S.O.B.’s Don’t Be Swindle

This book chronicles the Kyoto/Kansai 1980s hardcore punk scene through the album Don’t Be Swindle by S.O.B., with a focus on Kyoto’s main venues and the networks they created.

Apart from being the centre of Japan’s cultural heritage, Kyoto is home to one of Japan’s leading avant-garde art and music scenes. The Kyoto University-affiliated venue Seibu Kodo has historically been the focus of this scene, creating an ethos and organisational core which hosted major international acts such as Frank Zappa and Talking Heads while pushing more local experimental and political acts.

The hardcore punks in Kyoto, most of whom were high-school dropouts, borrowed the organisational structure and interacted with Seibu Kodo and its committees to create their own scene. By focusing on the seminal hardcore album Don’t Be Swindle by S.O.B. and using rich archival material, this book explains the connections and entanglements of space and scene in 1980s punk.