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Biography

The Swankys were a Japanese punk band from Kyushua island that started out playing Sex Pistols influenced 77-punk before becoming Japan's first hard core punk band. The Swankys were heavily influenced by the "Bristol" bands Disorder, Chaos UK and Chaotic Dischord. Once the Swankys had started playing the more aggressive hard core punk style repeated violence at shows quickly banned the band from local gig venues forcing the band to change name to Gai for about a year. This helped the band get a...

The Swankys were a Japanese punk band from Kyushua island that started out playing Sex Pistols influenced 77-punk before becoming Japan's first hard core punk band. The Swankys were heavily influenced by the "Bristol" bands Disorder, Chaos UK and Chaotic Dischord.

Once the Swankys had started playing the more aggressive hard core punk style repeated violence at shows quickly banned the band from local gig venues forcing the band to change name to Gai for about a year. This helped the band get a few concerts but the scam quickly folded as the band's fans of course knew all about the name change and venue arrangers quickly wised up to it -but by then the band's popularity proved to be worthwhile as band's reputation spread. In the end the band changed back to the original name, and ultimately to the original Sex Pistols inspired punk rock style.

Under the name Gai a demo and a flexi were recorded, today seen as genre forming 'noise punk' classics. After a year or so band changed back to the original name The Swankys and went on to record a LP called Very Best of Hero.

Towards the end of the mid-1980s the band changed musical style to something more akin to the style they started out playing, namely catchy Sex Pistols punk. The second LP entitled Never Can Eat Swank Dinner has Swankys delivering many older songs in a very original hybrid of well-produced almost pop production bubblegum punk songs mixed with significant elements of the bands' hard core noise punk trademark vocals.

The singer of Swankys, "Watch", went on to play in many post-Swankys projects including Space Invaders (a sort of post-punk hip hop band), Mouse (oi-punk with drum machine) and others. Guitarist of Swankys started Speakers which played Johnny Thunders inspired punk rock. Bass player of Gai/Swankys also formed and sang in Sieg Heil.

Watch also started a punk label called Kings World Records (KWR) starting out releasing punk cassettes and compilations and going on to release records of many other local punk and hard core bands. The label is now owned by Edison's recordshop which is still going (2009) and regularly reissues Swankys records. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.