Tsukiko Amano live

A few weeks ago I was very happy to get a ticket for the Tsukiko Amano concert. Tsukiko Amano (Japanese order: Amano Tsukiko) is still considered an underground artist it seems and no one I know seems to know her. Of course the 1000+ people who came to the Akasaka Blitz concert hall know her 😉

Ticket numbers were called out so that only groups of ten could walk in. That meant that I had to wait a little (number 641). Hearing the announcer was getting harder since they gave the other guy who was announcing that drink tickets were available for 500 yen, a megaphone. The audience was quite diverse.

Akasaka Blitz has both a standing and a seat area on two floors combining to a capacity of about 2000 people. The concert started at 19.30, only ten minutes too late (I remember when Erasure let their audience wait for 40 minutes while torturing them with old audiobooks). Tsukiko-san started with Cho (butterfly), one of my favourite songs. Despite playing hard guitar rock she really has the voice to still stand out. Standing in the 8th row I had no problems seeing everything on stage.

And she also talked to her audience, announcing a new album, talking about weather seasons and introducing the members of her three-piece-band. A funny bit was when she did prepare a towel to throw into the audience, first giving it to the drummer so that he could add his sweat and then she repeated it herself, before throwing it. Or when she wanted to introduce the band and the guitarist was still busy at the amp, seemingly surprising him.

“ashimoto daijoubu?” – and everyone jumped in the air at her signal. There were two songs where she expected her fans to sing-along, but I didn’t know these songs. Maybe she noticed this and added an English language song at the end of her concert. But this song was just weird 😉

The concert was approx. two hours long and really great. She writes her songs and also designs her own costumes. The video of Cho can be found here and Ningyou (puppet) here.