Know Your Chicken

Wow!
Kate, our champion Buffster suffered a temporary memory-fritz and actually had to Google for the answer to the way too easy quiz in the previous, worthless filler post … though she compensated with some gloriously bitchy trivia notes of her own.

Time for some answers, then.
Time to put the Buffsters out of their collective misery and for the rest of you to go "Yeah … Whatever … I couldn't give a shit."

In answer to the questions:
"Where, doing what, and wearing what colour lipstick did John and Yoko's sprog, Sean Lennon appear as himself in Buffy The Vampire Slayer?", I refer you to the opening episode of Series 2 … Whaddya mean you don't have it on DVD? Go out and buy it now!

Let's set the scene:
For the unBuffsters among you (Hi, Robyn and Lynn and Katherine), Buffy is set in the fictional Southern California town of Sunnydale, down at the scuzzier end of which is a nightclub and occasional vampire hangout called The Bronze.

Rather than just have some crappy DJ and backing track, those lovely, cuddly Buffy production folk decided to support live music and especially up-coming and cool bands; the upshot being that every scene set in the nightclub has totally groovy acts up on stage.
Even cooler; the acts were never mentioned in the credits; you had to search out posters in the background or dotted around the town/school/college to discover who they were, then look 'em up and try out their stuff.

So … Series two; episode one:
There on stage at The Bronze, doing his regular day-job playing bass for one of the grooviest bands ever to hit this planet was young Sean Lennon.
The band was - of course - the sadly defunct but weird, wacky and wonderful Cibo Matto, fronted by oddball Japanese girls Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda (the latter of whom young Lennon was dating at the time).

They performed the strange, dancey "Spoon" and the languorously sexy and gorgeous "Sugar Water", while Buffy (in full-on slut mode as Kate points out) and Xander practiced foreplay on the dance-floor.
For reasons best known to himself, Sean was wearing icky blue lipstick (see the screengrabs below for the full awfulness).

If you don't already have all their stuff, you should check out Cibo Matto.
They're what happens when Japanese girlie-pop weirdness crashes into the New York Art Rock crowd and starts dancing.
If I mention that such awesome luminaries as guitarist Marc Ribot and Medeski and Martin from MMW acted as their sidemen, our musicians - or Vic at least - will start drooling.

The music on Buffy (like the scripts and the acting) was frankly, pretty fucking astonishing for a TV show.
With the exception of Oz the werewolf's band "Dingoes Ate My Baby", every act on the show was for real.
Even the Dingoes were pretty good (they played real songs by LA band Four Star Mary, who also played the Bronze as themselves).
Veruca's band were in reality trip-hop duo T.H.C. posing as Sunnydale locals.

Occasionally, a fairly major mainstream artist would play at The Bronze, such as Aimee Mann or Michelle Branch (Sarah Mc.Lachlan provided the music for the Buffy/Angel luurve thang), but mostly it was just great and groovy indie bands, the likes of Sprung Monkey, Dashboard Prophets, Curve, Darling Violetta and of course, the über-groovy Cibo Matto themselves.

Outside of The Bronze there was music in other parts of town; the gloriously monickered punky songstress Bif Naked played a few songs with her band at a U.C.Sunnydale frat party.

And of course - as Kate and I both know and love - spiffy English librarian and "watcher" Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head; the Gold Blend coffee man of our youth and Prime Minister of Little Britain), played and sang an utterly hilarious and cringe-inducing version of The Who's "Behind Blue Eyes" at the downtown coffee bar (Pump), plus - thankfully in the privacy of his own house - a chortlesome cover of Freebird on acoustic guitar and, best of all, a wonderfully camp, Meatloaf-esque, cod-metal "Epiphany", live at The Bronze, backed by Four Star Mary and the show's main orchestral music composer, Christophe Beck.
So many tongues lodged so deeply in so many cheeks.
Watch him and wince.

Other bands that the production staff thought were cool didn't actually get to appear at The Bronze but in snatches of music coming from various places. However, there was always a poster up somewhere or a sticker on someone's locker to inform you of who was making that cool sound; probably the best being Boulder's bluegrass/zydeco funsters "Leftover Salmon", whose posters adorn Sunnydale in series four.

Weirldy, the orchestral music for series 5 and 6 was provided by someone calling himself Thomas Wanker.
Ahem …

Oh, and Nerf Herder played the glorious Buffy theme tune (covered brilliantly by Kim Deal's post-Pixies, girlie thrashfest "The Breeders" - available on the CD "Radio Springfield").

And I've not even started on Christophe Beck's incidental music or indeed the fabulous, all singing, all dancing "musical" episode "Once More, With Feeling" (which - on my DVD's special features, has a "Karaoke" version, which puts up subtitles of the lyrics so you can have a singalong party)! Come on over, Kate!
Or - come to that - Buffy's "yummy sushi pyjamas" … not a musical item but a scene that will forever make me twitch in all the right places.

Get a life?
Who needs it?
I have Buffy.

Quiz answers: On stage at The Bronze …

… playing bass with Cibo Matto …

… and wearing icky blue lipstick.

Giles plays The Who's "Behind Blue Eyes" at Coffee Pump

Anya, Willow, Xander and Tara watch in horror.

So there you have it. Yet more boring Buff-Stuff.

Oh, and the post title "Know Your Chicken" is a Cibo Matto song …
Most of their songs are about food or sex - usually both.

Which is as it should be.

(the poster for Oz's band that Willow had up on her wall)