Twiggy vs. James Bond

So, I was browsing through my music collection and found myself listening (and afterwards looking for) some Pizzicato Five (or rather ‘Les Pizzicato Five’) songs. You’re probably familiar with that song called Twiggy (30 second sample): you may have seen the absolutely hilarious (and serious apparently) video, or if you’re from a younger generation, you may have heard this song in the remake of ‘Charlie’s Angels’.

I’m not sure how I ran into the Pizzicato 5/P5 (I think early 1998, Alfons bought a P5 sampler with various songs, including the ‘Twiggy’ song and ‘Baby Love Child’). I know the context though: I had just discovered ‘Yo La Tengo’. Their records were released on Matador and it was that very same record company that launched the Pizzicato Five in the US and Europe.

Most of Pizzicato Five’s songs and videos can be found on Daily Motion and YouTube, of course. Daily Motion has a clip of the P5 doing ‘Baby Love Child’ acoustically while claiming that “This is the only song we can play”. Hilarious or brilliant, you pick.

So what is it that I like about the P5? Most songs sound heavily ‘programmed and sequenced’ and remind me a lot of the tunes created for older Japanese games: those cartridges that came with cassette tapes with the game’s music but then performed by hundreds of Yamaha FM synthesizers. Not to mention that mix of Japanese and broken English lyrics (take for example ‘Darlin of Discotheque’). Fun and absurd: Only in Japan.

1 P5 lyrics and translation (excellent translations actually)