In July 1999 The Boys were invited to undertake a short reunion of tour of Japan. Kid Reid gives his impressions of the experience and provides suitable photographic evidence!


As The Boys take to the stage the fans go wild

It seemed like another age and someone else who used to play bass and sing in The Boys. After all, it was 17 or 18 years ago that we last appeared together in the castle high above Ibiza town. After that show all the road crew decided they liked the place so much they weren’t coming home. So they just stayed with the sound equipment and lived on happily in the sun. But The Boys just won’t die. First Die Totenhosen covered some Boys songs, then there there were various re-releases, followed by a tribute album and now Japan.

Well, it was January when Matt called, July was a long way off, I’d never been to Japan, I might never get the chance again, and anyway, it would be easy. So I said yes, as did everyone else apart from Jack who sat in his chair and said “Drink” like the old priest in Father Ted. So we met up in a rehearsal studio just off the Holloway Road. “Are you the original Boys from the seventies?” said the owner. “No,” we said, “they were crap.” Vom seemed a nice chap. So shy, quiet, retiring and eager to please. During the first run through he was the only one who knew the songs. Christ what a mess. All of us with senile dementia when it came to chords and words, Cas with blown eardrums from whatever they do in those fjords, fights between songs as old niggles sprang back to life, and those bastards on the guitars playing too f*cking loud as usual.

“Sh*t that was loud,” said the studio owner, “you’re just as crap as the original Boys.” This was going to be embarrassing. But second time through it started to happen. “We used to be pretty good at this,” I thought, “quite unique in fact.” On the way home there was a feeling of relief. It was going to be alright. It might even be good. So we arrived in Tokyo after 16 hours. It was hot. “Sushi,” said Matt. “Beer,” said John, so we did and very nice it was too. First day was rest and recuperation. We went to see Vinyl Japan’s shops, out to dinner with Yuki (rhymes with Nookie and just as sweet) and then on to various clubs including the one we were playing in.

Not for the last time I thought how friendly and polite Japanese people were, especially the ones who said they owned the club and would we please stay and drink as much as we liked. Things got hazy then but I remember Vom appearing for the first time with his trousers down and a cigarette hanging out of his dick. This was to become a recurring theme, and that nice, shy, retiring drummer who rehearsed with us was only to appear from then on during daylight hours.


Things start to really rock as the band hit full throttle

And so the first show. It was a great little club, good size stage, excellent sound system and super-competent, female sound engineers. It was packed with an enthusiastic crowd, half of whom couldn’t have been born at the time of that last Ibiza gig, and who knew all the lyrics without being able to understand a word I was saying between songs. But we weren’t great. The intro music went on without warning while Vom was having a crap. We rushed onto the stage (slightly unprepared) which was HOT. First number, “TCP”, and both Matt and John broke strings.
From then on it was a battle between us and their guitar strings, which were either breaking or going out of tune on every song. The volume increased to compensate and we degenerated into a slightly out of tune, wall of noise with no audible vocals. Still, full credit to the others for following me when I decided, totally on purpose of course, to drop a whole verse of “Sick on You” and go straight to the chorus. At the end it went down well but we knew, as we struggled to change out of the most sweat drenched clothes we had ever been in, that we could do better.

Vom the t-shirt salesman
The second show was different. Intro music, straight into “TCP”, then “Rue Morgue” with no break, “Brickfield Nights”, “Sick on You”, and “Weekend” before a broken string. But this time the spare guitars had been tuned at the temperature of the onstage sauna and so were in tune with themselves and the piano. Anyway, we used the break to show them Vom’s arse, which had been daubed in Japanese with the slogan ‘T-shirts Ten Quid’. It helped the merchandise sales no end and got the biggest laugh of the night!
Onwards through the set and we were playing well, which we knew was the case because the reaction from another packed audience was unflagging. All gigs tend to be a blur afterwards but I can remember a few highlights, such as Matt suggesting we change “First Time” immediately before we were due to start it, everybody arguing on stage about whether we should or not, deciding not to, then playing it differently. John (or was it Cas) taking on a Japanese bloke in a saki drinking contest and the poor little fella ending up very much the worse off.
Afterwards deciding the plane left too early to bother going to bed, so it’s off to another place to carry on. Finally, to the airport, ‘Sayonaras’ all round (second Japanese word learnt), and the most impressive recovery from alcoholic collapse ever seen by the fella who lost the saki contest. Will we do it again? Let’s see.


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