cover：Of Montreal、Dressy Bessy、hewy、BIKERIDE、Linus of Hollywood
data：YOKO [NO EFFECT NO.1] (1/2P)
Snug/Coldplay/Tahiti 80/Of Montreal/Chewy/Dressy Bessy/Ant/Bikeride/Linus of Hollywood/Miles/Luminous Orange/Graham Coxon/Midget/Ca-p/Harco/Shortcut Miffy!/Water Gun/Happy Space Gun/Glow/Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci/Petit Vode/…And You Will Know Us by The Trail of Dead/Giant Step/The Crocketts/The Flaming Stars/Polak/Hefner/Chicago Bass/Masahiro Naoe/Idlewild/空気公団/The Chewinggum Weekend/Soul Wax/June6 & The Exit Wounds/cafe-au-lavel
[NO EFFECT NO.1] translation into English
Hi, this is Yoko from the Noodles. I’ll be writing a regular column here starting this issue, and I hope you’ll keep reading it.
For my first article I thought I’d do the appropriate thing for a music magazine and talk about how I first got into music. The first music I ever heard was the Carpenters. My dad always played the Carpenters in his car, and so when I was around four or five I spent a lot of time singing along to the Carpenters in my imitation English. I think that might be the only cool story from my childhood, really! But anyway, I listened to a lot of Western music. I’ve always liked good songs and good lyrics regardless of genre, and on the weekends I’d actually (I can’t even imagine doing this now) get up early in the morning just to listen to the radio straight all the way until evening. And that was AM radio! I didn’t start listening to FM until I was in high school. In middle school I was into 60′s music, and I bought a lot of oldies albums and movie soundtracks. I made a lot of mix tapes for my friends back then, even if they didn’t really ask for them. I always put the songs I liked most at the beginning and the end. Yup, I gave a lot of tapes like that out. Back then I liked this 60′s song called “Sad, Unrequited Love.” There were a lot of song titles that started with “sad” in the 60′s, but that was my favorite out of them. The Carpenters got me into those songs, and a lot of other stuff, when I realized that most of the Carpenters songs I liked were covers. I thought that must seem weird, so I went looking for the originals and ended up listening to other bands, like the Beatles. I learned about a lot of music through the Carpenters. And, at some point, I started making my own music instead of just listening. I was into writing poetry when I got started with the Noodles, and I showed a notebook of those poems to our guitarist, Junko, when I invited her. Just showed her that and said, “Want to start a band?”–scary, huh? Actually, reading those poems now, they do kind of scare me.
Oh, this is kind of random, but when the Noodles had just gotten together, I loved walking around with my guitar. Takashi from Miffy wrote the same thing last issue, too, but really, no matter where I was going, I’d take my guitar with me. Even if I was just going shopping someplace nearby I’d act like I was coming home from practice. Pretty stupid, right?
Just shows I was faking it back then. Now I really hate walking around with my guitar. (I like guitars, though. Mustangs are awesome!) And actually, I’m listening to music less and less. I don’t put CDs on at home or anything. But I still enjoy finding a good new song more than anything else. I used to spend a lot of time looking around for songs I liked, but at some point I decided I wanted to create those songs myself. Now, I want my own songs to make me feel something deep. I want the songs I write to move me more than the ones I just listen to. Actually, I’m guess I’m still listening to all kinds of music, it’s just that my friends who aren’t in bands seem like they know more about all the new bands, and have membership cards at places like Tower Records, and that’s sort of odd.
By the way, Noodles will be releasing a maxi single in August. The recording’ll be over soon, and then all we do is wait for it to go on sale. Somehow, I feel a bigger sense of accomplishment with this album than I did the others. This next maxi is really good, so I hope you’re looking forward to hearing it!
-”Sad, Unrequited Love” is the Japanese title for Helen Shapiro’s “You Don’t Know.”
-Takashi Numakura is the vocalist and guitar player for the band Shortcut Miffy.
