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The first song Mieko wrote was called Little Boy. She wrote it in school as a biology lesson was happening. Mieko felt more inspired during biology. It must have had something to do with the awareness of viscera. The song Little Boy was simply the words ‘Little boy, little crying boy’ repeated many times. There was no biology on the page, just the words of Little Boy and hundreds of Christmas trees she’d drawn.
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Mieko started playing in bands when she was sixteen. Everybody who listened to and played music in the town was in love with her. Everybody who had a band in the town wanted her to be their singer. They would have fired their current singer if Mieko had been willing to sign up with them.
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Mieko decided she was going to do music and nothing else when she heard an album called Only Everything by an artist named Juliana Hatfield. Something burned within her when she heard it. She was overwhelmed by it. When the cassette tape snapped, she cried and cried right up until the day a compact disc player found its way into her home along with a compact disc version of Only Everything.
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Nobuko brought Mieko up in a small border town. It was a melancholy town that had long been tarnished with the Republican stick. Nobuko tried to comfort her old college friends in Dublin by playing down the Republican element of the region, but it did not improve matters that the man she would soon marry was once prominent in the movement. His name was Fallon O’Neill. He was an amiable man, no longer involved with the old underworld, now peacefully associated with the local arts scene. He was a well-known painter and was regarded also as a gifted filmmaker. He once made a short documentary film about a community of travelling folk living in the town and it was shown on national television. Fallon loved Mieko and her mother very much.
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Nobuko had not planned to remarry after her divorce from Kei Aikama, Mieko’s father. She was not interested in men. They were all damn idiots, she would have told you. But Fallon filled her with love and hope and her devotion to him was strong, and she didn’t think he was that much of a damn idiot.
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Mieko came to love her blackened little border hometown. Its unfavourable reputation charged her up with underdog pride and she fought the town’s side even when there was no clear fight to be fought. For years she tended to emphasise this aspect of her life in attempts to substantiate her unusual upbringing. On a trip to Edinburgh as an older teenager, she was approached by a handsome young man who like many others was enamoured with her beauty and taken with her bizarre accent. He was tall and very cute, but Mieko wasn’t interested.
Where are you from? he asked her.
Bandit country, she happily replied.
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Pip had always wanted to form an uncompromising punk rock group. He wanted his band to be like Sonic Youth, only much more than they even were. He happened to be sitting beside Mieko in the biology class when she wrote Little Boy. Pip looked at the page and said, Cool. They both had Sonic Youth written on their schoolbags. Mieko also had Joy Division, Young Marble Giants, Morphine, Pere Ubu, Teenage Fanclub. Pip also had Pavement, Guided By Voices, Throwing Muses, Fugazi, and Wedding Present. Mieko teased him about Wedding Present. She liked them too but she pretended she didn’t just to annoy him.
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Mieko and Pip started to swap albums, and hang around with each other. Mieko made Pip look good. She redefined his sense of fashion. She gave him wardrobe instructions. Before Mieko, it was all blue jeans and tucked in check shirts for Pip. He did not look like a Sonic Youth fan – he looked more like a Meat Loaf fan. She suggested black, and a way of wearing black that did not make him look like a Cure and Cure-only fan. As soon as Pip took to Mieko’s artfully applied black, he never went back. This was how Ozu began. This is how all bands begin. Schoolbags and clothes.
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Pip played the guitar. Jim played the guitar and keyboards. Richard had the bass. Col hit the drums. Mieko had a microphone. They made a racket daily after school. Before they were called Ozu, they were known as the D’s In French, Mieko went by the name of Lady Harata and wore masks on the stage. They were naïve and pretentious at this point, but loud and good.
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The following was written in a magazine about them when they were still D’s In French, but on the brink of success as Ozu. The writer’s name was Sarah Hardy, and the magazine was called Inflammable Material.
This reviewer feels the group are spurred onto greater
heights by the presence of Lady Harata. She is a tornado
of on-stage ideas, wrapped in sensuous red clothing from
head to foot, her identity only hinted at through a pair of
harshly scissored peepholes for her cruel, insisting eyes.
The D’s in French are clearly wonderful songwriters and
possess some truly terrific pulverising tunes including Start
Up and He Owns A House Near Milan Which He Uses
Exclusively For His Pleasure. One track in particular, Real
Live Drummer, features an hallucinatory mid-section that is
so colourful and eventful you will either go nuts or suddenly
be face to face with ALL the answers. Think X-Ray Spex on magic mushrooms.
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It was on a trip to London supporting Dublin band, the Friesians, at a high profile venue bristling with significant industry heads that a noted music journalist who'd once written a book about John Cale saw the newly renamed Ozu. The journalist proceeded to scribble an article of myth-making proportions in their honour. Within a month, they were cover stars. Their first e.p Ozu Warriors from the Magic Mountain had yet to be released. Mieko was fodder for this industry. Impressionable indie rock girls aped her style because they were aware that Mieko appealed to the kinds of boys they wanted to appeal to. Mieko eventually despised indie rock. She started to write songs that were nihilistic and dreadfully morose, but this only made them like her more. Finally she decided there was little point in trying to escape this strain of indie rock culture because she was naturally part of it; maybe if she’d picked up a violin and done a Vanessa Mae, that would have done the trick?
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Following the release of their debut album Bold Uniforms on the successful Darkly Fab label, Ozu embarked on a tour which would generate much additional publicity for the band. Jim revealed that he had fallen in love with Mieko just as Pip felt he was finally comfortable in their relationship to ask her out. Mieko sensed that Pip was feeling this way but she wasn’t certain because he hadn’t acted. She had grown to really like Jim, so she accepted his proclamation of love and they started seeing each other. A relationship with Mieko at this time may not have been a good bet for either of the young musicians. Fame and success had begun to alter Mieko. She had become quite promiscuous of late.
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A fight happened between Pip and Jim when they were in Barcelona. It was a long fight. It started before the gig, was still going on during the gig, and was happening still after the gig. They performed a song that night called Broken Down Carla. Pip had some vocal duties on the song and during the performance, while he was creating the required harmony with Mieko, Jim spat at him provocatively. Pip stopped singing, unloosened his guitar, and made a lunge towards Jim. They wrestled for a little on the stage. Richard tried to break it up. He got Jim in a headlock and tore him away from Pip. Jim was the strongest member of the band. He got out of Richard’s headlock by lifting him up and slamming him down to the floor, which he did with an ease that frightened the Barcelona audience. Pip tried to clothesline Jim, but Jim’s arms were up and he blocked the attack. Jim punched Pip on the face, dazing him for a few seconds, then grabbed him, and was just designing a suplex move when Mieko smashed him with a microphone stand.
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Fallon O’Neill passed away at around this time. He died of lung cancer. He was forty-nine. Nobuko moved back to Dublin to be close to her old college friends, but all her college friends had moved on and forgotten about her. She decided to stay in the city anyway because Mieko had recently moved there and because there were too many memories back in the small border town. Nobuko was not a sentimental woman. She loved Fallon, but she was not going to sit around wallowing in grief. She kept some memories, and binned the rest.
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Mieko was deeply affected by Fallon’s death. It was her first death. Fallon’s dead body was the first dead body she’d ever seen. When she was looking down at his body as he lay in the coffin, she started to think of some of the funny things he used to say to her when she was younger. He’d been a wise and funny man. She laughed out loud over the coffin thinking about him and the people at the wake stared at her. She’s a nut, they were thinking.
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The Due Wallops joined Ozu for the tour which backed the release of Ozu’s second album Last Night’s Samurai Dream. The Due Wallops were fronted by Mieko’s rival, Clover Swerdlow – real name, Michelle Banks. Clover had devised a plan to sleep with each member of Ozu, her principal aim being to weaken and destroy the band, but happy even just to get their asses into bed regardless of that. Clover was a human torpedo of sex.
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Mieko and Pip were an item by the time of Last Night’s Samurai Dream. Jim was dating a model. He was no longer concerned with Mieko and Pip. He just turned up and played guitar. He wasn’t that close to them anymore. He had his own friends and he kept them separate from the band. Mieko and Pip’s relationship was one that had been bubbling underneath every aspect of their lives for years. The relationship itself had been growing bored of waiting for the pair of them to get it together. In the days following their first tryst, they were awarded more romance points than most people are ever awarded in their lifetimes.
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The tour was halfway through. Clover had already had her wild way with Col, Richard, and Jim. She just had Mieko and Pip to determine next. She was blatant in her approach to the matter. She invited them to participate in a threesome in her hotel bedroom. They were drunk, so they said yes. Clover was insane. She was even biting the two of them as if she was some kind of vampire. During the sex, Mieko caught a glint of real excitement in Pip’s eyes. Mieko experienced a moment of jealousy. Right as Clover was about to perform considerable fellatio upon a sweaty Pip, Mieko reached over to the side of the bed and grabbed a lampshade. She thwacked Clover across the head with it, which knocked her unconscious, and with Clover out cold, she continued the task of fellatio.
0 ^ 0
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Munter woke up. It was dark in the room. The blinds were down. He looked at his watch. It was seven in the morning. Nobuko was nowhere to be seen. She must have gone to bed. The music was not playing. The CD player had been unplugged. There was a glass turned upside down on his lap. He could feel a muggy layer of spilt whiskey on his groin. He felt terrible. He’d been lying on the floor for hours and hours. As he struggled to get up from the floor, his hand grazed a small photo album that was tucked underneath the bottle-swathed desk standing over him. He hadn’t noticed it last night. He took it out and opened it. The photographs inside were almost all of Mieko and Nobuko. The first photograph to meet his eyes was one of Mieko wearing blue jeans and a Nirvana T-shirt. She was posing against a small tree in a garden. She was probably about fourteen at the time of the picture. She was very beautiful, and smiling. She did not smile in any of the other photographs Munter looked at. She looked morose in most of them, like she was practising for album covers. There was one photo of Nobuko, Mieko, and a tall man wearing a brown suit standing together with Newgrange in the background. Munter figured it must be Fallon O’Neill. He was smoking a cigar and making a funny expression. He looked like a friendly man, Munter remarked to himself. Nobuko had her arms around a morose Mieko, in a mock-wrestle, and she looked much different, a lot happier.
Munter put the photo album down, got up, and went to the back door to get his shoes. It took him a while to unlock the door. It was a complicated lock, but in the end he got it. The shoes were dry and cold. The sticky-taped shoe did not look as bad as it looked yesterday. But this he found to be a con on the part of the sticky-taped shoe. Its situation was in fact a lot worse. The heel now appeared to be coming loose. He put the shoes on and began to leave. He was hoping Nobuko would get up to say goodbye before he left. He coughed a bit in the hope she would hear and rustled around a little. Then it occurred to him that it was seven in the morning and she was asleep. It was not right trying to wake her up at such an hour. He left.
