Shonen Knife with The Jaded at Monkey’s Music Club - 1 May 2025

OK, y’all, this is definitely a whole new world for Dispatches From Hamburg. Up to now in this series I’ve covered some incredible performers, and I have to admit that I’ve taken a small amount of pride in the fact that none of the artists I’ve covered so far has a wikipedia page. Well, all that’s out the window now, because on Thursday night I saw a band that doesn’t just have a wikipedia page about them, but also a discography page and one about each of their 24 albums! This is a group that’s not just established, but legendary, but to be honest, this was also the friendliest, most intimate, and least pretentious show that I’ve attended so far in my capacity as a reporter. 

For those of you who are a bit out of the know, Shonen Knife are a band that formed in Osaka, Japan way back in 1981, when a young woman named Naoko Yamano, who had grown up on a steady diet of Motown and The Beatles, heard the music of The Ramones and asked herself why she was spending her time working in an office when she could be doing what they did. She recruited her younger sister Atsuko, who played drums, and a mutual friend named Michie Nakatani, switching from bass to electric guitar so that Michie, who had no previous musical experience, could have a simpler instrument to learn. Together the trio hit the ground running, playing energetic pop punk songs with a healthy dose of 60s pop and ska influence and themes ranging from Euro-centric beauty standards to hangovers to cute animals and cleaning products. Their first self-released cassette came out in 1982, and they released their first full-length album, Burning Farm, the next year. 

It’s not quite clear how their songs first started to make their way across the ocean, but their combination of Pomo eclecticism, raw energy, and positive vibes gave them a strong and immediate appeal in the world of US independent music, particularly within the noise and Riot Grrrl scenes. In 1985, Calvin Johnson of the band Beat Happening found a copy of Burning Farm in a Tokyo record shop while he was on college independent study project to learn about the Japanese underground music scene. He contacted the band to organize a very limited release, on cassette, on his label, K Records, and things quickly snowballed from there. A 1989 tribute album featuring L7, Babes in Toyland, White Flag, Sonic Youth, and many others serves to show how much attention they had attracted by that time, but their biggest booster, whose band’s first album would be released the same year, was conspicuously absent.

Kurt Cobain, a friend of Johnson’s, was among the first Americans to get clued into Shonen Knife in the mid 80s, and by the fall of 1991 he had become an enormous fan. He included Burning Farm, which he told Melody Maker was so good that it made him cry, on his famous “Top 50” list, and shortly after the release of Nevermind, when he had some weight to throw around, he did everything he could to secure them as an opening act. Naoko has said that when she first got the call she thought that Nirvana, who she had never heard of, “looked wild, and I was terrified, so I didn't want to tour with them at first,”  but she was soon won over by their kindness and, even more so, by the way they committed on stage night after night. For his part, Kurt described the experience of seeing them perform for the first time in the same interview with Melody Maker, saying “they were so cool. I turned into a nine-year-old girl at a Beatles concert. I was crying and jumping up and down and tearing my hair out – it was amazing. I’ve never been so thrilled in my whole life.”

This past Thursday they played at Monkey’s Music Club, a longstanding venue in an out of the way corner of Altona. Despite being a bit of a hassle for me to get to, this is one of my favorite places to see a show in Hamburg. It’s the perfect size, with proportions designed to fit a lot of people while letting everyone be close to the action, and, at least in my opinion, everything seems to sound great there. If you have a chance to support them, I recommend it, especially because it seems like they must be having a lot of trouble with the gentrification crowd that’s been beiging up the west part of town for the past few decades. I don’t know what kind of person moves into a new luxury apartment building right next to a pre-existing music venue and then complains about the noise, but the way the door guy hustled to tell a couple to keep their not at all loud conversation down definitely gave me the impression that they’ve had the cops called on them a few times. Oh, and one more tip: don’t be dismayed by the lackluster beer selection at the main bar. There’s a little smokers’ room in the back, and that’s where they keep the good stuff. 

The show was opened by The Jaded, a local group with members from Germany, the UK and the US. Full disclosure, everyone in this band is a friend or acquaintance of mine, so I won’t say too much about them, except that they’re a really fun act with a classic punk vibe that you should definitely go see when you have the chance. Vocalist Rich Parsons has amazing frontman energy and presence, and the rest of the line-up, which has seen some reshuffling lately, seemed to have a new assurance and percussive power in their playing since the last time I saw them, although that may have had something to do with the acoustic. During their set they featured several new songs, and it was interesting to hear what seems like an increasingly diverse array of influences on their songwriting, including some new pop punk accents and maybe even a touch of classic rock. This may have something to do with the recent addition of Ricky Barkosky on Drums and Joe Holloway on Guitar, both former members of the Hamburg expat blues-rock band, Tijuana. 

When Shonen Knife took to the stage in their trademark Mondrian minidresses — reminiscent of the ones created by Yves Saint Laurent in 1965 but designed by bassist Atsuko Yamano, who has been curating the band’s signature look since the early days — holding up banners featuring their robot avatars and flashing metal horns at the audience, it was immediately apparent that we were in for a unique experience. They came ready for action and put their full energy into what was an impressively long set of about 17 songs, plus a three-song encore. They played their instruments with clear technical faculty but retained a raw edge to their sound, which is important when playing songs with titles like “I am a Cat” or “Sweet Candy Power,” which were two of the best of the night. Naoko Yamano in particular is a stand-out guitarist with a style perfectly suited to her mission, and she consistently added special touches and effects to her parts that made the whole show more interesting to listen to, without ever seeming overly virtuosic.

Never having seen them before, my main expectation was music in the style of The Ramones, but with more lyrics about candy and food. It was The Ramones who originally inspired Naoko Yamano to form the band, and it’s clear that they still have a special status as heroes to her and the rest of the band, who recorded a full tribute album, Osaka Ramones, in 2015. In a 2023 interview, Naoko gushed about having opened for them when they toured in Japan and bragged that Joey Ramone, who she says she loved for his sweet voice, told her that Shonen Knife’s versions of Ramone’s songs are better than the originals. I’m not sure I would go quite that far, but they could certainly be the best versions that it’s still possible to see performed live on stage in 2025.

They opened the show with what I now realize was “Buttercup (I’m a super girl),” the song they created for the Powerpuff Girls cartoon show, and the Ramones feeling was so striking that I was wracking my brain to figure out what song they were covering. They kept this level of energy and playfulness up throughout the show, all the way through their epic cover of “Rock ’n’ Roll High School” in the encore, but what I hadn’t anticipated was the diversity of other influences that they managed to layer onto that Ramones base.

“Twist Barbie” a song from their first album that was covered by Nirvana, struck me as an homage to Blondie — or maybe to some of the same earlier groups that Blondie were making homages to — but with a rawness that Blondie seems to have largely polished out by the time they recorded their first album, while “Mujinto Rock,” a song from their most recent album, Our Best Place, had a little lilt to the vocal and touches in the guitar part that immediately made me think of the Byrds. 

There were also several songs that put the groups interest in heavy metal and 1970s hard rock on display. “Bad Luck Song,” a highlight from their 2014 album Overdrive that featured choreographed windmill guitar chords, showed clear traces of Kiss and Cheap Trick. “Wasabi,” from their followup, Adventure, had a darker, more Black Sabbath kind of appeal, and “Muddy Bubbles Hell,” from 2008’s Super Group, sounded like The Cranberries’ “Zombie” being performed by Deep Purple. Possibly the most exciting, or at least the most surprising “rock oriented” song of the night was “Green Tea,” which featured a quick bluesy southern-rock shuffle that immediately made me think of ZZ Top. Another strong contender would be “Antonio Baka Guy,” a song from their 1986 breakthrough album Pretty Little Baka Guy that channeled what Black Flag was doing around the same time with its combination of deep metal sludge and hardcore-ish freneticism. 

One thing that I was delighted by throughout the show was how much they had done to improve the arrangements of songs since they were originally recorded, especially in the vocal parts. So many of the songs they played, particularly the older ones, had new vocal harmonies and interactions that made them more exciting, which may be a benefit of Atsuko’s move from Drums to Bass in the late 90s. In particular, two songs near the close of their set, “Sweet Candy Power” and “Riding On The Rocket” featured a kind of quick-time vocal back and forth between the two sisters that was the closest thing to hocketing, a medieval rhythmic effect in which a single melody is shared between multiple singers, that I’ve ever heard in popular music. 

There was just one part of the show, “Afternoon Tea,” a song from Our Best Place with considerably younger drummer Risa Kawano on lead vocal, that struck me as a bit cutesy. That may seem like a strange criticism to throw at a group whose whole appeal is so bagged up with the concept of cuteness, but there’s a difference between cute and cutesy. The reason I mention it at all is to say that I actually didn’t feel that way at any other point in the show, and that was a big surprise. There’s nothing that feels put-on about the friendliness and positivity, or for that matter, the cuteness, of Shonen Knife’s performance. The joy that they apparently derive from making music together and entertaining an audience, even after doing it for over 40 years, is palpable and extremely contagious. I had a smile on my face from the moment they walked on the stage, and it stayed with me until long after the show had ended. They have a bunch more dates to play all over Europe and the UK on their current tour — including one at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, which would be nuts — and they’ll be coming to the US in the Fall, assuming there still is a US in the Fall. If you can make it out to see them, I can’t recommend it highly enough. As Kurt Cobain said, “They play pop music – pop, pop, pop music,” and sometimes, maybe particularly right now, that’s just what you need.

Peter Lawson - Hamburg - 3 May, 2025