The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

You don’t know how lucky you are that we’ve scored an interview with the Boredoms. No really, you don’t, because although they’re one of the most exciting bands anywhere in the world, they’ve conducted most of their career in Japan. And they don’t seem to have heard of the internet. Christ, they’re so keen on remaining elusive, they wouldn’t even let us take a photo of them for this piece. Or rather we could, but not of their faces.

To fill you in, they were formed 21 years ago in Osaka by Yamataka Eye, a man who’d made his name in a noise act called Hanatarashi (‘The Snot Nosed’). That group didn’t so much play tunes as create “a visual experience of war”. Gigs saw Eye hotwire nearby diggers and drive them round venues, or saw up dead cats on stage then lob around their entrails.

I know what you’re thinking - “only in Japan” - but a while later Eye somehow found some proper musicians willing to work with him and formed the Boredoms. The initial idea behind the group was to live up to their name: make the most tedious music imaginable and spend more time tuning-up than playing at gigs. But following the addition of Yoshimi P-We on drums and trumpet, they went on to make some of the heaviest, most fucked-up and honest-to-god funny albums ever recorded, all with names like Onanie Bomb Meets the Sex Pistols and Chocolate Synthesiser.

In the early nineties, they somehow got major label deals in Japan and the US and were moving along swimmingly until the band decided to totally reinvent themselves. Out went the hardcore-psychedelia-noise-dub songs, bye-byes were said to the guitar and bass players, and in came a couple of extra drummers and a focus on developing the most relentless music they could manage.

Add to this rumours of sun worship, family histories involving the religious movement Oomoto (a Shinto sect suppressed by the Japanese government), an inexplicable name change to V∞redoms, the departure of 11 members (few of whom have had the chance to say why they quit), and you have quite some story.

This is why I’m sitting in the cold of a London town hall, excited to be asking Yoshimi, a Boredom since 1988 and the band’s first female member, about it. The soon-to-be 40-year-old mother of one shuffles into the room hidden beneath an oversize jacket, sits down with her manager and couldn’t be nicer - all wide smiles revealing her gap-teeth and cracking jokes with the translator. It’s just a shame we have to stumble into business.

“What’s driving Boredoms music at the moment?” I ask.

“Is it okay for me to answer?” replies Yoshimi. “I mean, is this not Eye’s job?”

I look at the manager, confused. Last I heard Eye was unavailable - ill downstairs with his head in a toilet.

“Is this an interview with the Boredoms or about Yoshimi?” the manager asks.

“Those questions you have to ask Eye.”

“Can’t Yoshimi answer for him?”

“I can’t say what Eye’s thinking right now,” Yoshimi says, “but if you want my opinions on what I think he’d say, that’s fine.”

That’s good enough for me, but just to make sure I’m not completely misunderstanding things, I ask, “So you don’t think you have any say in the band?”

“No, not completely no control, but generally we’re just making a more concrete vision of what Eye wants played.”

“And what is his vision at the moment?”

Yoshimi sighs. “It’s very difficult to understand Eye completely if you’re not Eye himself.”

Jesus, I wasn’t expecting this. Yoshimi hardly comes across as the silent partner in the Boredoms. She’s Eye’s longest standing partner and the new drum-led direction seems markedly her doing - finally taming the band’s chaotic energies into something disciplined and positive, if just as powerful.

Then there’s the fact she plays in other great bands: fronting OOIOO, a J-pop group almost as odd as the Boredoms, and drumming in riot grrrl act Free Kitten alongside Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and some bloke from Pavement. Someone with that much creativity could hardly keep schtum in Boredoms… But if she’s not going to budge, we’re just going to have to restart the interview at the one place everyone likes talking about: their childhood. And with one mention of that, Yoshimi opens up.

Yoshimi, it turns out, grew up in Okayama in west Japan, the daughter of a piano teacher and salaryman. She winces about her old music lessons. “At the age of three or four, my mum said, ‘If you really want to learn piano you have to do theory’ - when someone plays a song and you have to write down the notes. It was completely boring, absolutely no fun at all.”

Come 18, she had the shock of going from that strict environment to an arts school in Osaka. There she met Eye, started going to gigs with him and he asked her to try out drums. What was that like? “Pretty simple,” she laughs. “Hit something and it makes a noise. But it was fun - it really felt good feeling the vibrations coming back through me after I’d hit something. Being able to create that feeling became really interesting for me. It’s like when a baby plays an instrument - just makes noise and has fun being loud. I still find playing like that great.”

It’s the fullest answer she’s given all interview and, surprise surprise, it’s also a nugget of an insight into why she plays and what motivates the Boredoms. Fortunately, from there it doesn’t take much for her to talk about the group. I ask about their recent change in direction: “Now, rather than loud, aggressive, punk music, I prefer spiritual music,” she says. “The soulful feeling you get from that is much closer to what I enjoy and feel a link to.”

She goes on, talking about where she currently gets inspiration - “waves crashing on the beach and hearing things in it like the beat of Morse code” - and how that ties in with their working methods. “We don’t sit there thinking, ‘What can we do now?’ It more just comes to us - Pop! Like the 77 Boadrum event [the band played with a spiral of 77 drummers in New York this summer]. The idea came from a Japanese folk tale, but we really just wanted to see what’d happen if 77 people banged drums at once and the waves of sound travelled round them.”

She’s even happy to answer questions about whether the band are sun worshippers, and if their drum attacks are an attempt to channel its energies. “I do go to solar eclipses,” she says. “But it’s not really a religious thing. It doesn’t have any organised religious meaning to it and I’m not relying on it or gaining support from it. I just get a very natural, very primitive sense of enjoyment when I see these huge natural phenomena and can react to them.”

Unfortunately, Yoshimi’s manager seems to have sensed Yoshimi’s starting to give the type of quotes that aren’t supposed to be in print (good ones) and tells us to wrap it up. One final question, I beg. Just to confirm, Eye isn’t really the dictator behind the group, is he? Yoshimi puts a quizzical finger to her lips. “Maybe I am the dictator,” she says with a wicked smile.