bewildered.

The Soul Fortune Society are really too big to fit on the stage, coming across somewhere between The Polyphonic Spree and Dexy's Midnight Runners, with their trumpets and such like. It's a terrific blast of feelgood freshness for the first couple of minutes, but it all gets a bit samey after that, with their insistence on having all the instruments playing all the time becoming quickly tiresome. The high points are the rare moments where the guitarist is allowed to take center stage by himself, creating a mood of restraint that delivers the sense of soul that most of the set only hints at. - Ian Martin, Oct.20.04.