Perhaps best known as the group formed by Yamataka Eye before he achieved some degree of notoriety with The Boredoms, Hanatarash developed their own legend, early in the piece, for destructive live performances. The history of Hanatarash is full of borderline-unbelievable stories, the best of which, perhaps, is Eye demolishing part of a venue by driving a bulldozer through the venue’s back wall, and up onto the stage. Other stories have done the rounds – Eye almost sawing his leg off, after strapping a circular saw to his back; Eye throwing panes of glass into the audience; Eye threatening to throw a Molotov cocktail across the venue. As Masato Matsumura once noted, the Hanatarash modus operandi was “turning action into noise”; as such, performance videos of the troupe tend to highlight the action, and while their most notorious shows appear only to be documented with photographs, there are still some great clips available, like this one from La Mama, Tokyo, where the drum section pounds out an unstable mantra while Eye, destructively cheerful, gets busy with a wall of steel barrels. It’s no surprise to discover Eye and collaborator Mitsuru Tabata met as stage hands for Einstürzende Neubauten.