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Sport 37: Winter 2009

Ode to the Sharpie Crows

page 101

Ode to the Sharpie Crows

Haruki Murakami's sharpie crows: angry
connoisseurs of cakes, pecking each other
to death over a delicious and offensive
unfamiliar treat; blind, ugly, disgusting
as mole rats. A band stole the name. When
the new Sharpie Crows (not Counting Crows,
not Sheryl Crow) went on tour they stopped
in Eketahuna and the blind guitarist chucked
a firework at an old woman who hissed, 'Evil!'

It fizzed like a green sherbet in the gutter. The
singer bought a stuffed sausage from Keitha's
Café and held his stomach for the rest of the trip.
Their lyrics are set in the Congo, grind axes with
Rupert Murdoch, John Key and Frank Bainimarama.
They're not punk or shoegaze or surf or metal or rock.
They scream like a car after a crash or a heartbroken
couple after two bottles of cheap brandy. They drink
Double Brown and once tried asking for sponsorship.

Some of them roll an elegant cigarette others cook
a good chilli or pumpkin soup. One politely asks,
'Do you mind if I put some Björk on?' while another
sniffs your hair and sighs, 'Ah, woman.' When they're
topless, listening to trance music in a hot living room
full of bodies on acid and E—when they're spinning
you fast around and around—it's possible to lose track
of who's who. 'They're the most diverse band I've ever
seen,' a fan once observed, clinically.