Timestamp Woes

Have you ever spent four months of your life trying to unravel the origin of a photo? I have.

As someone who needs to know everything about whatever they're interested in, this photo took me on a whole journey of typos, print errors, and niche vkei bands that have since been forgotten to time or barely lasted two weeks.

In a late night deep dive, I found this photo on Twitter. At first, I didn't really think much of it - after all, that's obviously Gaz in the background. That should've been enough for me. But then I got to wondering after seeing the original tweet, "just who ARE those other two guys in the photo? They're not Kenichi or Tetsu." The original tweet's caption was no help, either.

“Gaz is supposed to be in Kneuklid, but this isn’t Kneuklid, I wonder who the other members are…?? September 8th, 1993”

You know you're cooked when even the person who was there and took the photo doesn't know who these guys are. Thus, my four months long search for answers that literally nobody asked for began.

My initial guess was that maybe it was some of the early members of Baiser. Gaz was their support drummer starting on December 30th, 1992 after Ken left and did so until October of 1993, when Akihiro joined. After all, the photo's timestamp would match up with the time period that Gaz was in Baiser. I quickly reached the conclusion that none of the mystery men in these photos were members of Baiser due to two things: there was no live on September 8th, 1993, but there was one on September 9th, 1993 at Yokohama 7th AVENUE, and the vocalist shown in the photo below looks nothing like Yukari.

The mystery vocalist. It's obviously not Yukino. He also doesn't look like Yukari of Baiser.
Group shot of BAISER. Yukari is in the center.

So, I ruled out BAISER. For a while, I was kind of at a dead end here until I decided to get a little bit more creative with my search, instead of, you know, letting it go and moving on with my life.

After a few weeks, it hit me: why not just sort by bands that had lives in September of 1993?

However, this also posed some new problems for me. I didn't know which livehouse this photo was taken at, and at the time, I couldn't find anything stating that Kneuklid Romance had a live on September 8th, 1993 except for the original tweet. I still sorted through all of the bands that did have lives during this timeframe, however, just to be sure.

So, now I'm stuck with another problem: trying to figure out which livehouse this live was at. Normally, I'm able to tell due to certain features in the background. For example, Meguro RokuMeiKan has their sign, Shinjuku LOFT has "LOFT" in the background and bottles near the stage lights, and O-DO has their lights arranged in a specific way.

There's nothing identifiable about this background, excluding that black box above the center stage lights. No bottles, no LOFT, no sign.

So, what's an idiot like me to do in this situation? Start combing through other photos I had saved to see if I could maybe find a match. Once again, no luck. Then, I just started looking up random livehouses on YouTube. After several unrelated videos, I found a video (that had been uploaded less than four days prior) of a band called 結晶 performing at Koenji LAZY WAYS around the same time period. At a few points in this upload of a live from October 27th, 1993, I finally saw that stupid set of stage lights. We finally had a match.

The stage lights. I'd like to make it clear that two months had passed between the beginning of this saga and finding out the venue.

I thought I'd be one step closer to finding out who was in this photo. Around the same time, I found a magazine page with a list of live show dates all the way up until the end of 1997.

Notice anything interesting about this list?

I stared at this list for longer than I'd like to admit, hoping something would eventually jump out at me. I thought maybe I was genuinely just overlooking September 8th on this list. The original time stamp would've corresponded to a show under their first "Sing for You" tour. That's when it I noticed something strange. Why is there a date out of order in this list when everything else is chronologically correct?

I may be stupid, but I do know that August 7th definitely comes before August 23rd.

I began to search for any shows under August 7th, 1993, but still got nowhere. Clearly this wasn't the answer either. I started to accept my fate at this point - I'd never find it. Until I realized that the day of the week is listed on this list of lives as well. As a shot in the dark, I decided to see what day of the week August 7th, 1993 was on. This list says it was a Tuesday, when it was actually a Saturday.

You know what day WAS a Tuesday? September 7th, 1993.

And it was at Koenji LAZY WAYS.

So you'd think I'd be able to go on vk.gy and sort by bands that performed at Koenji LAZY WAYS on September 7th, 1993 and this entire issue would be solved. It was not. Because god forbid anything be easy.

Because there IS no September listed at all. It just jumps from August to October.
In fact, it doesn't even say Kneuklid Romance had a live on that date.

By this point, three months had passed. My friends couldn't believe I was still trying to figure this out. Fair enough, I guess - no normal person would do this. I decided we were going to have to do this the hard way: by combing through every single band that was listed as active in 1993. I had a whole dedicated spreadsheet for this. I had specific categories and everything.

I expanded my tastes, so I guess something good came out of it. I also learned that Yukino was in a band called Quay d'Orsay prior to Kneuklid Romance.

Based off the photo of the vocalist and the jacket he was wearing, I figured I'd be searching primarily for okeshou bands. This was insanely stupid of me. I spent days looking at photos of so many okeshou bands = until I suddenly realized I'd seen that jacket somewhere else before, way before I'd seen this photo. Who's worn this jacket before?

Gaz. As far back as September of 1992.

I was genuinely at my wits end by this point. Fine, whatever, forget it.

And then, just like how this began, I opened Twitter to doomscroll before bed. That's when I saw it.

I recognized all of the bands listed except for one: Flèches d'Amour.

Thinking there's no way this is it, I did some more research - which turned up one (1) upload of a song and like, three photos.

Flèches d'Amour.

Details about the members of this band are few and far between. In the photo with the unknown bassist and guitarist: the bassist is Aoki Shinichi, and the guitarist is either Tanaka or Chel. In the photo with the unknown vocalist - that's Caim.