Thee Michelle Gun Elephant
Japanese rock band
Thee Michelle Gun Elephant (often abbreviated to TMGE) was a Japanese garage rock band formed in 1991. The band broke up in 2003.
History
The band was formed in 1991, while Chiba, Ueno, and Kuhara were students at Tokyo's Meiji Gakuin University. They later drew influence from The Roosters. Their unusual name originated when a friend mispronounced the title of an early jam session recording; featuring cover songs of Thee Headcoats (one of the band's main influences) and from The Damned's album Machine Gun Etiquette. Some years later Futoshi Abe joined the band. After an independently released EP in 1995, they signed to Nippon Columbia's Triad label, releasing the album Cult Grass Stars in 1996, followed later that year by High Time, the band enjoying chart success in their home country. Chicken Zombies (1997) gave them a top five hit. The band's 1998 album Gear Blues was the first to be released in the US (in 2000). Several of their songs were also used in Blue Spring, a Japanese movie made in 2001.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Thee Michelle Gun Elephant” as japanese rock band. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as japanese rock band. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1344492. VIAF identifies the subject as 132892844. The Library of Congress control number is no2006029257. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1991, 2003, 1995 and 1996.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thee Michelle Gun Elephant” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.