Crass is part of Clippers' appeal

After five and a half years as the wackiest live act in Taiwan, the Clippers (夾子電動大樂隊) have finally come out with an album. Titled Spiritual Service Team -- Turn on the Disco Ball, the CD was released island-wide on TCM records Dec. 15.

A few days ago in a Taita (台大) area coffee shop, I met with Hsiao Ying (小應), the guy who started the Clippers five and a half years ago. Over the band's life, he has continually formed and reformed it around him, dropping a drummer here, picking up a couple of dancing girls there. All of those changes have left him as the only surviving original member.

His hair is yellow these days, which seems to be more an emblem of his kitsch and camp stage persona than his daily life personality. One-on-one, he's reserved and introspective -- the kind of guy who sips his coffee and doesn't say anything too outrageous. By his mannerisms, he could easily be taken for the biomedical engineer he once studied to become. In live shows, however, it's a completely different story.

The stage is where Hsiao Ying wears turd-shaped hats, stage dives, makes sexual innuendo to his dancers and rattles off esoteric jokes one after the other. For many fans, the stage is where the Clippers truly exist, with some even considering the group to be as much of a performance art ensemble as a rock band. "Performance is what we're really all about," said Hsiao Ying. "We even conceive a lot of our music in terms of how it will be performed live."

To a large degree, the band's reputation for "performance art" came in its early days, in the two or three years after Hsiao Ying met American guitarist Stan Blewett and founded the group. In one 1996 show at Scum, a Taipei club that went out of business not too long afterwards, the music seemed to be little more than an atmospheric accompaniment to Hsiao Ying's repressive and constipated rants and satirical antics directed against the money-loving drones of contemporary Taiwan.

Hsiao Ying acknowledges his band's has a conceptual art aspect to it, saying that this was already apparent in the group's very first show at a noise music fest in an empty warehouse in Sanchung and eventually got them two gigs in a Tamsui (淡水) art gallery.

But in the end, he also believes that the conceptual aspect is not the main thing, because the Clippers aren't really about being arty. After all, there is another side to the band. It's the cheezy, tacky and Vuadville side. It relates more to Hsiao Ying's variety show-style performances and nakashi -- a type of Japanese organ music based around those annoyingly simple melodies you just can't get out of your head. "One time the Clippers played a show with a real nakashi MC," recalls Nikita Wu, a band supporter and the new album's covergirl, "and that guy was, like, oh my god! This is really great!"

Yet even that anecdote doesn't cover the full extent of the Clippers' low side. Almost in mockery of the intellectual underpinnings the group seems to maintain, the Clippers have also slaved away as a Taiwan version of a wedding and bar mitzvah band. "As a matter of fact," said Hsiao Ying, "we just played our first wedding recently. It was kind of weird. We played the same songs, just toned down."

And instead of bar mitzvahs, which don't happen much in Taiwan, the Clippers play political rallies. In the last election, they played for both KMT and DPP, and in 1998, they played at two events as part of Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) campaign for mayor. Of course, they played these events not out of political interest, but because they were paid to. When I asked Hsiau Ying how those gigs came about, all he could say was, "I don't know. They found us."