Female duo Frank Chickens (Kazuko Hohki and Kazumi Taguchi) originally met in 1978 at an organisation called The American-Japanese Toy Theatre where classic plays were performed using toy robots and suchlike. It was an artistic schooling that would foreshadow their musical career and ensured everything they did had an element of the theatrical. As is so often the case, it is a band’s early career that finds them at their most creative and experimental, and that’s precisely where Ninja Legends 1983-1989 steps in. Compiling tracks from their first three albums, along with a collection of radio sessions, this is anthology that crackles and fizzes with creativity and never ceases to amaze.

In an age when there was only a few domestic television channels and radio stations, being featured on any platform would garner an artist an exorbitant amount of exposure and when Frank Chickens were included on a BBC radio programme exploring the aforementioned Toy Theatre an odyssey was launched, and one that continues to this very day. They were a duo who understood the importance of opposites; born in Japan, but residing in London; respectful of their native traditions, but with a healthy obsession of pop culture and simultaneously studious and silly. It’s a tension of opposites that makes Frank Chickens a multifaceted affair and it’s a foil that was writ large over their 1984 debut album We Are Frank Chickens. Surreal in the way that children’s stories often are, cuts such as ‘Green Banana’ are also brought into tight focus; they’re vivid soundscapes, musical noirs that are inhabited by three-dimensional characters whom you feel you can reach out and touch. There’s so much going on in just one song that, just like Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, one lifetime is not really enough to grapple with all its ideas, and while time does iron out a lot of creases, We Are Frank Chickens still sounds revolutionary and, most importantly, listenable.

Released three years later, Get Chickenized found the duo further honing their craft; the musical eclecticism that characterised their last album has been refined and while certainly not generic, it operates within more organised boundaries. The hip hop beats and ska inflections that dazzled the listener on their debut have been dropped in favour of a more direct new wave approach. Some might bemoan this as lack of invention, but it has the benefit of bringing the lyrics to the fore and they’re just as demanding as the music found on We Are Frank Chickens, if not more so. In fact, the skeletal nature of songs such as ‘Sacred Marriage’ and ‘Japanese Girl’ makes their message of gender inequality and discrepancies in power all the more potent. However, there’s still plenty of variety on offer from the neo-classical ‘Yellow Toast’ to the heavy metal ‘One Million Hamburgers’ via the punky ‘Monster’. It would have been very easy for the band to rehash their first album, but Get Chickenized shows real evolution, which is exactly how it should be.

Only a year elapsed between 1987’s Get Chickenized and its follow-up Club Monkey (and in between we got an expanded reissue of their debut album (the version largely included on Disc One), yet it sounds as if Club Monkey had been put in a time capsule and sent deep into the future. Less angular and abrasive, but no less experimental, it evidences a band who are now in complete control of their art. It’s an album that’s stitched together by its own eclecticism with the funky ‘Jackie Chan’, the gospel (infused with Black Sabbath’s ‘Changes’!) ‘Shaken By God’s Hand’ and the shouldn’t-work-but-it-does mash up of country and western and traditional Japanese music found on ‘Hey Dead’. In staying true to the band’s original ethos, the only thing you can expect when approaching Club Monkey is the unexpected.

The BBC have been guilty of many crimes, and none more heinous as their carelessness with archive material. Their habit of “wiping” tapes found them destroying priceless historical artefacts; everything from classic Doctor Who episodes to performances by Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles. For some reason the radio archives were spared such purging and as such the final disc has a wealth of radio sessions from which to cull its tracklist. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Frank Chickens found a champion in DJ John Peel and he invited the band to record a session even before their first album dropped and from 1983 we get an early version of ‘We Are Ninja’. Thanks to the high specification recording facilities at The Beeb’s Maida Vale studios, the 21 tracks presented here are like good quality demos. In many cases, they are work-in-progress and vary markedly from the versions that’d appear on later albums. Spanning a period of six years, and running chronologically, this disc perfectly illustrates what restless spirits Frank Chickens were, in constant search for new musical territory, there’s was an endless, but infinitely enjoyable, quest.

Frank Chickens still perform to this day and continue to entrance and startle crowds in equal measure. But if you want to know where the Legend began, it is right here…

• Ninja Legends 1983-1989 is released via Cherry Red Records on 18th October 2024.

Track List:

Disc One: We Are Frank Chickens (1984)

1. Cheeba Cheeba Chimpira
2. Mothra
3. Green Banana
4. Madam Fatal
5. We Are Ninja (Not Geisha)
6. Yellow Detective
7. Shellfish Bamboo
8. Pikadon
9. We Are Frank Chickens
10. Sake Ballad

Non Album Tracks:

11. We Are Ninja (Re-cut 12” Version)
12. Fujiyama Mama
13. Ninja Dub
14. Blue Canary
15. China Night
16. Japanese Rhumba
17. Ari Lang

Disc Two: Get Chickenized (1987)

1. We Say You Say
2. Sacred Marriage
3. Street Angels, Tokyo
4. Two Little Ladies
5. Solid Life
6. Japanese Girl
7. Island Inside Island
8. Young Summer
9. Chicken Ondo
10. Yellow Toast
11. One Million Hamburgers
12. Monster
13. The Dark
14. House Of Ninja

Non Album Tracks:

15. Yellow Toast (Burnt Mix, 12”)
16. One Million Hamburgers (Mac Mix, 12”)

Disc Three: Club Monkey (1988)

1. Club Monkey
2. Waiting For A Dog
3. Burn That Body
4. Revolution
5. Night Drain
6. Feed Me
7. Jackie Chan
8. Shaken By God’s Hand
9. M.Y.T.H.
10. Hey Dead
11. Club Monkey Reprise
12. Do The Karaoke

Disc Four: BBC Radio Sessions (1983-1989)

1. We Are Ninja *
2. Fujiyama Mama **
3. Shellfish Bamboo **
4. Blue Canary ***
5. Burnt Toast ***
6. Black Ship ****
7. We Are Frank Chickens ****
8. Green Banana *****
9. Pikadon *****
10. We Say You Say *****
11. China Night ******
12. Ari Lang ******
13. Japanese Rhumba ******
14. Sake Ballad ******
15. Yellow Detective *******
16. Madam Fatal *******
17. Japanese Girl ********
18. Sacred Marriage ********
19. Chicken Ondo ********
20. Jackie Chan *********
21. Do The Karaoke *********

* John Peel Session 15/05/1983

**John Peel Session 28/09/1983

***John Peel Session 14/03/1984

**** Richard Skinner Session 26/07/1984

***** Richard Skinner Session 14/11/1984

****** John Peel Session 05/03/1985

******* Janice Long Session 31/07/1985

******** John Peel Session 05/08/1986

********* John Peel Session 10/07/1989