Dom Pates: Collected Writings

New host for this blog

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:01:00 +0000

This blog has now been moved to Wordpress. Click on Dom Pates: Collected Writings to go to the new site.

Having been under development on Blogger since 2006, I decided to move it over to a new service with greater functionality in order to officially launch it. For further details, a more enhanced site and to see new pieces as they are published, please go to the new site. My personal blog Postings From An Edge will likely remain hosted with Blogger.

If you have spent any time on this blog while it has been under development, thank you for your interest or comments. I look forward to seeing you on the new site!

(Disclaimer: This blog will remain online at this address for the forseeable future, but there will be no further updates.)

LYRICS // Endgame (2007)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 21:43:00 +0000

Back in 2004 and with the London march against the invasion of Iraq still fresh in my mind, I made an approach to UK music organisation Peace Not War (PNW), to offer them a track for their then pending 'Volume Two' of pro-peace/anti-war music. Upon informing one of the founders of the project that I was living in Japan, he asked me if I could help them to get their CDs some exposure over there.

Although I was based in Tokyo at the time, I'd spent most of my free time travelling around the country and had no contacts in either the Japanese music industry or peace movement. Reluctant to even consider the idea at first, so daunting a task did it seem, I shelved the idea for some time.

The Control K tune that I offered never did end up on one of their CDs, but I did get rather more deeply involved with them instead. His request ultimately seemed too good an opportunity for combining two of my interests (music and peace) and building a new network in my adopted country to turn down. A few months later, I got started on what was to become Peace Not War Japan (PNWJ), an organisation that has continued following my departure from the country.

By the time that the first PNWJ CD was released, I already had my own band (Shelf Life), who performed covers of rock 'n' roll standards in a local bar. When rumour filtered through the PNW network that London was thinking of producing a Volume Three, I went to the band and suggested that we should write a song for it - one that we could really pour our efforts into and make too good for them to turn down. My songwriting partner Cheryo and I set ourselves the task of writing a new 'peace anthem'.

In many of my previous sets of lyrics, I'd tended to take the Dylanesque route of using obscure imagery to conjure up word pictures. If this new song was going to have a chance of sticking in peoples' minds, I was going to have to keep things simpler this time around. I kept my eyes open for scraps of lines that could fit in, or be adapted, to a simple and effective anthemic song for peace. We were aiming along the lines of 'Hey Jude' or 'We Are The World' (very popular in Japan) in terms of hooks and build.

The opening line was borrowed from Atticus Finch (or Harper Lee, to be more precise) in 'To Kill A Mockingbird', one of fiction's great lawyers. The next line, added myself, was on the same theme and encourages looking at a situation from another person's perspective. One of the benefits to an independent, unaffiliated third party attempting to resolve a conflict between two sides (as, for example, Norway has tried to do with different factions in the Sri Lankan civil war) is that they can bring an approach that takes both points of view into account. War and conflict is almost never one-sided. The song asks listeners to think about things from the other side too.

As I became more involved with the Japanese peace movement, I met many interesting and sometimes extremely brave people that in my line as an English Teacher in suburban Tokyo I would never have had an opportunity to do. One such person, whom this song was mostly inspired by, was a young Iraqi engineer that I went to see speak and later shared a meal with. I'd never met somebody from that devastated and desperate country before and was eager to hear his story, particularly when the Western media so dehumanises the inhabitants of Iraq.

His was a tale that was tough to swallow, yet also deeply inspiring and gave me a little more faith in the human spirit to overcome the worst possible things that can be thrown at it. According to him, life under Saddam wasn't great but it did have its positive aspects too. Criticism of Hussein was a strict no-go, but if you came from a poor background (as he did), you were entitled to a free University education and Iraq's universities were considered to be amongst the best in the Middle East. He got himself an engineering degree. Then, the invasion of 2003 came and like all young Iraqi men, he got the call-up to fight (not an option he could refuse).

During the early days of the occupation/insurgency (delete according to perspective), he went through all manner of horrors - the deaths of many of his friends and family, kidnap and capture by jihadists, imprisonment by US forces, and the destruction of most of his town. It would seem natural for someone who went through such things to be filled with hatred for the causes of such things and initially he was. However, something happened that put him on a different path.

When some Japanese journalists were captured in Iraq by 'al-Qaeda', he was held captive with them. The female journalist he was with encouraged him to look the situation from other perspectives and to think more about peace than revenge, an approach he took on board. Such can be the power of words and talking things through. This story inspired the second verse of the song.

In the chorus, the line 'I am what I am...' was borrowed from the Ubuntu free operating system, whose name comes from the Zulu aphorism which articulates a basic respect and compassion for others. The operating system aims to 'underpin the concept of an open society', which seemed like a suitable sentiment for the song and also sat quite comfortably with Gandhi's famous line about 'an eye for an eye' in this song.

The other chorus lines of 'we are the ones...' was picked up from New Internationalist magazine, in a special issue on positive stories from the Majority World. It's a line I've seen used much more widely in recent times too. The verse about the 'silence of our friends' was adapted from a quote by that other famous peacemaker, Martin Luther King.

To seek 'peace of mind' is, I believe, inherent in most people. However, it is our fears and suspicions that lead us to build walls around us rather than bridges between us. These only serve to enforce differences between people rather than encouraging a search for similarities.

'Peace Not War: Volume Three' didn't happen in the end, and PNW themselves seem to be largely inactive these days. Never mind, the potential of being on that album prompted me to write the song that I am probably most proud of.

In the spirit of the song, when the band perform it live we usually invite members of the audience or other bands that we play with to come on stage and join in with the chorus. We also made a promo video to go with it too, my first one, where an audience does the same thing. The video was certainly a lot of fun to make, although it did give me a bit of an idea of the amount of time that people who do this kind of thing for a living have to spend waiting around! The video can be seen at the top of this posting.

The song, titled 'Endgame' in reference to the games that world powers play with peoples lives in their war-making, ended up as the final track on our first CD release 'Best Before End'. It is available for download through , as a single track or as part of the album.

Peace out.

Endgame

You'll never know a man,
Until you step into his shoes.
Won't see what's goin' on,
Unless you look through another's eyes.

A friend of mine,
Told me of soldiers on his streets.
Home and family gone,
Yet he learned not to hate.

I am what I am,
Because of who we all are.
An eye for an eye,
Will make the whole world blind – so blind.

We all seek,
Yet rarely find our peace of mind.
We're still building walls,
We should be building bridges instead.

In the end,
It's not the words of our enemies,
We remember,
But the silence of our friends.

I am what I am,
Because of who we all are.
We are the ones,
That we've been waiting for – so long.

I am what I am,
Because of who we all are.
We are the ones,
That we've been waiting for – so long.

(You'll never know)
(Without standing in his shoes)
(You'll never see)
(Better look through another's eyes)

(Yes, he told me)
('Bout the soldiers on his streets)
(His family was gone)
(He turned his hate around)

(All looking for)
(That little peace of mind)
(Newer, higher walls)
(But a bridge brings us together)

(It's not the words)
(Of our enemies that last)
(But the silence)
(Of our friends, so shout it loud)

LYRICS // Second Hand Sunshine (2007)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 16:23:00 +0000

'Second Hand Sunshine', a title that popped up one day in search of a song, was written as a global warming song. It's not a subject that seems to have been tackled a great deal yet by songwriters, so it seemed like a good opportunity to get one in early.

Many of the lyrics had been hanging around in various forms for years, as scraps that hadn't yet found the right song to end up in. I was glad to finally give them a home.

The first verse starts with, of all things, a reference to the infamous Conservative politician Enoch Powell, who was sacked from the government front bench in 1968 for his notoriously inflammatory 'Rivers of Blood' speech that raged against rising levels of immigration to the UK.

Naturally, I am fundamentally opposed to such views and see the world in an entirely different light. However, he did utter one truism (at another time) that stuck with me:

All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.

Understanding this helps to not place ultimate faith in political leaders as the ones that will provide the solutions to our world's problems. While they may play a part, they will ultimately fail in what they are trying to do - even when with the best of intentions - because that is 'the nature of politics'.

The opening of the song therefore is a plea for collective action against the status quo of the continuing pollution of our earth, rather than waiting for the people in power to make the changes needed.

The 'same old juice' of the second verse refers to the developed (and now developing) world's ongoing dependence on fossil fuels, with 'lizards' being the dinosaurs that turned into automobile juice over millennia underground.

While the use of these fuels may well have led to the rapid development of many nations and so have been a measure of human and economic progress in many ways, our ongoing dependence on them is leading to vicious resource wars, destruction of eco-systems and economic fragility. Ropes can also be used to good and bad ends, for rescuing somebody or hanging them, and is given here as a metaphor for fossil fuels.

Nevertheless, we are living through very interesting times as well as dangerous ones. Largely powered by the internet as an element of the digital revolution, the early 21st Century is a period of unprecedented technological progress.

It is possible that some of the solutions to humanity's most pressing problems can be found through technological innovations which enable us to better harness more natural sources of energy - such as solar power. Those who remain stuck in the older ways of thinking will be left behind, clinging on to outmoded means and watching slack-jawed as they are rapidly surpassed. This is the general thrust of the third verse.

The fourth verse alludes to the amount of information that is already available on the internet, which can point to different means of reducing ones personal carbon footprint or developing a more sustainable lifestyle. It's out there at our fingertips, but so many choose to ignore it.

The song itself appeared on the first Shelf Life album, 'Best Before End', and can be previewed or purchased as part of the whole album on .

Second Hand Sunshine

All our leaders in the end are claimed
By Old Man Blood River
Won't somebody turn the heat down?
It's an arrow too much for our quiver

We're still fixing up on the same old juice
The lizards died to give
A rope is a lifeline or it's a noose
The reptile way's too aggressive

Brave new ideas drop from your skies,
Like burned-out satellites.
You’ll fall to your knees watching people pass by,
And they follow their days with their nights.

Slip the URL into your browser.
You’ll find an answer on the other side.
If the decision makes you drowsier,
There’s no excuse to run away and hide.

Gimme some of that
Second Hand Sunshine
Power me up
And I'm on my way

Give us some of that
Second Hand Sunshine
Plug us in
And we'll be on our way

All our leaders in the end are claimed
By Old Man Blood River
Won't somebody turn the heat down?
It's an arrow too much for our quiver

We're still fixing up on the same old juice
The lizards died to give
A rope is a lifeline or it's a noose
The reptile way's too aggressive

Brave new ideas drop from your skies,
Like burned-out satellites.
You’ll fall to your knees watching people pass by,
And they follow their days with their nights.

Slip the URL into your browser.
You’ll find an answer on the other side.
If the decision makes you drowsier,
There’s no excuse to run away and hide.

Gimme some of that
Second Hand Sunshine
Power me up
And I'm on my way

Give us some of that
Second Hand Sunshine
Plug us in
And we'll be on our way

LYRICS // Ghosts (2007)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 15:27:00 +0000

I was born in Brighton, a seaside town on the South coast of England. Despite this beginning and several later visits to then-still-resident grandparents, I grew up getting to know an entirely different place - Cardiff, the city I got my schooling in.

As soon as the opportunity presented itself, in the form of a college place, I found my way back to Brighton - delighted to get out of Wales and having a fixed idea in my head of Brighton as some kind of escapist oasis amidst all the mundanity of the rest of Britain.

It was there that I wiled away my twenties. I somehow made it through my University years and racked up over a decade back in the place of my birth, wading through loves and losses, rock 'n' roll bands that came and went, and all matter of limits explored. It's the kind of place that people escape to from whatever is getting them down in their own part of the country and then reinvent themselves as something new. It can also become a certain kind of trap - a great place to explore an idea but rarely to make a success of it.

After about 15 years of trying, my musical ambitions reached a certain zenith point when The Zamora had their moment in the national spotlight. To my surprise, just as the band's star was in ascent, I was rather unceremoniously booted out of the line-up.

I had to come to terms with the fact that the future I'd spent years carving out for myself had been taken out of my hands. Given that I wasn't really going anywhere career-wise either and with an ultimately disastrous relationship topping off my seaside downfall, my time in my 'home town' drew to a natural end.

Although it took a while to come to the decision, I ultimately decided that I wasn't going to wallow in misery but would do something about it instead - as big and radical a challenge as I could give myself - and throw myself into somewhere as crazy and far away as Tokyo to see what happened.

By the time I left Brighton, I was seeing ghosts of my former past all over the city. Ex-flames with new beaus, those I'd once rocked with, workplaces I'd had to put up with in the absence of something better, on every street corner. This song began as an expression of that feeling and was originally written in the present tense - the place that was haunting me. The melody came naturally with the words - a kind of melancholy waltz-y feel - and has changed little since being written.

Songwriting is often an exorcism in itself. Once I wrote the song, I felt a little better about things, that was that. I didn't really expect to see it ending up recorded and released on an album, least of all produced in Japan. However, when it came to writing the material for 'Best Before End', this was a natural to pull out of the bag.

Of course, by the time it was exhumed, the feelings had changed and the ghosts I'd spoken of belonged to another very distant world. I'd also become more reflective about Brighton and what I'd actually gained from my time there, so the song was adapted slightly with a change of tense suggesting that my haunting was over and I'd learned from the experience.

Telling the above tale explains most of the song, but there is just a little more imagery in it that might require some background.

Woody Allen, when asked why all his films were set in Manhattan, once commented something along the lines that as the whole world was there, it provided all the inspiration he needed to make movies. Unwilling to leave the town for many years for related reasons - my whole world was there - I felt the same about Brighton at one time. In time however, my perspective on it changed and I realised that there was a whole world outside of my seaside shelter. Woody Allen now also makes films in locations other than Manhattan - a natural progression, I feel.

'All India Radio' came to me from Salman Rushdie's Booker-winning novel 'Midnight's Children', one of my favourite works of fiction. Along with many of the other characters in the book, Saleem Sinai (the protagonist) is born with a certain set of special powers. All children that are born on or after the stroke of midnight on the moment that India is declared independent from British rule are endowed with certain powers and the closer they were born to the striking of the clock, the stronger their powers. Saleem is born as the clock hits 12:00, so his unique abilities are that much more pronounced.

Each gift that the children have been endowed with is unique to them, with the protagonist's being a telepathic ability. As this develops and as he ages throughout the novel, this ability becomes very useful to the rest of the children, who convene in great conferences in Saleem's head. Rushdie had his character comparing the feeling of all these competing voices in one space to All India Radio, the nation's radio broadcaster and home to the hundreds of languages contained within the country.

Prior to the point of my departure from Brighton, I found myself juggling a profusion of multiple identities drawn from the various activities I'd engaged in during my time there - rock singer, teacher, student, manager, unemployed, hedonist, shop assistant, lover, loser, volunteer, bus driver, the list goes on. All these different voices, different versions of myself vying for attention, began to drown each other out, leading to a feeling of like listening to All India Radio.

The song was recorded and released by Shelf Life, staying as a slow-paced and reflective tune. At the time of writing, it doesn't appear on the band's MySpace page but is available for purchase from .

Ghosts

That city’s streets,
And all its heartbeats,
Got me wherever I turned.

The riffs and the pages,
The loves through the ages,
Hit me like children and burned.

But when I stopped to think for a minute,
Of how much I had grown,
And used the eyes in the back of my head,
To look at what that city’d shown – me.

I laid dem all to rest.
Yeah, I laid dem all to rest.

There was a time,
When that place was mine,
Like Woody Allen’s Manhattan.

Now it’s just a shell,
A lingering smell,
I’d done all I could have done.

But when I stopped to think for a minute,
Of how much I had grown,
And used the eyes in the back of my head,
To look at what that city’d shown – me.

I laid dem all to rest.
Yeah, I laid dem all to rest.

Voices went round in my head.
Games once played out, now dead.
It felt like All India Radio.

Bodies piled up on the floor.
Couldn’t take it no more,
It felt like All India Radio.

But when I stopped to think for a minute,
Of how much I had grown,
And used the eyes in the back of my head,
To look at what that city’d shown – me.

I laid dem all to rest.
Yeah, I laid dem all to rest.

LYRICS // Games (2007)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 23:55:00 +0000

Reading Eric Schlosser's 'Fast Food Nation' a number of years ago, I was quite struck to find out that many of the smells of American fast food are actually manufactured in large plants off the New Jersey Turnpike and then added to the food during processing. As I was going through a difficult relationship at the time, I occurred to me that that which might smell sweet wasn't actually all it appeared to be. The first line of this song came from that and hung around in a notepad, awaiting a song to fill it out.

Shortly before I left Britain for Japan, I once again became distracted by a dalliance with someone that I misconstrued to have greater meaning. I was dropped cryptic notes with quotes from Montesquieu and Anais Nin, that set my heart a-racing for a moment. Luckily, I managed to see it for the game that it was after a while and set on my merry way, bound for Tokyo, but not before I put my feelings to verse. The Turnpike Rose seemed to fit for this situation too.

When it came to writing a set of new songs for the Shelf Life album, as usual I trawled back through my archive of lyrical scraps to see if there was anything salvageable there. There seemed to be some useable lines and couplets here, so I took them as the bones and fleshed it out with a little more new stuff. The lines about the chameleon referred to my state at the time in Tokyo of having a variety of different personas that I used for different situations (teacher, rock singer, charity founder, Brit, etc) and that when one displays a variety of different guises, others often don't know (or can't tell) who the real person lurking underneath is.

The song was written to be a relatively simple one with an easy-to-follow chorus, and performed as a rather punky thrash. When it was recorded, a strong synthesiser element was added in the production, taking it away a little from its Pistols-inspired roots and making it quite poppy.

Lyrically, the song is about the games that boys and girls play in the early or pre-dating phase that can often end up to be just that - a game. The song can be heard on the band's MySpace page and purchased from .

Games

That scent, like a rose,
From the New Jersey Turnpike.
No-one else knows,
The smile on her face that she looked like.

Maybe, I didn’t want to name names,
Maybe, we stopped playing games.
Maybe, I didn’t want to name names,
Maybe, we stopped playing games.

My guises like clothes,
Changed for the moment or season.
No-one else knows,
What truths are in the chameleon.

Maybe, I didn’t want to name names,
Maybe, we stopped playing games.
Maybe, I didn’t want to name names,
Maybe, we stopped playing games.

Montesquieu and Anais Nin,
Knocked my door and came right in.
They asked first if I was able,
And left messages on my table.

We dallied a while and spent some time,
It helped us get through the summer.
No distant rainbows broke,
She moved on to play with another.

Maybe, I didn’t want to name names,
Maybe, we stopped playing games.
Maybe, I didn’t want to name names,
Maybe, we stopped playing games.

Maybe, I didn’t want to name names,
Maybe, we stopped playing games.
Maybe, I didn’t want to name names,
Maybe, we stopped playing games.

That scent, like a rose,
From the New Jersey Turnpike.
No-one else knows,
The smile on her face that she looked like.

My guises like clothes,
Changed for the moment or season.
No-one else knows,
What truths are in the chameleon.

Maybe, I didn’t want to name names,
Maybe, we stopped playing games.
Maybe, I didn’t want to name names,
Maybe, we stopped playing games.

LYRICS // Vonnegut's Blues (2006)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:42:00 +0000

An early attempt at a political song with Shelf Life and our first original song written together.

'Vonnegut's Blues' was written as a (loosely disguised) diatribe about the Bush administration, inspired by a piece written by the late American author Kurt Vonnegut, who was still alive when the song was written. The original article that prompted the song was discovered on Common Dreams, where the writer bemoaned the state of his country under Bush Junior. What got him through such times was music - always having good tunes to take away the pain - and that was the one thing that couldn't be taken away from him. A sentiment I couldn't help but agree with.

...'No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.'...

The opening lines check Rumsfeld, 'him at the top' would be Junior himself and 'Number Two' bears an uncanny resemblance to a certain Mr Cheney. The chorus takes on the idea of peak oil and implores the audience to speak out about the parlous state of the future. The song was an attempt to write something quite simple and direct, lyrically speaking, instead of cloaking the message in elusive imagery.

I seemed to have had the opening lines knocking around my head for years and finally found a song that they'd fit. Long after it had been written and performed a number of times, I found myself one day singing along to an old Dylan tune. To my embarrassment, I found that I'd almost exactly lifted them straight from 'A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall' ('...the executioner's face is always well hidden...')!

Should Dylan and Vonnegut therefore be listed as co-writers (pretty cool names to share your writing credits with at least)? Let's just say that they provided some useful 'inspiration' for the song!

The song itself can be heard on our MySpace page, and purchased from . Vonnegut's book 'A Man Without A Country' is also a fine read.

Vonnegut's Blues

The executioner’s kept hidden
He cuts from the bottom and the middle

No matter how bad it gets
We’ll have music

No matter where they take us
We’ll still have our songs

We’re on a flatout week
Until the oil supply peaks
The future’s looking bleak
So it’s your turn to speak

Him at the top is an accident
Dad and friends put him there for revenge

No matter how bad it gets
We’ll have music

No matter where they take us
We’ll still have our songs

We’re on a flatout week
Until the oil supply peaks
The future’s looking bleak
So it’s your turn to speak

Number Two is watching me and you
There’s not a great deal he’ll let us do

No matter how bad it get
We’ll have music

No matter where they take us
We’ll still have our songs

We’re on a flatout week
Until the oil supply peaks
The future’s looking bleak
So it’s your turn to speak

LYRICS // The Tokyoite (2007)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 01:19:00 +0000

Living in Tokyo for almost five years was a major and transformative period in my life. The city inspired me in so many ways and, perhaps bizarrely for a place that is considered so impenetrable for most non-Japanese people, opened many doors for me that I'd never dreamt I would one day walk through. Naturally, it ended up as the subject for a song.

The Western pop canon is littered with songs about London ('London Calling'), Paris ('I Love Paris'), New York ('New York, New York') or LA ('Under The Bridge'). However, there are very few well known songs about Tokyo.

A cursory search of the internet turns up a few such odes and being someone who lived as an insider (yet always still being 'a foreigner'), it is fascinating to see the perspective that Western artists have had of Tokyo. It seems to broadly fit into two camps - those who view it from afar as part of the 'mysterious East' and those artists who have passed through on some world tour or other and been bowled over by the entire 'fish out of water' sensations that they experienced. Many male writers seem to have focused on some groupie fling that they obviously had, where the woman in question seemed other-worldly and unattainable, other than for a fleeting moment, and she symbolises the city for them.

Heavy metal was happy to take up the 'mysterious' angle. W.A.S.P. in 'Tokyo's On Fire' spoke of 'Big mondo fun, the land of the rising sun, A monster rising in my eyes' going for obvious imagery and Godzilla shtick, while Saxon 'had a dream about the mighty Shogun...Faded visions of the Samurai' in 'Walking Through Tokyo'. At the end of the song 'the Geisha gives on dying pleasure' too, so they get the girl as well as the mystic past. In 'Woman From Tokyo', Deep Purple got hooked on that which got Saxon. The singer 'Talk(s) about her like a Queen, Dancing in an Eastern Dream'.

Bryan Ferry's 'Tokyo Joe' was bitten by the same bug - 'My girl friday she no square, she like Lotus blossom in her hair...Geisha girl show you she adore you, Two oriental eyes implore you'. Judging by the rest of the song, if he made it out there at all, it doesn't look like he got much further than Roppongi. The Bee Gees might not have even made it out of the hotel in their 'Tokyo Nights' - 'Well she took me away by saving life, I was down in the rising sun...Well I came for the moment and stayed till the end.'

Female artists have been just as overawed, even by Tokyo women, but of course in different ways to the boy rockers. In 'Tokyo Girl', Ace Of Base (a band I could never have imagined ever finding a reason to write about when I began this blog, although the same comment could equally apply for Saxon) thought their subject 'had got the moves to rule the world, that cute inscrutability' which went on to rhyme 'Tokyo Girl, you're a mystery'. Gwen Stefani was 'fascinated by the Japanese fashion scene' and 'just an American girl in the Tokyo streets' in 'Harajuku Girls'. Although it's not clear that she had a fling herself, Donna Summer in 'Tokyo' 'met this stranger there, so...was feeling somewhat scared...but all the ladies there were nice, the gentlemen politely out of line'.

Canadian songwriter Bruce Cockburn managed to resist the temptations that seemed to sway the other male writers that passed though, but was still pretty freaked out by the place, particularly after witnessing a car being pulled from a river. Stefani might have captured the flavour of Harajuku pretty well, but Cockburn got the urban sprawl feeling, mentioning 'Pachinko jingle and space torpedo beams, Comic book violence and escaping steam'. He put 'Tokyo' out in 1979, so he would have had a taste of things before the extravagances of the Bubble era. Elvis Costello barely mentions anything to do with Japan in 'Tokyo Storm Warning'. He could have been in a Tokyo hotel in the first verse, but then wanders off to talk about dead Italian tourists and the 'Costa Del Malvinas'.

I might not have had a musical career comparable to any of the above artists, but I probably got to know Japan's capital rather better.

To me, the city that ended up feeling more like home than any other place I've lived (Brighton aside) was a very finely tuned machine that functioned so well and smoothly largely because its residents consented so willingly to the part they played in the whole picture - a form of 'consensual citizenship' missing from most Western cities. I've tried to convey a sense of that in this song.

The first verse ticks off some of the sights of the cityscape. The second one refers to the devotion that many workers (mostly male) have to their companies, particularly the globe straddling electronics giants like Sony and Toshiba. After the destruction of the city during the Second World War, it was the army-like discipline of these workers that provided the workforce that enabled Japan's 'economic miracle' during the 80's and 90's. 'Salaryman' is equivalent to 'breadwinner' in English, but is obviously more gender specific.

Even in the less prestigious jobs, many people at least give the impression of being dedicated to their work. When McDonalds opened their first branches in Japan, new staff apparently proudly talked about how they were 'working for an American company', and thus perhaps looked a little more internationalised than the generation of their more inward looking parents. Hostess bars appear to the outsider to be little more than gaudy, neon clad brothels, when most of them are actually rather different. Although sexual activity may be part of them, they are more like a modern equivalent of the old geisha tea houses, where beautiful young women are essentially on hand to flatter visiting male luminaries and the like. Many of Japan's businessmen are more conversationally open with the 'hostesses' they visit than their own wives, as many of them feel unable to talk about the strains of work at home.

The fourth verse refers to the blend of deeply traditional and hyper modern that one finds in Tokyo. Japanese houses are still measured in terms of the number of tatami mats that can be fitted on the floor. On the street, one can find an ancient looking wooden shrine with a deep attention to aesthetics right next to some vast concrete tower block with all the wires on the outside.

The bridge ('From the top of the mountain, to the waters of the ocean') is a reference to the scale of the city, which feels like it stretches from Mount Fuji far off in the distance right down to Tokyo Bay. There is actually a significant amount of countryside between Fuji and the outer limits of the city's edges, but it remains a totemic presence over the skyline on a clear day, visible from many of Tokyo's higher vantage points. Fuji makes for a calming and commanding sight beyond the visual clutter of the cityscape.

'Commuters pouring in through arteries' is about the complex network of train lines, jam packed to fill even the smallest bit of breathing space in the early morning, that all feed into the centre of the city. To me, those office workers were the blood that kept the heart beating and the train lines the veins that delivered them. 'Robots bow', even in cartoon form on train station ticket machines, as automated apologies to an imaginary inconvenience. The volume of advertising is so much higher than anywhere else I've been, and all they seem to depict beautiful people and perfect lives - a kind of futuristic Asian version of 50's picket fence America - thus 'pretty faces tease'.

'Lose myself in my headphone world' - across the city, it seems like most people have a set of headphones in their ears. On those cramped trains, personal space is at a premium, so immersing oneself in an iPod or similar gadget is a way of creating distance between yourself and the person breathing down your neck.

'Hold my breath for the quake thunder' - having once been devastated by earthquake and living in region with the highest amount of seismic activity on the planet, it is very common to hear talk of 'the next Big One' - the next quake that will destroy the city yet again. Living with earthquakes does take quite some getting used to, but seeing that the Japanese don't tend to panic during one, you learn to live with it after a while.

I've not written a great deal of ballads in my time, but it seemed to me that Tokyo was deserving of one. The song appeared on the Shelf Life album 'Best Before End' and can be heard on our MySpace page and purchased from .

The Tokyoite

On bullet trains and in pod hotels
The neon lights and elevator bells
Skyscraper high and in parallel
This machine and it's heart beat on

Salaryman as foot soldier
Corporate beasts with a great hunger
It made me feel a little older
This machine and it's heart beat on

I call it home – and it's so alive
I'll store it away – in my archive of times

In hostess bars and hamburger chains
A rat race graft where no-one abstains
Business symphonies to loss and gain
This machine and it's heart beat on

In public baths and on tatami floors
Wooden shrines and concrete eyesores
I made my chances, how about yours?
This machine and it's heart beat on

I call it home – and it's so alive
I'll store it away – in my archive of times

From the top of the mountain
To the waters of the ocean
A monument in superlative
The pinnacle of these islands

Commuters pouring in through arteries
Robots bow and pretty faces tease
'Thanks for your custom, come again please'
This machine and it's heart beat on

Lose myself in my headphone world
A soundtrack for this city absurd
And hold my breath for the quake thunder
This machine and it's heart beat on

I call it home – and it's so alive
I'll store it away – in my archive of times

From the top of the mountain
To the waters of the ocean
A monument in superlative
The pinnacle of these islands

LYRICS // She's Coming Home (2007)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 23:17:00 +0000

The best way to get from the heart of Tokyo to the main international airport is by the Narita Express, the smooth-as-glass train that glides through the concrete cityscape to break into the open countryside and paddy fields of Chiba prefecture, where Narita Airport is set. I made several journeys to and from Narita on this train, and although it is a slightly more expensive ride than the other options for getting there, it is by far the most comfortable and allows time and space for a nice doze before arrival.

One such journey on the Narita Express was to meet my sweetheart when she returned from a business trip to Hong Kong. I arrived in ample time, bouquet in hand, only to get a message on my phone that her flight was going to be delayed by several hours. There was nothing for it but to camp out in the cavernous expanse of the airport and wait it out. I helped myself to a good Thai meal and killed an hour feeding coins into a massage chair I came across. After a while of wandering and vainly glancing up at the arrivals board for a glimmer of news, lines of verse started coming to me.

When Shelf Life started writing the material for our debut album ('Best Before End'), I turned to my notebooks for salvageable scraps that could make their way into songs. What had originally been written as a waiting poem turned out to be the basis for this song.

After many years of trying to be clever and wordy in my songwriting, I made a conscious decision to try and go for something simple and direct. Given the story above, they are fairly self explanatory. There is a little nod to The Beatles (unsurprisingly) in it, inverting the Sgt. Pepper ballad of a daughter running away from 'She's Leaving Home' to...

The song itself was often used to open our shows with and is a positive-looking, rolling Stonesy blast. It can be heard on our MySpace page and purchased from .

She's Coming Home

I speed through rice fields
And bamboo clusters
This is how it feels
Waiting for her return

The train moves smoothly
Like water down glass
I drift and slumber
And dream of lucky stars

Departure lounge blues
Held up on the arrival board
If you could be in my shoes
Sweet landing such reward

It's a new feeling
I never had before
From floor to ceiling
What I was waiting for

Yes, she's coming home
I've been living alone
For so many years
At last I'm in the zone

Departure lounge blues
Held up on the arrival board
If you could be in my shoes
Sweet landing such reward

Hong Kong's only
A few hours away
She's coming home
It's gonna be a better day

Hong Kong's only
A few hours away
She's coming home
It's gonna be a better day

REVIEWS // The Fest Yet (1991)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 23:05:00 +0000

I've never counted how many gigs and live shows I've been to in my life, but it could easily run into four figures. The very first one I remember was at the tender age of 15, seeing a band called Rodgau Monotones somewhere in Germany at the behest of my penpal of the time. I wasn't particularly impressed with them and all I recall is thinking that they sounded a little like ZZ Top.

The first one that I went to by choice, probably not long after, was Julian Cope. I was 16 by then and Cope was touring the 'Saint Julian' album, his comeback collection after having ducked out of the scene whilst he recuperated from having fried his synapses a little too much for the pop mainstream. The key gimmick on this particular tour was a scaffold-like mic stand that Cope clambered on and which swung around as he kicked through his set. I left the venue, Cardiff University, as he was going through his seventh encore, a feat I've not seen replicated by any performer since. I guess by then I was hooked.

In the first half of my twenties, I substituted the desire to go abroad and explore foreign lands for standing in muddy English fields to watch as many bands as I could possibly squeeze in to three days. This was a time when the British festival scene was considerably smaller and there were only really two main events to go to - Glastonbury and Reading. Just attending these two was enough to stretch the limited student finances to breaking point, so it was probably just as well that there weren't a lot of others going on. My first of the era was Glastonbury in 1990 and the last major festival I went to was WOMAD in 1995, having finally started branching out from solid indie rock.

At the end of it all, I swore to myself that I wouldn't go back to the likes of Glastonbury unless I was playing there in my own band and set out on my efforts to put such a combo together. Still haven't made it back yet. One day though, who knows?

I did however get a crack at being a music journalist, when I wrote up a review of the 1991 Reading Festival. This was published in college rag The Printed Image and can be found in full glory below.

The Fest Yet

What does every journalist open a festival review with? Yes, a quick recap on the weather, of course. Naturally, arrival at the site was heralded with seriously heavy rainfall. Memories of last year’s Glastonbury Festival came flooding back, of having to cross oceans of mud to reach anywhere resembling a good view of the main stage. However, the mud soon ceased to be a problem, as you would cease to be too if you were trampled on by 30,000 pairs of Doc Martens.

It is very easy to find your way to the site if you’ve never been to the festival before. All you need to do is follow the long flow of greboes heading in the same direction. The festival goers took on the form of a funeral procession. Almost everyone was clad in black, but I suppose with The Sisters Of Mercy headlining the Sunday night, it was to be expected. For a finishing touch, the procession was complete with an array of flowers (admittedly all on James T-shirts though).

Friday 23rd

BABES IN TOYLAND delivered the first excitement of the day, and were obviously eagerly anticipated, judging by the mass migration towards the stage. Spearheading the new wave of all female US hardcore bands, the Babes set out to prove that they could make as much noise as the boys on the bill.

SILVERFISH turned up next to thrill us with their screaming guitars and blistering noise. The guitarist Fuzz, was clad in a tuxedo while Leslie happily swore at the audience as if she hated them. And with songs like ‘Total Fucking Asshole’, who’s to argue?

NIRVANA followed Silverfish, sounding even harder and grittier. Nirvana have recently fled the Sub-Pop nest to join the elder statesmen of hardcore, Sonic Youth, on Geffen. A major label doesn’t mean any compromise on their sound either. Introduced by John Peel as ‘another dandy little combo’, they kicked Reading into a higher gear in preparation for the bigger names that were to follow.

You can always hope for something special about the day when DINOSAUR JR grace the stage. J Mascis looked a little bored but that didn’t undermine their combination of soaring guitars, brilliant noise and great melodies. ‘I Live For That Look’, ‘The Wagon’ and ‘Freakscene’ all helped to drag out the sun, kicking and screaming, to brighten the day and the moods.

For all those suffering from hardcore fatigue, there was either the comedy tent or POP WILL EAT EATSELF, who changed the mood by giving the crowd an opportunity to dance instead of slam. The Poppies made a very spirited attempt to put on a good show, with smoke and backdrops, and they succeeded in being entertaining if a little tacky. All the PWEI classics were rolled out including ‘Def Con One’, ‘There Is No Love Between Us Anymore’ and material from the recent ‘Cure For Sanity’ LP. They really brought the crowds to their feet.

SONIC YOUTH, Friday’s co-headliners, were out to kill. By the second song, Thurston Moore was already hurling his guitar around the stage. This was a band who clearly belonged up there in front of an audience where they could take their fusion of experimentation and extreme noise considerably further. They slugged their equipment around so much that they had to tune up between most of the songs. Kim Gordon ended the set by jumping up and down on her bass guitar as if the instrument had offended her family, while Thurston Moore continued to hurl his guitar over the edge of the stage like a dog on an extending lead. It’s times like these that you’re grateful not to be one of Sonic Youth’s guitars! Highlights of the set included ‘Teen Age Riot’, ‘Mary Christ’ and ‘Dirty Boots’ (surely the theme song of the day).

Suffering blistered ears and a battered body from Sonic Youth, IGGY POP, Friday’s headliner, started out as a real anti-climax. He failed to make very much of an impression, despite his prancing around like Mick Jagger on heat, his claims of having been ‘sent here to rock this shit’ and the removal of most of his clothes (often dropping his jeans too). There was little distinction between the songs and there had been far more powerful bands on earlier. Still, I suppose even ‘living legends’ must have their time to warm up and Iggy Pop is no exception. ‘China Girl’ (yes, that one) broke the pattern by sounding different, and had me on my feet; ‘Real Wild Child’ got everyone dancing, while ‘The Passenger’ was even granted an audience singalong. By ‘Lust For Life’ the boredom had been forgotten. He encored with two Stooges songs, ‘No Fun’ and ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’. When we thought that it was all over he came back for one more song, the old R ‘n’ B classic that he had retitled ‘Louie Fuckin’ Louie’. It may have taken a while, but Iggy Pop showed us why he was up there at the top of the bill.

Saturday 24th

Saturday turned out to be an altogether more varied day with the emphasis on ‘pop’ music on the bill. The first (and only) disappointment of the day were FLOWERED UP. Imagine a third rate Happy Mondays with Cockney accents and all the songs sounding the same and you’ll get the picture.

That left the brilliant TEENAGE FANCLUB to make the first good impression on me and give me reason to stand up. They succeeded. Kicking off with the classic ‘God Knows It’s True’ and ending up with the rolling ‘Everything Flows’, they managed to pack in as much serious fun as possible. Teenage Fanclub were clearing playing for themselves and having a whale of a time while they were at it. They gave a more diverse element to the day’s billing with their swaggering Dinosaur Jr/Neil Young guitar sound.

Seeing as this year’s festival seemed to be full of those who’ve hit the limelight very quickly (Neds, Babes, Fannies), this gave a great excuse to put BLUR on. This is a band who both want to be big and who will be. Damon, the singer, loped on stage looking completely stoned and proceeded to spend the entire set falling all over the place like an Orang Utan with his spine removed. From catchy pop ditties to swirling hippy anthems, Blur smothered the audience with adoration and were loved in return. Damon must have been watching Sonic Youth (albeit in slow motion), the way he was knocking things over, including himself. If this man had a guitar, he would be dangerous. Whenever a roadie ran on to put back an unfortunate mic stand or Dave’s cymbals, Damon tried to mount him. Future headliners?

DE LA SOUL were so bad at Glastonbury last year that I decided to skip them this time, making THE FALL the next band to grace the stage. Even the existential miserable bastard Mark E. Smith seemed in high spirits today. He was actually smiling when he kicked the roadie off stage! Keeping with the band’s tradition of barely ever playing anything more than a couple of years old, this year’s ‘Shiftwork’ LP was really brought alive. This is quite sad because it means a largely excellent back catalogue gets ignored, with virtually the only ‘old’ song they played being ‘Big New Prinz’. Still, Mark does like to keep himself on his toes. An encore was called for and delivered in the shape of last year’s Festive 50 chart topper ‘Bill Is Dead’ and the title track from the ‘Shiftwork’ LP. ‘Always different, always the same, they are the reason I listen to pop music’, John Peel is quoted as saying when asked to describe The Fall. They are now in a league of their own.

That left two bands to round up the day and the best were (naturally) left till last. Simply put, CARTER THE UNSTOPPABLE SEX MACHINE were brilliant. Rock festival purists would undoubtedly have been horrified at two guys running around on stage with a drum machine and backing tapes for accompaniment. Despite the fact that Carter are better suited to slightly more intimate venues than a 30,000 capacity outdoor arena, they didn’t let this spoil their set and their sound was far from lost in the open air. They were also very well received. The set was opened with ‘Surfing U.S.M.’ and continued with many faithful renditions of tracks from their last LP ‘30 Something’. When Carter play live, the songs sound no different from their vinyl counterparts, but that is testimony to how good their records are. That’s why it’s better to see them live; because you look stupid stage-diving in your bedroom. ‘Sheriff Fatman’ and ‘This Is How It Feels’, the Inspiral Carpets number, formed the first encore and ‘G.I. Blues’ closed the set completely.

Watching JAMES in concert is always both a pleasure and an experience. Tonight’s spot at the Reading Festival was no exception even though my view was mostly obscured by the large gut of a front row security guard. James have now reached a stage where you have to have an opinion on them. Every third person you pass on the street is wearing a James T-shirt. For a band that have been together in various incarnations since 1983, it’s a surprise that it has taken them so long to get this far. James have a back catalogue that many bands would kill to have written themselves. From the opening shot ‘What For’ (a single that deserved to be a massive hit), through to the end ‘How Was It For You’ (their first taste of Top 40 success) and the encore of ‘Come Home’, there was never a dull moment. All the old songs were revitalised and sounded as fresh as if they had been written yesterday. The new songs were all gems in their own right. Tracks like ‘Hymn From A Village’ tend to lose their vulnerability under the expanded line-up but that’s not to say that the song wasn’t done justice to. The band put so much energy and vitality into their performances, it’s as if each one is playing for the last time and is trying to outdo the other while still staying in complete harmony. Tim puts so much into it that he appears to be hyperventilating between each song. Of course, even bands of magnitude have their problems. The early part of the set was brought down by bad sound. It took times trying to start ‘Walking The Ghost’ before Tim gave up and went for another mic. But there are always the highs with the lows. After they played ‘Sit Down’, the crowd broke up the order by singing the chorus back to the onstage assemblage at such a volume that the band couldn’t carry on. It is moments like seeing the look of elation on Tim’s face as he sat and surveyed the mass of singing faces that make it all worthwhile. ‘Lose Control’ followed, stripped down completely to acoustic guitar and vocals. They manage to keep their stage shows fresh and alive by constantly changing their set around and making each show unique. James have finally arrived and they are untouchable.

Sunday 25th

Seeing as the Main Stage had such a patchy line-up, I decided to spend most of the day in the Mean Fiddler tent. Naturally, it took a few bands for the atmosphere to warm up. WELL LOADED did nothing for me at all. They in fact sent me to sleep. TOASTED HERETIC were marginally better, yet still not enjoyable. LOVES YOUNG NIGHTMARE were fairly good, or worth applauding anyway. The tent packed out for the next artist, CAPTAIN SENSIBLE, appearing in trademark red beret and round shades. He was great, giving us a run through his greatest moments, including old Damned favourites ‘New Rose’ and ‘Smash It Up’, and ‘Glad It’s All Over’. He left the stage with a cry of ‘Buy my records, you fucking bums!’

THE POPINJAYS sprang up next to inject a bit of fun into the proceedings with bouncy melodies and catchy choruses, after legions of Damned fans left the tent. The girls didn’t look as if they expected to go down too well. Despite this, they were very well received.

Swansea’s very own indie favourites, THE POOH STICKS, followed some out of place jazz band. They were really good, even though I knew none of the songs. Amelia Fletcher guested to add some sugar to the harmonies and Hue finished off by squirting the audience with a water pistol!

FATIMA MANSIONS were the next band that I saw in the Mean Fiddler, who were just fascinating to watch. Cathal Coughlan has enough venom in him to put a charging rhino to sleep, while his excellent choice of songs showed that it is possible to sing about political matters and not come across as a load of pretentious toss like THE GODFATHERS (Main Stage). He must come off stage completely exhausted after his performance of a marionette in a cyclone. Fatima Mansions closed with the epic ‘Blues For Ceausescu’.

NEDS ATOMIC DUSTBIN were the only band on the Main Stage that I bothered to see anything of, and that was only about twenty minutes worth. The Neds played a selection of new songs and their hit single ‘Happy’ in the short time that I saw them. They were as energetic as ever and looking as if they were having a great time, which is what it’s all about really.

NEW FAST AUTOMATIC DAFFODILS proved themselves to be as effortlessly brilliant as ever, exuding their gritty funk grooves to the point where the tent felt more like a club than a gig, and everyone was dancing. New FADS are not as raw as they used to be but that does not make them mellow by any stretch of the imagination. Tracks included ‘Big’, ‘Fishes Eyes’ and ‘Man Without Qualities’. The crowd were seriously disappointed when the band left the stage and didn’t come back on. Because there were so many bands on at this tent, they all had to play condensed versions of their normal length sets.

The choice between the headliners was easy. It was either a case of standing in a field amongst a bunch of preening goths listening to the pretentious drivel of THE SISTERS OF MERCY or packing myself like a sardine into the Mean Fiddler to experience Bristol’s finest, THE BLUE AEROPLANES.

They were well worth the wait. People who were pissed off about New FADS short set soon forgot their grumbles. As is always the case with The Blue Aeroplanes, there seemed to more people up on the stage than down in the crowd. Their mixture of ‘beat poetry’ with layers of guitars (and a weird Polish dancer) seems to work every time now. The band rolled off such favourites as ‘Jacket Hangs’, ‘…And Stones’, ‘Yr Own World’ and their Paul Simon cover of ‘The Boy In The Bubble’. Even the indecently young looking guitarist Rodney Allen got his own singing spot. Gerard looked like Rodney’s father next to him, placing a firm parental hand on the young lad’s shoulder. Are The Blue Aeroplanes pretentious or brilliant? Probably a bit of both, but that’s OK because sometimes pretension works. Tonight, The Blue Aeroplanes soared. But they do prompt the question: Was Gerard Langley born with those shades on, or what?

If you want to know what the festival was about; not being able to shower, shit or shave properly for five days, eating cold junk food and drinking warm beer, but being able to see loads of brilliant bands, don’t ask me or take notice of any of the reviews. Get yourself a ticket for Reading ’92 and experience it for yourself!

(all pictures courtesy of www.musicpictures.com except for Iggy Pop, courtesy of Reading Evening Post)

INTERVIEWS // That Joke Isn't Bunny Anymore (1991)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 22:09:00 +0000

Of all the indie bands from the early 90's that I interviewed as staff writer and Music Editor for college rag The Printed Image, very few of them actually made it into a written article. One of the rare ones that did was conducted with a fellow called Noel Burke, who was in the musically unenviable position of having stepped into the shoes of Echo & The Bunnymen's departed singer Ian McCulloch.

To be fair to him, he did a sterling job of fighting his corner in what has since proved to be a losing battle, that of making his own mark in a very difficult situation. As a fan of the original band, I was actually quite taken with the tunes that the Burke-led Bunnymen came up with too, although they didn't really do the name justice in this fan's eyes. Still, respect was given to him for trying.

This interview was one of the times when I was left with a tale to tell from getting it that was almost equivalent to the subject itself. As best I can remember, I took the bus from Cardiff to Bristol where the band were playing that night. It was cheap option and as I was knee-deep in usual student debt, a train wasn't really going to be on the agenda. Befriending a couple I met on the back of the bus who were also heading to the same show, I may well have gotten my mind a little befuddled with whatever they had with them to pick themselves up or slow themselves down and duly shared with me.

Having been into the Bunnymen for a few years by then but gotten into them after their heyday, it was the closest I'd got to seeing one of their shows. There were at least two of the original members of the band playing and 'two out of four is better than none', I thought to myself.

After the show, I went backstage to talk with Noel. By then, the band were not getting anything like the press they'd received in their heyday and given that he was new to being a Bunnyman, seemed glad to have someone want to know what he had to say - even if it was some big-haired 'A' Level student that wasn't likely to give them a great deal of exposure in his rag.

Noel bought me a beer too, which added to the sense of congeniality I was feeling about the evening. He was a very pleasant subject to interview and we spent quite a while talking. Might have even had another beer together too.

Once it was all over and the tape recorder was switched off, I bid my farewells and exited an empty venue. Not really that aware of the time that had passed, I got to the bus station only to find that I had missed the last one back to Cardiff.

No money for a hotel. No desire at all to sleep on the streets of Bristol. Too tired by the exaltations of the evening, I wasn't of a mind to try and stay awake wandering around the darkened streets until the first bus of the morning. There was nothing for it but to hitch back to Cardiff.

I don't remember a great deal about the journey back now, but I know that hitching after midnight in a deserted city doesn't equal prime chances of being picked up. I had to wait a good couple of hours to get a ride, probably from some night-shifting trucker that saw it as a way to break up the tedium of what he was doing. It would have been somewhat close to dawn by the time I got back home, so there certainly wouldn't have been any college gone to the next day.

I'd barely ever dream of hitching these days. Suppose it's something that if you ever do it, and I've certainly done it enough in my time to not want to have to do it again now, you can tick it off your list of things to experience in a lifetime and leave it at that.

Ian McCulloch eventually rejoined a reformed Echo & The Bunnymen. Noel left the band in 1992 and became a teacher. He later got back together with his first former bandmates St Vitus Dance and released an album called 'Glypotheque' in 2008.

That Joke Isn’t Bunny Anymore

In 1987, Johnny Marr left The Smiths and, thankfully for the band’s sake, they split up after considering replacing Marr. Imagine now if Morrissey had left and the band had continued, with a replacement for Morrissey, under the name of The Smiths. To say that they wouldn’t have been the same would have been an understatement. Neither would The Wedding Present without David Gedge. Or Happy Mondays without Shaun Ryder. Or Echo And The Bunnymen without Ian McCulloch.

Ian McCulloch left Echo And The Bunnymen during an American tour in 1988. Bravely, Will Sargeant, Les Pattinson and Pete De Freitas decided to soldier on, still carrying the Bunnymen flag. A replacement for Mac was found in Belfast-born Noel Burke. They received further setback when drummer Pete De Freitas was tragically killed in a motorcycle crash (the new album ‘Reverberation’ is dedicated to Peter) the following year.

Will and Les made it clear that it was their intention to persevere under the moniker of Echo And The Bunnymen. Initially, Mac hit back, suggesting that they rename themselves Echoes Of The Bunnymen. Last year, 1990, the new Echo And The Bunnymen album ‘Reverberation’ was unleashed in the face of adverse criticism. I only remember reading one good review and that was only a good review, whereas in the past an Echo And The Bunnymen album should have received an excellent review. The main problem that most writers seemed unable to come to terms with was the name. They didn’t seem to look further, to the music on the album.

Having said this, ‘Reverberation’ is actually an excellent album. Noel Burke is a rare find indeed and a very talented songwriter. Unfortunately, this is possibly the worst light he could be seen under, for he will constantly be living under the shadow of Ian McCulloch, a daunting prospect. ‘Reverberation’ on the other hand does not stand up very well against the real Bunnymen albums, such as ‘Heaven Up Here’ or ‘Ocean Rain’. One wonders whether he is being himself in his song writing or just a pale imitation of Mac.

I’ve talked to a few people who say it’s not the same and I say it’s not meant to be the same. I’ve got my own preoccupations with singing, and lyrically I’ve got enough to be going on with myself to worry about what was going before.

I see it as an integral part of the band. Obviously, a frontman has certain duties and in the whole scheme of things, the spotlight’s on you. It’s silly denying that, but as far as anyone else in the band is concerned, songwriting or whatever, everybody’s got an input and that has always been the way with the Bunnymen. It was like that when Mac was in the band. Will and Les did a hell of a lot of the songwriting. Mac wrote the lyrics and he did his own vocal parts and that’s exactly what I do with the band.

Previously to the Bunnymen (Mark II), Noel had been in a band called St. Vitus Dance who had split up and Noel had moved to Liverpool, getting a job at Waterstone’s book shop. This is where Will and Les found him after having decided on him as a replacement for their departed singer.

Burke had been a fan of the band up to ‘Ocean Rain’. Had they been amongst his influences as a member of St. Vitus Dance?

I saw them in Belfast. There was a bomb scare and we had to go out into the freezing cold for about an hour before we were let into the gig, so they were dead late, but it was good. I enjoyed it. At the time, I wasn’t even in a band. I liked them, but they wouldn’t have been an influence. Lyrically, it was people like Costello and Cathal Coughlan, out of Microdisney and Fatima Mansions now. Musically, it was mostly 60’s type stuff, like The Zombies and Wire. Basically, it was the same sort of thing as this band in that it was very democratic and everybody had different tastes. I’m only speaking from my point of view. Everybody had a different input.

Although a lot of their live set consists of the new songs that they have written together, a selection of old songs have crept in, such as ‘Silver’, ‘All That Jazz’ and ‘Bedbugs And Ballyhoo’. Having been a fan of the band, surely it would have been strange for Noel to have been playing those songs?

It’s not that weird because I’m so familiar with them. Obviously, I prefer to play the songs that we’ve written, but as far as the old songs are concerned, they’re Will and Les’s songs and they were Pete’s as well. He was in the band when I first joined.

For Will and Les, this is like a new band. There is one respect though in which they are not a new band. They have kept the name, which is going to invite criticisms and comparisons to Mac’s Bunnymen.

I’ve got a theory about that. The people who are going to compare will be about the same age as myself, about 27, and they’ll be looking back to what they were doing when ‘Heaven Up Here’ or ‘Ocean Rain’ were out. People have fonder memories of an album because it’s buried in their past and they’ll associate it with losing their virginity or whatever. I don’t think it’s fair to compare it on those terms because it’s something you know and love and it changes. Certainly people are going to have a lot of preconceptions and be sceptical. I would have had that attitude. If I had been an outsider, I would have said that it’s bound to be crap. I think that people, when they look back in a year or so, they’ll think it’s a really great album. I think it is a pity it has come out in such circumstances. People look at it in its historical perspective now and see it in this so-called ‘bad light’.

Once the fans have been won over, the next hurdle is the press, who can destroy a band’s career and haven’t been too warm to the new Bunnymen yet. Does Noel get upset by the press reactions?

Who gives a shite? There’s room in the world for everyone. The music press only tend to be interested if they think there’s going to be a slanging match and we’re not going to do it. We’re not going to come out and slag Mac off. My philosophy in life is ‘those who can do, those who can’t work for the NME’. I know loads of people who work for the NME who were in bands who never did anything. So they got into the NME with a chip on their shoulder.

So, provided Echo And The Bunnymen don’t take too much notice of those cutting journalists, what plans are there for the future?

I just want to do as many weird and wonderful things as possible. I want to put out loads of singles. I want to do stuff outside of the band. Everybody wants to do stuff outside of the band. We’ve all got such diverse interests. I don’t mean anything like a solo career, but working with other people. Maybe singing or getting into production. I just want to keep doing what I’m doing.

There is a question that is always asked of Paul McCartney or George Harrison. It is, in fact, asked of any band members or bands who have gone their separate ways. Are there any plans for a reformation?

I don’t think that (Will and Les) have any regrets. It’s just that things went the way they did and I think they’re happy now. The whole thing had soured and they weren’t getting on. It was like a marriage and everyone had got used to each other but they weren’t getting on and it was a question of who would send the boat out first and Mac did; he left. I don’t think they’ll ever want it the way it was. I know for a fact that they don’t see it now as second best.

Since I interviewed Noel, the band have been dropped from their record label. Time will tell if they win the press back over. Bring on the dancing reviews.

INTERVIEWS // All The Songs Sound The Same (1991)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 23:47:00 +0000

The first time I remember dabbling a little more seriously with writing was accepting an assignment for the high school newspaper, aged 11. Excited as I was to have the opportunity, as an avowed pacifist even then I was dismayed that my first 'proper writing job' was to be a review of a boxing match! The piece in question may not exist now, but I do remember that I watched the match and went ahead with writing about it.

It took something like another ten years before I would really have something to get my teeth into. Taking an 'A' Level in Media Studies at a Cardiff college, I gravitated towards the setting up of a new magazine, that came to be named The Printed Image. I was given the position of Music Editor, which felt quite prestigious at the time. It certainly gave me a dose of life as a 'blagging' music journalist, as I spent the good part of a year calling up record companies under this guise and convincing them to allow me to interview the artists that spent so long on my turntable at the time.

While I met many of the indie heroes of the day and got a feel for the mysteries of backstage life, I rarely turned any of the resulting interviews into articles. I guess that this was partly down to the drag of spending many hours trawling through a cassette to transcribe what I'd come up with to turn it into something readable. However, the first one of these interviews formed the article that appears below.

Following on from the demise of The Smiths and in the days when anything that John Peel gave his thumbs up to got a listen by my pals and I, The Wedding Present became the 'band du jour' for a good few years. Founder and frontman David Gedge was my first interview subject and despite my initial fanboy nerves, he was the most genial of hosts.

The interview took place at the Newport Centre and must have lasted for up to an hour. At the time, the band had a habit of selling bootleg tapes of their shows at gigs and I was keen to put this possibility to the test. After the interview, I asked Gedge if he didn't mind me making a recording, given that the horse's mouth was on a plate (so to speak) and I had the gear to do it with. To my pleasure, he said yes and even agreed to give me written permission.

After the interview, my gang and I headed for the front row where we would bear the crush of the crowd to get closer to the band. I had the tape recorder stuffed down the front of my trousers (not the easiest of circumstances), a wire trailing along my sleeve and the mic in my outstretched hand. It wasn't long before a security guard came up to me and told me that I couldn't make the recording.

Promptly, I whipped Gedge's permission slip ('To whom it may concern, please let the bearer of this letter...') and showed it to the guard. There wasn't much he could do in the face of it and he might even have bristled a little at my audacity when I asked if he would put my machine on the stage so that I could get a better recording, but still went ahead and did it.

The days of black jeans, Newcastle Brown and getting crushed down the front row seem long behind me now, but they were certainly fun times. My meeting with David Gedge turned out to be quite a useful masterclass in how to go ahead and put your own music out yourself, without going through the machinations of the music industry. It helped that he was a very nice bloke too.

All The Songs Sound The Same

David Gedge being honest.

On Thursday 15th November, The Wedding Present played to an elated crowd at Newport Centre, mixing a set of choice oldies with new songs from their coming third LP. I spoke to the band’s mainman, David Gedge, finding him to be very pleasant and talkative.

He told me about many aspects of the band’s five year career, their transition from a small time independent band to one of Britain’s top ‘alternative’ groups and many other aspects of the music industry that the band operate in. I asked David about the band’s beginnings and how they managed to finance the first single ‘Go Out And Get ‘Em Boy’.

We were all on the dole apart from Peter (the band’s guitarist) who was a teacher and we just basically saved £5 out of each of our dole cheques and started a bank account. It’s surprising how much it adds up really. Something like £10 a week, £500 a year. It cost about £100 to record and £400 to manufacture.

We did a couple of demo tapes and sent them off, but no-one is really interested in demos. We did this other tape which we decided was good enough to record and we took that around to see if anybody wanted to put it out and again everybody said no so we decided to put it out ourselves. And we called it Reception Records because we were called The Wedding Present and it seemed like an obvious word.

A lot of The Wedding Present’s influences have been among the most revered underground guitar bands of the past twenty five years. David told me what he and the band listen to and how their tastes have changed.

There’s four people in the group and I suppose we’ve all got different tastes, especially Peter who’s into folk bands and stuff. I’ve always been a fan of guitar bands really, like The Membranes, The Velvet Underground, Postcard bands. It probably has changed, although I’m not sure what to. I’m quite fickle really, one record that I like today, I’ll probably hate in a week.

I like Ride because I went to see them in Sheffield and they dedicated a song to me, so I was really touched. Afterwards, they told us they formed the group after seeing us play. So Ride are probably my favourite group at the moment.

They have also worked with producer Steve Albini recently. Had David listened to any of Albini’s other bands since recording with him?

I’m not really a fan of the bands he tends to work with, to be honest. I like The Breeders and I like The Pixies but most of the bands he works with just go ‘chrrrrwhrrrrchrrrr’ and I just don’t like it. I think it’s quite boring and I don’t think they’ve got any real songs. I think Big Black (one of the bands Albini has been in) were a bit like that but the guitar sounds were great. I saw them live in Leeds and thought, this is the man for us, really.

He’s very much a person who’ll remain in the background, or with us anyway. He’ll just set the stuff up and he’ll fiddle around with your amps a bit and your drumkit and say ‘How do you like this sound?’, and it’s usually a really good sound. He’ll just record it. When you come away from that and you’re writing at home again, you use that knowledge to write songs and I’ve probably got more money now, so I can experiment with guitars and amps. It’s all getting more technical. We used to just have these guitars, plug them into an amplifier and play, whereas now I’ve got all different weird tunings and effects pedals which just make it more varied.

While a lot of The Wedding Present’s early indie contemporaries such as Primal Scream and The Soup Dragons seem to have jumped on Manchester’s ‘dance’ bandwagon, the band have stayed true to their course and kept up the guitars. Although Gedge isn’t completely dismissive of the whole scene, he remains slightly sceptical.

I think it’s always interesting to experiment with things like that. I can’t really imagine us doing it now because people would just say ‘bandwagonning’, Primal Scream or something. And I’m probably the only one in the group who’s interested in that type of feel anyway. I’ll wait till my solo career, like Holly Johnson, all those Hi-NRG records. I think it’s a quite interesting phase of music, definitely.

The Wedding Present themselves have often received criticisms of the songs all sounding the same, of being the ‘Status Quo of indie’. They’ve actually named a recent 10” EP ‘All The Songs Sound The Same’. How does David react to these criticisms?

We’ve always tried to change the direction. To me, I suppose ‘Bizarro’ sounds different to ‘George Best’, and I know in retrospect it’s probably not as different as I’d imagined it is. Once we’d made ‘George Best’, there was no point in making that LP again, so we immediately set out to make a different type of record. Ultimately though, I suppose it’s not that dissimilar but now I think after five years of experience and also after having worked with Albini, we’re finally managing to escape from that. I think a lot of it is that we’re quite shy and quite conservative really and it’s very difficult to get a new idea which is good on that situation, because we’re always scared thinking that it’s different, but is it any good? I think finally we’re actually getting over that now and starting to mess around, and obviously we’ve got a bit of money now.

What about reviews?

It depends what mood we’re in really. If I’m in a mood where I’m considering that the music papers are out for a week and then a new one comes along that’s completely disposable in the same way that pop music is, then it doesn’t bother me. I can just take it like a ‘pop comment’. It’s really weird because if someone criticises me and they think the work’s good, then I think ‘oh! thank you very much’, but if they think that it’s bad, I think ‘you’re wrong!’ It’s quite a personal thing to me.

Gedge was in a band whilst studying for his Maths degree at Leeds University called The Lost Pandas, an early version of The Wedding Present. I asked him his opinion on the student environment for fledgling bands.

It’s a really good place to start a group, obviously. Principally because you can put an advert up in the union and there’s going to be a lot of like-minded people hanging around, so it’s quite handy. But it’s probably better to be as far away from University as possible because it’s not a particularly trendy place to be, is it?

The Wedding Present have now made two memorable appearances on one of Britain’s longest musical institutions, Top Of The Pops. Firstly with their particularly lacklustre performance of ‘Brassneck’. Secondly, confusing the audience with its false stops and starts, their version of the old Cockney Rebel song ‘Come Up And See Me (Make Me Smile)’. Was ‘Brassneck’s lack of enthusiasm intentional?

Oh yes, it wasn’t serious, although a number of people thought I was the proper act. I had my brother ring up, who’s not a fan of the band, say ‘What was wrong, had someone died?’ I’m surprised I got away with it really, because I was getting more and more bored. You have to rehearse about eight or nine times during the day to get the camera angles right and every time I was getting more and more deadpan, and I thought that some director’s going to say ‘Come on, you can’t do this’. But he didn’t. I honestly thought we wouldn’t get asked on again after that.

The single went down ten places after that.

I don’t think any single’s gone down further after a Top Of The Pops appearance!

Somebody who gave The Wedding Present a lot of support earlier on and who still does is Radio 1 DJ John Peel. Did David consider The Wedding Present to be a ‘John Peel band’?

I think we probably are. He’s the only person who plays us on national radio. It’s a very much over-used word. I consider ourselves to be an independent band. I know that means about four different things now. To me, about four years ago, it meant being uncompromising. Now, it means you’ve got to treble your guitar or something. Obviously we are in that category of groups, alternative really.

After having been own their own independent record label for so long, they recently signed a deal with a major label. Had the band lost any of their artistic control since signing to RCA?

God no! I think it’s actually the opposite, because we’ve got more money now. We’ll go into the studio and try something and if it doesn’t work, we can have extra studio time to do it again. I think it’s given us more freedom.

There was of course the case of the band’s compilation video, which the group wanted to call ‘Spunk’ and the record company insisted on putting it out as ‘*punk’.

That was RCA’s video department which was a different kettle of fish. I don’t think they really understand us there, whereas to the people who signed us, we said ‘Look, we’re glad you like the group and that you’ve given us all this money, but we should make it clear that we’re not someone you can push around, so if you can’t handle that fact, then go spend your money on someone else’. And they said, ‘All right, fair enough’. I mean, they always advise us and say that if we put the name of the band on the sleeve, we’re going to sell more records, etc, etc. Ultimately, it’s our choice. I can’t imagine it lasting forever. They’ll probably drop us.

For the second year running, The Wedding Present have played at this summer’s Reading Festival, having moved up the bill this year.

If someone had said ten years ago ‘One day, you will be playing the Reading Festival and The Buzzcocks will be on before you’, I would have laughed. But it was a nice day, that was the main thing. The year before it was raining.

Unfortunately for the band, bass player Keith Gregory had his amplifier blow up!

The worst two minutes of my life! Normally, I can think of something to say, but I was so nervous. So many gigs in Britain, Europe and America and nothing like that has really happened before. Guitar strings, they break all the time, but we’ve never had an amp blow up! The biggest audience you can imagine, 20,000 people. I was terrified!

David Gedge is a man who comes over as very satisfied with where he is, describing the band as ‘like a giant hobby’. Talking about music journalism, he questioned ‘how can you describe something that affects you physically?’ Reinforcing the fact that he’s at where he likes and he likes where he’s at, and would be comfortable nowhere else. The band have a good relationship with their fans (‘I think they’re quite nice people in general’), Gedge still hasn’t paid his poll tax (‘I haven’t, but I’ve not been asked yet’) and they can only go from strength to strength.

INTERVIEWS // First Cutlery's Deepest (2007)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 23:36:00 +0000

Tokyo Pinsalocks (l-r Reiko, Hisayo, Naoko)

The first interview I ever did for publication was with David Gedge of The Wedding Present, one of my favourite guitar bands when I was a teenager. It was exciting to meet with one of my musical heroes at the time and I was pleased that he was such an approachable subject. Gedge gave me a long interview and I committed the whole thing to cassette tape.

When it came down to getting an article out of it for the magazine I was writing for at the time, I spent literally hours in the college library, rewinding the tape again and again with headphones clamped to my ears as I transcribed the entire interview. This made the man hours quite considerable and the prospect of going through this process every time I interviewed somebody less than tempting to say the least.

Many years later, interviewing actors at the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo about a play I had just watched them perform, the task was made much easier with the interview having been recorded on a MiniDisc player - the ease of the digital age making my writing job that much faster.

In 2007, I became a staff writer for the now-defunct Asia Player magazine. In what turned out to be my last piece for their final issue, I interviewed another musician and stumbled across the grail of making an interviewer's life even easier. Holding down a writing gig in Tokyo with a handful of other committments at the same time left me with very little space in my life to get more than a few hours sleep a night, so I was grateful for any shortcut that came my way.

The answer? Email your questions to your subject and then just edit their responses into a nice clean looking piece - the trick is that the person being interviewed actually does the work for you and gets their words as they want them in the bargain.

The subject for this piece was Reiko Kaiyoh, drummer with Japanese electro-pop queens Tokyo Pinsalocks. Having written about them already in my column for the magazine, Reiko asked me to give them some coverage on an upcoming event that the band was organising - a female focused arts event that they had called Spoon Market. The resulting interview can be found below.

Unfortunately, I never made it to the show due to there simply not being enough time in my life to squeeze in everything that Tokyo threw at me. It sounded like a really fun gig, but in a place with as much going on all the time as Tokyo has, you simply can't say yes to everything.

Still, I did manage to take my interviewing technique discovery away from the experience, so I got that and Reiko got her coverage - everyone's happy!

First cutlery's deepest

In the rush of a busy life in the city, we take the clutter and bustle of our daily lives for granted. There's always cutlery or chopsticks in the kitchen, and the vending machines will always have tea. Take the humble spoon. Use it to shovel in the cereal, soup or fried rice, wash it up and forget about it till hunger hits again, right?

Think again – there are those for whom it holds a much deeper meaning, and not just as something for Michael Jackson's metal bending friends to show off with.

The Dan of West Africa have mastered the art of carving large spoons into impressive works of sculpture. The spoon's owner is given the title of 'wa ke de', a high distinction given to the most hospitable woman of the village. The custom of the men of Wales giving love spoons to their sweethearts dates back hundreds of years. Even Freud himself has gotten in on the act, giving the spoon the female role in the knife/fork/spoon dinner table trio.

Tokyo Pinsalocks, Japan's leading purveyors of all-girl electro-pop have taken the spoon as metaphor for themselves. Singer Naoko once described the band that way, being both cute and tough – feminine curves tempered with a metallic steel. To extend the metaphor further, they've organised not only an event but an entirely new scene named after the object – September's upcoming 'Spoon Market' at Ebisu Milk.

The event is set to be an extravaganza of all things female from this fair city, and features bands, DJs, VJs, art exhibitions, shops, stalls and food. The music is ladled on thick, with appearances from the Pinsalocks crew themselves, along with Noodles, Motocompo, Falsies On Heat and Kate Sikora, amongst others. Spoonfuls of style will come from the fashion goods, accessories and jewellery on sale, with further treats served up in the way of paintings, photography and short films. It's all stirred up with fine food from the likes of Patisserie Potager and Tacostar.

Asia Player managed to grab a few moments between courses with Pinsalocks drummer and co-organiser Reiko Kayoh to find out a little more about what's cooking down at Milk.

Where did the idea come from?

We wanted to create an atmosphere where we would be excited to perform our music, and an ideal place to go out to have fun. We play music as a way of expressing ourselves, which is very similar to that of other artforms – film making, fashion designing, and food making. When we create our music, we get inspired by all these things, not only from listening to other music.

We couldn't find a place like that, so we decided to make one.

What makes it different from other events in Tokyo?

There are events which have live performances, and art exhibitions together, but usually the art is secondary to the 'main' live show. At Spoon Market, all the art, shops, food, and music are given equal status.

Ebisu Milk is known as a venue/club, but we are proud to offer it as a gallery/cafe-bar/shopping market too that night.

What are you hoping to achieve with it?

To stimulate people's everyday lives and make them a little happier by attending to this event. Also to establish a scene of female artists by combining these different fields, hopefully all getting inspired by each other.

What are you most looking forward to at 'Spoon Market'?

For Milk to become one big market. All the artists we chose are awesome, but what's important is to join them all together and make the whole place into one world, one market. From entering the door to the end of the basement floor, we want the audience to feel 'what a cute and cool place!'

What are your expectations for it?

As far as we know there are no other events like it, but we are sure there are many people who would want to come to a place like this.

We expect more artists will become interested in Spoon Market culture. We want to join people who usually work in different fields together and create a scene.

We will be sure of our success when we hear people describing someone's artwork as 'that's very Spoon Market-ish!'

Who do you hope to attract to the event?

The target will be people like us! That means women our age (late 20's to early 30's) who are interested in music, fashion, art, like going to cafes, want to make their own style and are looking for something that inspires them. However, people from different generations, genders, or cultural backgrounds are just as welcome.

What's in it for boys attending?

Boys and girls might feel the same way about something but express themselves in a different way. They can definitely enjoy the similarities and differences in the art styles. Maybe they'll be able to understand their girlfriend's taste a little better too!!!

Is this going to be a one-off or a regular event?

A regular event hopefully, but we'll see how it goes after the first one. We want to see if this is the right place to have this event, the right number of artists, etc. We definitely will continue the Spoon Market with the same concept, but don't know when and where yet. So, watch this space.

What's your message to the audience?

If you like one artist, you'll definitely love the rest. For people who want a good night out in Tokyo, for people who're looking for inspiration, for people who just want to enjoy music or to relax, see you at the Spoon Market!

EVENT INFO

VENUE: Ebisu Milk
DATE: 21 September (Friday) 20:00 – 04:00
TICKETS: Advance - 3,000 yen (inc. one drink) / Door - 3,500 yen (inc. one drink)
Available from Ticket PIA
WEB: www.pinsalocks.com/spoon
PHONE: 03-3413-9331 (Heaven's Door)

SHORT STORIES // My Name Is Shoko (2006)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 16:11:00 +0000

Where do stories come from?

Paul Simon, in response to being asked where he got the inspiration for his songs, once said something along the lines of songs being out there all over the place, floating by like invisible gases, and he just happened to act like a receiver that picks up on the signals going past him. His songs didn't come from him but he just picked up on something that was drifting past. It was a nice analogy for the often mysterious creative process.

There are many other ways that songs and stories come into being though. I would hazard a guess that the vast majority of fiction draws in some way, however small, from traces of personal experience. A writer looks around them, sees something of interest or intrigue and then uses their imagination to forge the observation or experience into something resembling a tale that they then have to tell.

In the spring of 2006, I was sitting on the terrace of a hotel in Kyoto enjoying the morning warmth and a pleasant hotel breakfast, when a woman came onto the terrace, sat down behind me and began talking to herself. She followed it up with ordering a beer and having a right old time - entirely alone.

I wondered what it was that made somebody do such a thing, especially a woman who looked like she was usually such a respectable character. It's not really the done thing in Japan to sit and stare at that which seems out of place (unless you're a child on a train gawping at a 'foreigner', for example), so I tried to be as subtle as possible in casually looking over my shoulder to try and figure out what the deal was with her.

One can never know what demons plague the strangers that surround us, but imagining why can go some way to filling in the gaps. What may be a thing of complete innocence, a stranger momentarily dropping their guard and losing it in public, can become an elaborate fusion of plot and counter-plot when twisted through a writer's mind's eye.

So it was with Shoko. The main character in this story was inspired by that woman on the Kyoto hotel terrace. The rest is filled in myself, attempting to sketch out some of the expat experience of living in Japan with fictional writing about Japanese characters too, and ways that their lives sometimes intertwine.

'My Name Is Shoko' has yet to be published elsewhere so this posting is a first appearance anywhere. Be forewarned though - it's a pretty long tale!

My Name Is Shoko

Frank Grunwald sighed as he placed two espressos on the table and squeezed into the bamboo chair that faced his colleague. Ed Wade had joined the agency a few years before, Japan being his first overseas assignment. Having arrived a couple of years earlier and remembering some of the struggles he’d had settling in to Tokyo at first, Frank had taken Ed under his wing. On their first night on the town, they discovered a shared and deep-rooted passion for jazz that sealed their friendship.

When his memo had originally come through, an electronic missive from the comparative calm of the bygone Clinton era, Frank had squared up the changes that this would mean for his settled life. Even with Columbine, Mogadishu, Iraqi no-fly zones and Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the government building in Oklahoma, when viewed through the fear-laden spectacles of these times of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, it seemed like such a peaceful period in American life. Then again, as the past is lived through and the present is lived in, it’s easier to focus the memory on what was good and obliterate the bad.

Despite the sackful of change that was about to rain down on the family, a part of him was delighted at the prospect. All the greats dropped by Tokyo. Yokohama had its own Blue Note. The secret joints squirreled away down some unknown side street in the middle of nowhere were legendary to him and his band of fellow true believers.

‘You’re sounding tired, Frank’, started Ed, kicking off their traditional Saturday morning get together with a sympathetic ear. Every week they followed the same pattern – they’d meet at 10, set the wives off shopping down Omotesando, then retire to their usual café, sitting in the same seats, ordering the same drinks and talking about the same things. The mundanity of routine provided comfort and relief from the pressures of their work and the quantum shift needed in human behaviour to make their work unnecessary.

They’d kick off by getting the working week out of the way – a new development in Japanese solar power research, the latest threat to their agency from the fossil fuel lobby or a pending paper being presented at a carbon trading conference in Delhi. Once the in tray was cleared, they could get down to what really mattered. A Bill Evans reissue, lovingly remastered and with extensive liner notes, picked up in Shibuya on Wednesday evening. A newly discovered Japanese bass player, plucking pure magic from his strings and chanced upon in some Kichijoji basement dive. Who’ll be on the bill with Herbie at Big Sight this year.

Outside, the street was already in full bustle as the shadows on the paving shortened in line with the ascension of the spring sun. A light breeze murmured along the boulevard, brushing the leaves, pregnant in their green brilliance, against each other with sighs of their own.

‘Another tough week, Ed. I’m really in need of a break.’

Convinced that the dark circles under Frank’s eyes had grown larger since last weekend and aware that his boss was unlikely to get a vacation this summer due to the G8 Advisory Panel he was chairing, Ed thought it better to get the shop talk out of the way faster.

‘So how was Kyoto?’ he enquired, keen for a few scraps of good news but also hoping that Frank had followed up on his suggestion of taking a little time for himself whilst there.

Across the table, Frank knocked back the rest of his espresso and his eyes glazed over for a moment. He’d had a gruelling week running a series of workshops on environmental responsibility for US corporations operating in Asia, and rewiring DNA is hardly falling off a log.

The caffeine kicked in and the tiniest of smiles began a slow crawl across his face.

‘Stumbled across this great little joint I’d never known about before. A hot little trio…nothing but Monk tunes. Broke my heart, man, broke my heart…’ he paused for a moment to recollect the sumptuous notes coaxed out of the keys a couple of days before ‘…and made up for that damned Exxon asshole I had to deal with in the morning.’ His brow furrowed again. ‘I don’t know Ed, some people just can’t seem to comprehend what we’re facing. They just don’t get it.’

‘Well my friend, if biology decides to continue this experiment with higher intelligence, natural selection will take those fossil fuel dinosaurs out eventually.’

‘And it’s precisely that long term view that helps me hold my tongue,’ Frank replied. ‘Still, the hotel was nice.’

Ed enjoyed comparing places to stay and he was generally impressed with Japanese hotels. They had a smooth consistency in their operations and tended to work like well-oiled machines. He’d stayed in some pretty rough joints trekking round Europe after graduation so the service he got in a Japanese hotel would always remind him of having come up in the world since his earlier youth. As far as Frank was concerned, they were purely functional boxes that kept him away from sleeping next to his wife. It was unusual for him to have actually remembered this one.

‘A funny thing happened at breakfast on my second day there,’ Frank leaned in, warming Ed up for a story.

As he was usually stuck in the office during the working week, he was always keen to hear Frank’s ‘on the road’ tales from the provinces outside of the metropolis.

‘I went down for breakfast at 6.30…’ Frank went on, ‘…can’t think so clearly on an empty stomach so I went down early. I loaded my tray from the buffet – miso soup, fish, eggs, coffee, the usual kind of Western-Japanese mix, and took a seat outside with it. You remember the weather in the week?’

‘Sure. It was really warm here. There too?’

‘A glorious spring morning. Anyway, I’m chowing down my food, no-one else around, sun on my back, when this woman came onto the terrace. The staff were all scurrying around in their uniforms, seating people on the inside and clearing away the trays from the early birds who’d finished their breakfasts and gone. She was pretty well dressed in a smart business suit, and fully made up for the time of day it was. Not overdone or anything, tastefully applied an’ all that, but enough of a mask on to face the day.’

‘How old was she?’

‘From her clothes, I’d guess at mid forties, but I can never tell these things. Might have been in her fifties for all I knew. She walked past and sat on the table behind me, so we’re back to back. Now, this place is self-service, right? There’s nobody else but me on the terrace. Soon as she’s sat down, she belts out a ‘Sumimasen!’ – trying to get the waiter’s attention.’

Ed expected this to be a good story and began to pepper Frank’s tale with comments of his own. ‘Not a great move in a self-service buffet. Must have caused a scene. Anyone answer her call?’

‘Not straight away, no. There’s no one else on the terrace bar her and me anyway. She tries again, this time booming out so the staff inside will definitely hear her and asking for a beer.’

‘That’s a bit early.’

‘Just what I thought. She’s sporting a navy blue business suit, offset with gold jewellery, and I can sense a sadness in her that is not written on her face. She’s smiling to herself as her long fingers raise a Pianissimo Slim to her red lips and her gold lighter clicks open. Beer and smokes at that time of the day, she’s tougher than I am.’

‘At college I sometimes started a day like that, but sure couldn’t keep it up for the rest of it,’ sympathised Ed.

‘Right. When nobody comes out to serve her, she stands up and purposefully walks inside, cigarette dangling off her bottom lip. I’ve got my fish and eggs down at this point and am working towards the coffee to get my brain in gear for the day ahead. Trouble is, I can’t think about work ‘cause I’m trying to figure out what’s the deal with her.’

A couple of minutes later, she’s back with a large glass of beer in her hand and a big smile on her face. She sits down and knocks it back, like she was Harry Dean Stanton just outta the Texas desert.’

…

Shoko fumbled around in her bag a second time, to find the card that served as a key for the door of his hotel room. Had she given it to him to keep safe after all? A foolish mistake she’d not make again, if so. Junya was always forgetting things – his wallet on top of a parking lot toll machine, an umbrella under the table at a restaurant, even his own suitcase on the shinkansen. He wheezed next to her, catching his breath and not bothering to check his pockets. The alcohol had gone to both of their heads and he was more concerned with straightening out his vision so that there was only one door handle, not two or three.

The same size and shape as the business cards that littered the bottom of her purse, she eventually located it amongst them, extracted it carefully and dropped it into the awaiting slot above the handle.

A satisfying click and they were inside.

The hotel room was dark and cool. When they had gone out earlier in the evening, they had closed the curtains, left the air conditioning on cool and switched on a small table lamp in the corner to provide some subtle illumination of the room. The bedclothes were still the same highway pile-up they’d been left as earlier.

First, shoes off and left by the door. Junya had kicked his off and stumbled into the darker recesses of their hideaway from the rest of the world and the reality of the lives they usually led. Shoko took her left heel in her hand and slipped the shoe smoothly off her foot, repeating the well-worn action with the right one. She subconsciously followed the same pattern every time she removed her footwear, with the same unthinking and lilting rhythm of a river passing over the stones on its bed. Placing her shoes carefully next to each other, she did the same for the ones he’d cast off so carelessly.

As he stumbled into the room, Junya’s hand automatically found the remote control and flicked the hotel TV on. The screen showed a parade of pretty young things – actors, actresses, singers, models – on another cooking show. Their hairstyles were meticulously tousled and their expensive designer threads looked casually thrown on. Each one was enjoying their 15 seconds of passing through the spotlight’s orbit – Warhol’s maxim reduced yet further for the blip era. The pretty young things were taking it in turn to sample the delights or horrors of each others attempts at cooking a range of seafood dishes, brandishing expressions of delighted joy or cutely constrained repulsion.

As he tried to focus on the glaring box that had taken over the room, Junya struggled to figure out whether he’d already seen this show once or twice today, or if it was a new one.

Although his drunkenness caused him to lose some of his sheen, he usually cut a fairly dashing figure. A sharply chiselled jaw, hair cut in an Elvis style plus the diamond-studded cufflinks he usually sported had made him stand out from the other gentlemen when they had first met. That was two years ago, and the bar in the Gion district where the encounter had taken place was no longer in business.

Junya lived with his wife and daughter, out west in the Tokyo suburb of Tachikawa, although he was rarely at home. A salesman for a major electronics company, he was often out of town on business. Even when he was in Tokyo, the combination of having to work hard and entertain his clients after hours, plus his weakness for the Russian dancers that kept many of Roppongi’s ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ in a steady supply of bottle blondes meant that he spent very little time with his wife and barely even knew his daughter.

Shoko was a little younger than Junya, but not by a great deal. In the 1980’s, during the ‘Bubble Era’, she and her husband Hirotaka had run a highly successful advertising agency in Osaka. As they always do, the bubble burst, the Japanese economy slumped and their agency eventually hit the skids. Hiro was utterly ashamed of what he perceived to be his failure to be successful in business, but took a different route to many of his contemporaries. He didn’t jump in front of a rush hour commuter train. Instead, he picked off one of the young company secretaries and ran off to Hokkaido with her.

To Shoko’s astonishment, she never heard from him again. Accustomed to the good life as she was, the lean years following the collapse of her former life were a great struggle to adjust to and after a few years, she slipped into hostessing. It kept her in diamond smiles and having worked in advertising, she became very good at targeting her clients exact needs. In time, she worked her way upwards through the ranks and became one of the city’s best-known Mama-sans, Kyoto being her new start to Hiro’s Hokkaido.

Junya’s exact needs had been more difficult to identify. To her, he had a mystique to his character, a faraway look in his eye that, dangerous as it probably was, attracted her. He had a notorious weakness for women, but the restless spirit that marked him out as magnetic seemed to spring from somewhere else, somewhere distant.

One thing she could be sure of, although they were both finally in the same hotel room again after another month apart, he was drunk. He’d been drinking on the train on the way in that evening already, which she’d picked up right away despite his best attempts to hide it with breath mints. He’d carried on at the restaurant, clearly drinking with a purpose. When asked over dinner whether there was anything wrong or that was troubling him, he batted her concerns away and replied how glad he was to see her. Shoko couldn’t help but notice that his hand kept loitering near his chest, fluttering as if unable to make a decision yet trying to clutch at something.

Sprawled on his back, Junya took up most of the bed. After a brief glance in the mirror whilst passing, shoes neatly aligned near the door, she gingerly sat on the edge of the bed and turned to face him. His eyelids were drooping and sporadically jerked upwards as he struggled to stay awake. Shoko tucked her legs underneath her behind, so that she was sitting on her feet. Then she reached her long fingers out and placed them on his cheek. As he drifted off, the touch of her hand on his skin produced a ripple of a smile at the corners of his mouth.

Perhaps it was the disappointment of him being in this condition after the long absense. Perhaps it was the combination of the alcohol itself and the medication that she’d been taking for recent yet chronic cases of depression that had been happening. Perhaps it was the unavoidable breaking down of some neural pathway that was on its way out. Whatever the reason, something snapped in Shoko. She grabbed his necktie in one hand and slapped him hard across the face – back and forth, once, twice, three times. Sluggishly, his eyes began to open, slow as a lizard trying to move around in the winter sun. The speed of his reaction caused her anger to rise yet further. She clenched her fists and began pummelling his chest, screaming no words yet exhaling her growing rage.

As one domino knocks down another, whatever snapped in her caused something to snap in him. His eyes shot open and his chest jerked upwards. His face wore a shocked expression and his hands jumped to clutch at his heart. Shoko was still trapped in her rage, and continued unabated. For a brief moment, Junya found his voice and implored her to stop. The first utterance had the force of an angry man, the second was the sound of a balloon gradually letting out the rest of its air, the third – Junya’s last word – barely even managed to limp out of his throat before it died on his lips.

Slumping back down again, his arched back snapped straight and his eyelids flickered for one last time before clamping shut.

Shoko had no idea that he was suffering from a fragile heart condition, he’d hidden it so well. At first, the momentum of her anger carried her rage into his state of stillness. After a while however, she realised that her actions were having no effect and the life drained from her fury. She poked at his chest, shook his shoulders and implored him to give her some kind of response. Like the sun's slow crawl into a new day, it dawned on her that Junya had stopped breathing altogether and was dead.

The moment this realisation struck, her mind flooded – thoughts, fears, likely consequences, gushed unstoppably across her conscience. She had killed a man. Would she go to jail? What would happen when his wife found out? Why had she been so angry? Why hadn’t he told her about his condition? Would she be able to find another partner at this stage in her life? How could she get out of the hotel without being found out? Who was going to sing to her, make love to her, buy her jewellery now?

Wildly contradictory emotions battled each other. Panic arose from the pit of her stomach to the back of her throat. As her body began to shake, she sidled into the corner of the room and curled into a ball.

A few hours later, shafts of sunlight stubbornly broke through the gaps in the curtains and began staking footholds on the hotel carpet, waking Shoko up to the fact that tomorrow was already here. She snapped out of the trance that had held her captive behind the armchair in the corner of the room and carefully got on her feet. Glancing out of the corner of her eye, she was aware of Junya’s prostate form lying exactly where she’d left him, not yet fully cold but statue still. The bedclothes were piled up around him. What a shock that would be for the chambermaid!

Stepping into the small bathroom, she let her clothes fall to the floor and left them unfolded, an early chink in the armour. She slipped into the shower and the hot water coursed all over her body, making her skin tingle. After the shower, she rubbed herself dry, then wrapped one towel around her body and her hair in another. The morning routine followed to the note – mirror light on, sit down facing mirror, open vanity case, apply foundation, catch glimpse of corpse in background, eye make-up and lipstick, off with the first towel, underwear on…

Shoko checked her reflection in the mirror one last time. Her hair was fine, make-up perfect, smile still in place, clothes looking good, earrings matching outfit – altogether quite beautiful! She was ready for breakfast. Leaving the room exactly as it was, she removed the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign from the outside, closed the door behind her and walked off in the direction of the elevator.

…

Frank continued with his story.

'So she starts calling the waiter over again. There’s some really familiar song in the background, just casually tripping out of the restaurant pa. It’s kind of jolly and sorrowful at the same time, plenty of keyboards and a little harmonica. Sounds like it’s meant to be Dylan, but I know it’s not him.’

‘She get a better response from the waiter this time?’ enquired Ed.

‘Oh, for sure. They were watching her like hawks now, only from the background. One of them came onto the terrace and over to her table. She asked him for a bottle of wine!’

Traces of the song began coming back to him and tugging away at his memory…<’it’s nine o’clock on a Saturday’>…<‘making love to his tonic and gin’>…

‘It was perhaps the first time I’ve ever seen a Japanese waiter refuse to serve somebody at breakfast. And you know how reluctant they are to turn down a customer.’

‘For sure. Was she pissed at that?’

…<‘can you play me a memory?’>…<‘not really sure how it goes’>…<‘I knew it complete, when I wore a younger man’s clothes’>…

‘She seemed to pretty much accept it after a while. I heard the click of her lighter and she just settled on smoking instead. I’m sitting there, with my back to her. There’s a few other guests scattered across the terrace now too, all quietly tucking into their food.

All of a sudden, I started hearing conversation…‘Why won’t they serve us?’…‘I know it’s early, but I’d like a drink’…‘we can do that later, you bad boy!’…‘Let them look, I don’t care’…

Something was wrong though. As casually as I could manage, I turned around, pretending to stretch and also happening to catch a glimpse of this lady.’

‘So what was the deal?’ Ed enquired, picturing himself on the terrace with the sun mottling his face and the fresh smell of morning and coffee in the air.

…<‘we’re all in the mood for a melody’>…<‘you’ve got us feelin’ alright’>…

Frank paused a moment, as if for dramatic effect, knowing he had Ed’s full attention. ‘What was that damned song?’ he thought to himself. He drummed his fingers on the table for a second, stretched out his arms and then leaned in, conspiratorially.

‘I’ll tell you what the deal was, Ed. There was nobody else there. Not a soul. No-one.’

‘So she’s just talking away to herself? Schizophrenia? Imaginary friend?’

‘I don’t know, man. I was wondering the same thing myself. The strangest part for me though <…‘they’re sharing a drink they call loneliness’…> was what happened next. She’s chatting away to this imaginary friend, real bubbly and like she’s having a great time. Of course, she’s getting pretty funny looks by now – people are really staring at her <…‘but it’s better than drinking alone’…> even though she seems to be completely oblivious. Then, all of a sudden, she’s up on her feet and really laying into whoever she thinks she’s with. ‘My name is Shoko!’ she shouts, ‘not Candy, or Star, or Rosie, or Moonlight AND I WILL NOT TAKE THIS ANY MORE!!’

‘My God,’ cut in Ed ‘What a scene!’

‘I didn’t know which way to look. Next thing I know, she slams her fist down on the table – it’s one of those lightweight, round aluminium ones – and her beer glass bounces off and smashes on the terrace paving. The waiters jump into action, more concerned by the fact of the broken glass on the floor than what’s probably the biggest scene they’ve ever seen over breakfast. And she storms out!’

And at exactly that moment, the song came back into his head.

‘Billy Joel! ‘Piano Man’! Got it!’

Ed’s expression veered from the astonishment that was spread across his face at the tale of the Kyoto hotel breakfast to puzzlement at why his colleague had suddenly switched to AOR balladeers (Ed had always much preferred Tom Waits’ bar-room tales).

Yes, they were sharing a drink they called loneliness.

But it was better than drinking alone.

REVIEWS // Lively Up Yourself (2006)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 14:22:00 +0000

Sometimes you come across something that you just can't resist. So it was when I learned about the inaugural Reggae Snow Splash event in one of Japan's premier ski areas. I knew the organisers through other ventures and decided that it was an event that I couldn't miss - an unusual combination (reggae and winter sports) but an irresistible one all the same. Pulling together a small crew of likely sorts, we set off by bus from the the heart of the city bound for the Japan Alps.

The event itself was undoubtedly the party of the year. Through all the fun and games, I managed to write up a review of the event and throw in a little 'gonzo' background to the trip too.

The resulting review got published on a Canadian website named The Foreigner - Japan that I got a couple of other pieces published at too. It can be found here. Having sent the review around a couple of other options too, I also ended up getting commissioned by Outdoor Japan to write the cover story for their Summer Music Festivals issue, posted elsewhere in this blog.

I wasn't able to attend the second Reggae Snow Splash, in 2007, but I know that the organisers expanded the programme for it. I wish them the very best with it in the future and hope to see this fantastic event becoming a permanent fixture on the Japanese event calendar.

Event photos by Racer; Alpine scenery by Dom Pates.

Lively Up Yourself

Chalk and cheese. Salt and cornflakes. Some things are just not meant to go together and can make for an awful mess. However, some opposites can compliment each other. I once tried chocolate chilli at a Mexican restaurant, with great trepidation. It was delicious. British entrants are rarely expected to qualify for the Winter Olympics, yet the UK even came back from Turin with a medal this time around.

Reggae. Snow. Perhaps the last place you’d expect a reggae festival would be at a ski resort. Jamaica might be known for its Blue Mountains but certainly not any white ones. These days, such a sun-kissed sound is no longer confined to the Caribbean, but heard the world over. And Reggae Snow Splash (RSS), in the heart of the Japan Alps, made perfect sense.

The first event of its kind, it provided skiing and snowboarding by day, and live reggae and DJs by night – all at the site of the 1998 Winter Olympics. A bus was laid on to take merry revellers up to Nagano from Tokyo, and the event was put together guaranteeing a stress-free weekend away from the city. Faces from the Japanese reggae scene would be providing the entertainment and for partygoers not wishing to hit the slopes in the daytime, there was even a guided snowshoe hike through a beautiful mountainous setting, with winter forests and spiced wine to top it off.

My gang and I joined the Ski Babylon bus leaving on the Friday night. Once on the road, the passengers were all welcomed with a jerk chicken bento and a cup of ‘jungle juice’ to get us all in the mood – a fine attention to detail that showed the organisation that had gone into this event. Sat at the back and joined by one of the bands playing, we got into the swing pretty quickly.

The bus rolled into Hakuba and we joined the party at Tracks bar that had already kicked off. We partied until 3AM and then bowed out, for the slopes were drawing us later on.

On the main day itself, one and all were not quite up to tackling snowboarding straight away. After surfacing, we borrowed some bicycles from the lodge we were staying at and headed off for a ride through country with breathtaking alpine backdrops – a fine way to clear the foggy head. We stopped in Hakuba town at a restaurant called Uncle Stevens, and were served huge portions of delicious Mexican food at reasonable prices. On the way back, a visit to a nearby onsen was paid – a perfect way to relax and rejuvenate in preparation for the evening.

Back at Tracks, the main event was warmed up by local DJs and Caribbean Dandy, a unit from Tokyo on the leading edge of the reggae DJ scene in Japan. The first band on was Tex & the Sun Flower Seed, who describe their sound as ‘J-Po-ggae’ – a mix of reggae, ska, rocksteady and J-Pop. With eight people on stage and a tight yet loose sound, they made a commanding start to the live music. After a long day out on the slopes, the audience was a little slow to move at first, but Tex’s lively and inclusive set warmed them up quickly. Anchored in bass, horn laden and with a very lively frontman, the band’s sunny grooves won the audience over and had the whole room dancing away the remaining winter chills.

Cool Wise Men were the main act. Active messengers of the Jamaican roots music scene in Japan since forming in 1993, they were to bring the day to a climax and did so with great style. Some hot horn action was provided at the front by sax, trumpet and trombone, with rhythm, guitar and keys holding down the back. Soon enough, the place was jumping and grooving to the Wise Men’s traditional and rootsy sound. Sometimes, a well-known reggae refrain was thrown in. A good energy and solid stamina from them kept the crowd going throughout the night. Most of the material lacked vocals, but they weren’t missed. Cool Wise Men can be seen playing with Jamaican trombone legend Rico Rodriguez in Tokyo in May – a sure-fire hit show to be.

After their set, Caribbean Dandy played out the rest of the party and spun many fine, classic tunes, helping the happy Snow Splashers to keep on grooving till the small hours.

Up and about early the next day, we were on the slopes by mid-morning. As a former Winter Olympics site, Hakuba is well developed for a whole range of winter sports. There are many shops offering gear and wear rental, plus opportunities for beginners to learn from experienced instructors. Plenty of bars and restaurants provide much of the off-slope entertainment and the array of ubiquitous hot springs give the chance to rest those weary bones after all the excitement of plunging downhill fast. Other outdoor activities can also be enjoyed, such as trekking, hiking, and kayaking or rafting along the Himekawa River that flows through the resort. Many of the mountains in the range reach 3,000 metres high and it can be tough to beat the spectacular wintry alpine views from some of the peaks.

Mid afternoon, and all the partygoers gathered together for a final time to say goodbyes to new friends before the bus took everyone back to Tokyo. In terms of organisation, concept, attention to detail and vibe, I’d have to say that it was the best party I’ve been to in a long time. The tour guide on the bus even took the trouble to sing us a number with the on-board karaoke system as we rolled out of Hakuba!

On the return home, hanami season appeared to have kicked off in Kichijoji’s Inokashira Park, with many people partying under the blossoming cherry trees and welcoming in a new season.

So from Winter, must come Spring…

Links

Reggae Snow Splash
Outdoor Japan
Hakuba Alps Backpackers Lodge

REVIEWS // Playing It Cool (1997)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 12:40:00 +0000

I've contributed sporadically to magazines over the years. It seems to come in fits and starts.

Having served as Music Editor at a sixth form college magazine in the early 90's, I moved on to making music, films and painting for a few years instead. By the late 90's, I came back again to writing a little when asked by a friend who worked for a University publication (even though I was no longer at Uni).

During the period as Music Editor, I found my way into plenty of gigs by artists I liked when they came to town. Sometimes, I actually wrote up the interviews that I conducted too. I managed to revive this technique for a Super Furry Animals show in Brighton in 1997 and hooked up an interview with the band. Turned up at the venue, asked who I thought would be the right person to let the band know I was there, waited for ages and no-one came. As I'd been really hoping to meet the band, I was rather disappointed that nothing came of my manoeuvres.

Still, I thought that I might as well use the opportunity to write a review of the show anyway. The review that appears below was originally in the now-defunct University Of Brighton publication Babble. I have seen Super Furry Animals countless times since this one and they remain one of my favourite live bands - often quite a spectacle to witness and usually very memorable. Check them out if you get the chance.

Playing It Cool

Super Furry Animals, Brighton Centre East Wing

Growing up in South Wales in the late 80's and early 90's could be quite a dull place to be if one was, to any extent, a fan of contemporary cutting edge music. It remained as one of the last outposts of spandex-trousered, poodlehaired, old style heavy metal, even after Kurt Cobain slayed the beast. House, techno and later on jungle had a very long journey there. The only hints of it were so underground that you couldn't reach them because all the mines had been closed anyway. The Manics' mascared manifestos of situationist gobshite caring had barely made it to 'A' Level. Singing in Welsh could only either get you a laugh or a play on John Peel (when nobody else at the station listened to him).

Now, after the Manics killed a legacy that limply contained Tom, Shirley, Shaky and The Alarm, and finally put Wales on the musical map, the door was at last kicked open. This means that wonders such as Super Furry Animals have been let through and allowed to flourish in all their psychedelic/punk/bubblegum/techno/folk splendour.

It's a shame that they were playing in such a shit venue as the Brighton Centre East Wing. This carpeted conference room could only have been designed with suits around tables in mind and the band looked rather uncomfortable when first taking to the stage. It took four songs before they decided to break the ice and speak to the audience. Brighton crowds can also be notoriously 'here we are now, entertain us'. The high teen turnout ensured that the crowd didn't have to wait long before being surfed upon. And, unimaginable five years ago down here, people brought out the Welsh flag, wrapping themselves in it and waving it at the band.

Once things were underway, the Super Furries both thrilled and plucked at heartstrings too. The amphetamine fuzz funk of 'Play It Cool', the acid punk of 'Something For The Weekend', the poignancies of 'Gathering Moss' and 'If You Don't Want Me To Destroy You' (you can almost see it 'when the insects fly all around you'). They've taken psychedelia mixed with punk but keeping the essential bubblegum elements of both, whilst driving their techno-blaring purple tank straight into Brian Wilson's cupboard and nicking all the best harmonies.

Who knows where they're going? They have an oddball feel to them that makes them nicheless. Their influences point them in so many different directions that they could just fall apart through a lack of seams. Then again, if you're looking back on the late 90's, you don't need to look much further for a finer set of pop songs (with Gallagher having wrestled the song from the clutches of the beat) than their first two albums 'Fuzzy Logic' and 'Radiator'. Gruff, the singer, left the stage while the rest of the band stayed on playing a furious trance and thrashing the two huge kettle drums that had lain obtrusive and untouched, centrestage, throughout the gig. Then Gruff returned for the encores, with the Furries bowing out on the hypnotic thrash loops of 'The Man Don't Give A Fuck' ringing in the ears.

Next time Super Furry Animals play Brighton is when they support Blur at the larger Brighton Centre. May they stamp all over the place and let us all give a fuck about these furry magicians.

INTERVIEWS // City Transplants & Their Domino Hearts (2006)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 13:11:00 +0000

Bruce Michell with Dom Pates

In 2006, I got a couple of articles published on a Canadian website (The Foreigner - Japan) covering Japanese issues. They were pleased enough to ask me to contribute more for them and I was commissioned to write a piece on a play being put on at the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo, which included interviews with the actors. The original article can be found here.

The majority of interviews that I'd done in the past had been in the early 90's and with British musicians, so it was good to have a chance to get back into it and interview some different subjects, that came from a different background too.

The play was written by a relative of Thomas Edison and performed as a series of monologues. It was my first experience of writing about theatre and also the first time to work with a transcript that came from a digital source rather than an analogue one. Certainly an improvement on slowly rewinding a cassette! It was also interesting to share some experiences I could very much relate to of living as an expat in Tokyo.

The article that appeared on the site can be found below. The photographs of the actors were all taken by Tomomi Akagi.

City Transplants & Their Domino Hearts

A woman is telling the story of how her husband died. She is nurturing a glass of red wine and occasionally leans on a bottle of pills. She seems to be trying to purge herself of the guilt she feels about his death and thinks she might have been in some way responsible for it. 10 years previously, she’d had an affair with a young student at the university where she taught and her husband, an acclaimed writer, had never forgiven her for it. An argument about it arose when they were on a dark and wintry Canadian road and a sequence of events including a deer in headlights, a truck carrying metal poles and the driver losing concentration led to his death. She later tries to commit suicide, but fails and realises that life is a better option.

An older man, dressed in a bathrobe, gaunt and bent yet still putting in a powerful performance, is describing the style of his sermons. He’s a minister awaiting a heart transplant, not yet ready to meet his maker. He too is carrying his own burden of guilt. When a childhood friend killed herself in a bathtub, he felt to blame for it and in religion he found a kind of salvation or remedy for his guilt. Later, we learn that his body rejected the new organ, his struggle ends and the heart continues its journey into another body.

A younger man drops into the seat at his desk, glaring into his laptop and barking instructions in German into the headset he’s wearing. A high-flying advertising account executive director, his immigrant mother was raped and he grew up in fatherless poverty. Clearly, his profession is his revenge on a world that gave him such a cruel start. More than just playing a part in shifting trucks, he sells the dream of ‘Rugged Outdoor Man’, the pinnacle of masculinity who fights the elements and protects his beautiful family. Like a badge of honour worn by so many in his profession of hard work and hard living, he suffers a heart attack at 33.

The Canadian Embassy in Tokyo is a grand looking building; slickly modern, smoothly finished, tastefully lit and welcoming. Staged at the theatre belonging to the Embassy, ‘The Domino Heart’ was performed by three actors delivering monologues. It was written by Matthew Edison, a young Canadian actor and playwright who is also the great, great, great, grandnephew of Thomas Edison. Inventiveness clearly runs in the family, for the piece was most poetic, richly laden in metaphor and rose very well to the challenges posed by being entirely constructed from monologues.

On one level, it was a play about heart transplants, with the first donor’s organ going into another body and then a second when the first patient dies (thus the ‘domino heart’, an organ falling like dominoes into body after body). On other levels, the play was about the eternal themes visited by many of the arts; love, life, trust and communication between people.

‘The Domino Heart’ was directed by Robert Tsonos and Rachel Walzer. Robert, a Canadian actor and director, has lived in Tokyo for about 5 years and also played the part of Leo, the character in advertising. Rachel, originally from Jerusalem, has been in Tokyo on and off for the last 13 years and also teaches drama when not working as an actress or narrator. Mortimer Wright, the minister, is played by Bruce Michell, from Sydney and in Tokyo for 16 years. Lynne Hobday, a British-born actress, vocalist and lyricist who played the part of Cara, the grieving wife, as initially drawn to Japan at around the same time as Bruce.

Rachel Walzer

The cast and crew were able to spare a little time after the show to talk about the production and their lives here in Japan’s vast metropolitan capital city.

We began by talking about the play itself. Robert was attracted to the poetry and the metaphors of it, also complimenting the style of the piece. Intrigued by the challenges posed by making a series of fairly long monologues into engaging theatre, Rachel commented that ‘it was really interesting to find all the little ways, the little secrets, the little paths to make it alive and visual’. For both, it was an intense experience to produce. Robert added that the concentration, commitment and talent needed was high.

There were challenges too for the actors. Bruce had to tone down his Australian qualities to play a character that’d moved to Canada. Lynne mostly acts in Japanese language theatre and this was her first English production in many years. Naturally, it was also important to maintain focus and keep the monologues interesting too.

So, how about their experiences of theatre in Japan, and was it much different to that of in their home countries? What are some of the delights and drags of being an expatriate in one of the world’s biggest cities – being an outsider yet also being on the inside? What difficulties do they face and where are their favourite haunts?

Robert Tsonos

Robert: ‘Well, there’s language restrictions obviously. In order to do major TV dramas or things like that, you have to be fluent in Japanese and I’m not.’

Rachel: ‘We have a large, foreign English-speaking community in Tokyo, but I think just a very small percentage of that community is interested in theatre. We’re always striving to get more audience members, but generally…I think the izakayas are more attractive. If you’re an actor in London or New York perhaps, then you’re OK, but outside of that, it’s difficult…’

Bruce: ‘We probably wouldn’t be doing this kind of play in Australia. We’d be more likely doing the classics or we’d be doing an Australian play.’

Robert: ‘To have the entire cast of 8 or 9 people sometimes, all from different countries, is fascinating to me. How do you communicate with each of them in a different way? Some of them are more…like the Venezuelan actress (I worked with) was very physically based, and the British are very intellectually based, right? So you’ve got to give almost different direction to each of them, which I find fascinating, so I that’s been really exciting.’

Rachel: ‘It’s also fascinating when people bring their own culture and mannerisms and yet when it comes to just human issues, it’s all the same stuff and if it’s expressed with honesty, it doesn’t really matter if you’re the kind of person who uses your hands more or if you’re the kind of person who uses your head more. It makes the play even more interesting. What does connect the Japanese who work within our group as well as everybody else is that everybody seems quite internationalised, meaning that they’ve been exposed to a lot of different cultures and they’ve brought a lot of the different flavours that they’ve been exposed to to their performances.’

Bruce: ‘People, I think, are less insular. You’re getting a more international feel. You’re getting people from different backgrounds…So I think you’re getting more variety of experience, variety of directors and the variety of plays.’

Naturally, living in a place like Tokyo has its advantages as well as its drawbacks.

Lynne Hobday

Lynne: ‘It can also be a bit precarious, because I’m pretty much freelance, but I’ve been in work for quite a long while. Tokyo’s always changing, there are always new opportunities, you never know what’s around the corner, so (there’s) that excitement.’

Bruce: ‘I think that in your home country, people are more set in their ways. They have routines and they tend to be more family-orientated to start off with, and it’s not so easy to meet people or to break into new social circles, but in Tokyo I think it is much easier. People come, they stay for 2 or 3 years and maybe then they leave, so they’re more inclined to go out, meet people, open up themselves.’

Rachel: ‘It might be a bit hard for me if I were Japanese…I think I would feel a little bit restricted, because the culture here is a restrictive type of culture. As a foreigner, I feel liberated, I feel that nothing’s expected of me, I can do whatever I want, so I feel freer here than what I would in my own home country.’

Bruce: ‘Foreigners, particularly Westerners, are cut a lot of slack. They’re treated pretty well. Sometimes you’re not treated well by everyone, but generally speaking, I think Westerners are treated quite well…People do say there may be discrimination, say in the rental market or something like that, but it’s nothing that I’ve experienced.’

It’s a very big and busy place. Any other downsides?

Lynne: ‘A little bit too busy. Actually doing things and not chilling out enough, probably. I can never stop here!’

Bruce: ‘Travelling at 8.30 in the morning on the Yamanote line is not great, obviously, and we do things to survive. We wear iPods, we have our mobile phones…and that’s a sad thing…but I think that’s kind of a survival mechanism. We do that because we have to do that, just to cope with the crowding, the pushing, and those kinds of things.’

Rachel: ‘I’d be happier if there was a little bit more nature.’

Bruce: ‘When you’re working hard, and people do work hard here, it’s nice to have access to a little bit of nature, to be able to relax. I think if you’re used to it, you have actually a hunger to see trees and greenery and sky and things like that, but, you live here for a certain period of time and you get used to it. That’s the body and the mind. It adapts to what environment we’re in. But you’re reminded of it sometimes. Sometimes you see Fuji in the distance, and you think, ‘Wow, yeah, that’s great, there is a sky, a horizon out there.’

Tokyo’s green spaces do find favour, as do some of the livelier and more cosmopolitan spots.

Rachel: ‘There are parks that are very beautiful, there’s Nezu Art Museum, that has its own little Japanese area with ponds and trees and stuff like that. If you know the little nooks and crannies of the city, you can find a little peace.’

Bruce Michell

Bruce: ‘I really like Shinjuku Gyoen. It’s a lovely park. I also sometimes go down to the area around Omotesando and the park near that area as well.’

Lynne: ‘Harajuku, Omotesando, probably. Lots of trees and wide roads, it just feels a bit European.’

Rachel: ‘I love the nightlife of Tokyo. I like the excitement and the buzz of places like Omotesando and this area, Aoyama, and I love the various flavours sometimes…when I’m in the mood for Shinjuku or Roppongi.’

No matter how long people have been resident in this city and whatever background they’ve previously come from, there still seem to a lot of commonality to their lives. Whilst Tokyo seems to be systematically busier than most places and may lack an abundance of wide open green spaces, these are similar reservations that many of the Japanese people drawn to the magnetism of the national capital have. What does mark the ‘foreigners’ out from the ‘locals’ is the experience of being an ‘outsider on the inside’. Other global hotspots such as London or New York might take a more integrationist approach, as cities built on the backs of their respective countries waves of immigration. Simply the act of living there makes one a Londoner or a New Yorker.

Here, one can never be a ‘true Tokyoite’, yet that is not without its advantages. While most incomers have to hurdle the language barrier, and Japanese is a notoriously difficult language to learn, there is often a greater freedom in being a foreigner in Japan. Rachel spoke of the liberation she felt here. Bruce mentioned the fact of many foreigners having an easier time than in their home countries and of being ‘cut a lot of slack’. Everybody also felt the buzz of the place.

It would appear that, for our actors and directors at the Canadian Embassy and undoubtedly many others like them, their city transplant operations were successful. Their bodies accepted their new Tokyo hearts.

INTERVIEWS // Buds Wiser (1991)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 13:07:00 +0000

The first time I can recollect writing for a publication was aged 11 in my first year at school. I was given a chance to write for the school newspaper and had a useful lesson in journalism from it. I could write for them, but not on any subject of my choosing.

I was given a Barry McGuigan boxing match to review. As an avowed pacifist even then, I wasn't best pleased about the assignment, but put something together anyway as I wanted to get my name in print. I don't even remember if it was printed in the end or not, but I certainly no longer have a copy of the fight review.

Almost ten years later in a different educational institution, I became Music Editor at my college magazine (The Printed Image). It's useful to be somewhere at the beginning as it's easier to pick the role you want for yourself. It turned out to be a great role too, as I learned what a cunning blag being a 'music journalist' was - just give your name and the publication you write for, tell the record company/band/manager what you'll do for them and end up getting showered with goodies!

I ended up using the position as an opportunity to meet many of my musical heroes of the time and interview them. The list of early 90's British indie bands that I got through was pretty extensive - including The Wedding Present, Ride, Teenage Fanclub, Silverfish, The Fall, Carter USM and the ones who appeared in the article below, The Darling Buds. I ended up getting to know them a little too, as I would often bump into them on the South Wales gig scene (which was pretty small then).

Not long after this time, Wales ended up with a place on Britain's musical map just as I moved to another town and my tastes diverged pretty solidly from those indie roots.

The Printed Image, if I recall correctly, only ever made it to a third issue. The Darling Buds themselves fell apart shortly after their third album, partly down to record label disinterest.

What it is about things coming along in threes?

Buds Wiser

Manchester – so much to answer for, South Wales – well, not much really (with the obvious exception of Tom, Shakey and Shirley). How many well known/successful Welsh bands can you think of? Yes, you don't need the other five fingers. The Darling Buds should be high on your list.

They are a four piece band hailing from Newport (Caerleon to be exact), with the exception of their drummer, a Liverpudlian. The line up consists of Andrea (vocals), Harley (guitars), Chris (bass) and Jimmy (drums).

The band have been going since 1986. Andrea had moved to London and Harley was still committed to another band then as well. He worked in a recording studio and whenever he had a spare hour, the band would go in and record something. Harley had some money from a pension he'd taken out and invested that in the pressing of The Darling Buds first single 'If I Said'. It was released on their own Darling label.

Harley: 'Why do a tape? Everybody does a tape. Why not spend a little more money and do a single which is more accessible and can be easily played?'

By 1987, there was enough interest in the band from the single via the music press and a healthy John Peel interest, that the group started to take it all more seriously and signed to independent label Native Records.

One of their first gigs together was supporting The Butthole Surfers at Newport Centre. The next year, after a couple of singles on Native, they signed to Epic Records, a branch of CBS (now Columbia).

Andrea: 'When you're signed, you get an advance and you've got to work out how much you're going to spend on the album, because this is an album a year; how much on each of you living.'

Harley: 'I could earn more working in a bar!'

Andrea: 'We live on the bare minimum and the rest goes back into the band. There's always perks. When we go off on tour now, before we were in cheap little Bed and Breakfasts and now we can stay in some nice places and make it a bit easier for us. We don't have a luxury lifestyle at all.'

They had a blitz of popularity when they first signed to Epic, with a Top 40 single, a Top Of The Pops appearance and countless front covers. Unfortunately for the band, the label didn't know what to do with them, and when The Darling Buds wanted to release new material, Epic would insist on pushing the album ('Pop Said...' their debut), by releasing more tracks as singles etc, all against the band's wishes.

Andrea: 'The thing is, within the company, it is so huge and there are so many bands that are so different to us. You've got a whole bunch of people trying to get their heads together around these bands and a lot of them don't understand The Darling Buds at all and get things completely wrong. All these silly things happen and we feel really annoyed and we feel let down by it all. But there are people within the company then, that are really good for us. Probably about five people who we really do trust and we do really like, but then all the others are just people who are doing a job and that's what gets annoying because they do things wrong.'

They also went from press darlings (ahem!) to last year's thing pretty soon too. The press have never been too keen on Wales as a potential musical force.

Harley: 'Wales is just not on the map in a lot of places.'

Andrea: 'I think it was in Washington. We walked into this radio station and there was this DJ on the air. His assistant let us into the studio and she said we'll be off air in a minute and he'll be straight into chatting away to you. So we walked in and found a chair each. He was on air and he said (adopts American accent), 'And they're here. The Darling Buds have just walked in. Hi, it's The Darling Buds...from Manchester, England''. (several groans)

Harley: 'And we were going 'Hang on a minute, no we're not!''.

Andrea: 'And he was saying 'Well, Wales is right next to Manchester'. Yeah, right next to it mate!'

Harley: 'I mean, we're all Welsh.'

Andrea: 'Except Jimmy.'

Harley: 'And he's closer to Wales than Manchester! We're all Welsh and it's just something that's totally overlooked. We found out that when we were starting out. We couldn't get gigs outside of Wales. No one was interested. Half of the time they think you're a heavy metal band. John Peel has done a lot for Wales. He's really tried, but there's no encouragement from anywhere else.

They have a lot of S4C (Welsh TV channel) programmes, don't they? Welsh pop programmes. I can't understand them because I don't speak Welsh (laughs from around the table).

I was never taught Welsh at school. I was watching one the other day and they had several great bands.'

Andrea (tongue in cheek): 'That Manchester scene's great though, don't you think?'

Harley: 'There are a couple of good bands. Like The Stone Roses first album. That is a really good album. When I put it on, I can hear The Who, I can hear all these other bands. But you know, what's wrong with that?'

Andrea (sarcastically): 'I can't fault it. I love the whole scene.'

Harley: 'The thing is, I got the Happy Mondays album and I can't get into it. Ride, that's a really good album. That's an album I listen to a lot. I think the guitar is definitely going to come back. Well, it's never going to go away!'

Andrea: ' I think it's people's tastes that change, not so much the music. We were part of that guitar thing. Before that, there was the C86 thing. Then the very guitar orientated thing, with the blonde singers. There were also a lot of bands around with boy singers. I mean The Wonderstuff, The House Of Love. They were all sort of poppy, guitar bands. Then it went into The Stone Roses with their retro guitar sound, and the dance stuff. It's peoples' tastes really. And then Ride happened and I think people were getting so sick to death of the dance scene and of the summer of love, that they're going back to guitars.'

Harley: 'That's the thing with this country, fashion goes really strongly with music. The fashion at the time was Soul II Soul, who were wearing all that stuff and then The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays with the flares.'

Andrea: 'I think they're fantastic, I do. I love them.'

Harley: 'Don't be so sarcastic.'

Asking them about their influences, and realising the many, many different bands that they take their sound from, the general consensus is of 'guitar bands...with good melodies'. I asked them about their own songs.

Harley: 'I don't want to be really, really famous. I think the band still want to write a really good song. I don't think we've written our best song yet.'

Andrea: 'There's things we're really proud of. You get excited about everything that you write and maybe a couple of years later, you go back and think it's crap and you rip it to pieces and start again. Then again, you write a song and you're dead proud of it and you get really excited about recording it, the same as you did when you did your first record. All that comes back again and that is brilliant.'

Harley: 'There's several off 'Crawdaddy' that I just don't like at all. There's one or two off the first album. 'You've Got To Choose', I hate.'

Andrea: 'We were in the studio the other day and he had his portastudio out and was playing lots of early demos. There was 'Hit The Ground' on there and it was so gorgeous. It was just us doing it on the portastudio and it sounded so naïve and really simple.

I think also we do get a bit disappointed when we record things in the studio, then listen to them and we're quite happy. Then six months later, we listen to them and still think that hasn't captured us live. There is a lot of atmosphere at the gigs and on records we just seem to be losing that.'

We talked to The Darling Buds for over two hours in the pub that we met in and covered many other topics.

Harley: 'I don't think that the Manic Street Preachers (the only other Welsh band with any press) would get on with us. A slight clash in...did I say Clash!?' and the demise of Sounds (defunct music weekly) to which Andrea sarcastically replied 'I'm going to miss that!' Harley is getting some money from publishing and is hoping to put it towards setting up a record label that will be geared towards getting bands in this area recognised. The band themselves are currently writing material for their third album which is due out in the Autumn. They are hoping to produce this LP themselves. The meeting ended with a discussion on Harley's prowess as a guitarist.

Harley: 'The guitar is an extension of the penis, yeah? But at the moment, the guitar has still got me. I'm not in control yet.'

Andrea: 'Must be a peculiar shape, Geraint (Harley's real name)!'

Harley: 'The guitar is a very personal thing to a lot of guitar players and when you've got control of it and you feel like you're playing with it, this might sound pretty weird, then that's great. But at the moment, the guitar is still laughing at me, which makes me think I've still got a lot to do!'

He described the band as 'just pissheads'. May these 'pissheads' continue to bloom.

TRAVEL // A Sunshine State Of Mind (2007)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 14:26:00 +0000

Japan is not the first country I lived in other than my place of birth. Way back in the comparative calm of the early Clinton era, a few years after the end of the Cold War and before the Monica Lewinsky incident, I spent a few barmy months living in Florida. A toe in the waters of expatriation, if you like.

I'd carried a chip on my shoulder about the US throughout most of my youth, derived in part from my father's attitude to the place and partly through my own observations and concern about factors like Ronald Reagan. Britain does tend to have mixed attitudes towards America anyway. Some people love the place, whereas others loathe it.

However, I'm not the kind of guy that really likes carrying chips on his shoulder, especially now out of the sprinted rush of teenhood and into the marathon run of adulthood. I had to put these ideas I had to the test, and so I tried living in America for a while. Lo and behold, I discovered that just like anywhere, there are some really good people in America. Just like everywhere else too, it also has its fair share of not-so-good people, but it was the good ones that turned my prejudices around and made me look at 'that place across the pond' in a different light.

Early on in 2007, I stumbled across a chance to write something that could end up in a book. A couple of Brits living in Denmark had come up with a home-made book project about 'moving away from home', named Being Abroad. Having written extensively about my experiences of living in Japan, I decided that I should exhume another story from the memory banks instead and tell my American tale.

In the end, my piece didn't make the final cut. I don't know what it is but I often don't seem to have a lot of luck in getting anywhere with UK-related ventures! Perhaps I am forever bound to remain on the outside, looking in.

Rather than let my long tale of youthful adventure under the Floridian sunshine languish on my hard drive, it is instead presented here. Although it's a lengthy tale, it is somewhat edited down from the original size.

'A Sunshine State Of Mind', then - the tale of three plucky young British men and the scrapes that pulled them apart out West.

A Sunshine State Of Mind

Remember fearing a nuclear winter? Remember Ronnie and Maggie? Perhaps, perhaps not. We've all interacted with the big beast in different ways and at different times, and while it comes in many guises, none of us can really ignore it. As a kid, I grew up with a fear and loathing of America. My perspective on the world was reasonably narrow, being an island boy at heart. The US was the big beast across the pond, the playground bully in the world schoolyard. A place stacked to the back teeth with intercontinental missiles, where the police not only had guns but used them too. And in Reagan, a man with his finger on the apocalypse button who seemed to have no clue of the implications of that.

It is also, however, laden with contradictions. The musical pioneers and outlaws, such as the old blues guys, the jazzers and the hippy crowd had great essences of cool and looked much hipper than any home-grown heroes. And somewhere that produced the likes of Martin Luther King and Jack Kerouac had to have something going for it. Yet my overall impression was negative – the perfect, white-toothed fake smiles and 'have a nice day' platitudes, the plasticity of Mickey and the Golden Arches and the camera-toting tourists who thought cultural relics were 'cute'.

When the sign went up on the university notice board for an exchange trip to the US, I laughed it off. Why on earth would I actually want to go there? Somehow though, the opportunity seemed to stick in my mind. After stages of denial about taking the opportunity up, I finally settled on the idea that if I was going to carry this prejudice around with me, I might as well actually put it to the test.

Applied, got it, so where to go in that vast land? From the options, I decided to ignore the apparent backwaters of Arizona and South Carolina, plumping instead for America at its boldest, brashest and most plastic – Florida. After all, if you can make it in your most challenging point of a destination, you should be able to make it anywhere, right?

Two of my college friends had taken the same decision to head for the Sunshine State, and I'll call them Matt and Richard here. We approached the situation as three cocky young Englishmen bent on plunder and adventure, heading West to take on America. In those days, there wasn't a smoking ban on trans-Atlantic flights. We stocked up on cheap fags, then spent the 14 hour flight adding to the cabin fug and competing over who would be the first one of us to pull an American girl.

Landing in Orlando, the first thing that hit us was warmth. Coming from the wintry gloom of England in early January, it was a damned good start. First challenge, make it through the long lines of serious looking customs officials, second challenge, find a car rental place and the next one, drive an hour to Tampa. The Pet Shops Boys were singing about West End Girls on the radio in the rental joint, sounding utterly out of place but somehow comforting at the same time.

I was the passenger in the back, under glass and staring out at all this alien newness. The highway was so wide and the streets so utterly uncramped. Such a change from the terraced, identikit streets I was used to walking that wore their age on the outside. The neon-flanked highway flashed by, as huge billboards and brightly coloured fast food drive-in signs rose and fell.

We arrived in the early morning at a vast green campus and made our way to the international dorm that was set to be our home. I don't recall it as that culturally diverse, but it was almost certainly the first time I'd met people with Mexican or Native-American blood. Matt and Richard were sharing a room while to my great luck, my American roommate spent most of his life at his girl's place.

January 1994, and America was still basking in the relative calm of Clinton's early days. The twelve long years of Republican rule in the White House had finally come to an end. It might have been before the dot-com bubble, but it was also before Monica Lewinsky, Columbine, Tim McVeigh, Al-Qaeda and the bombs dropped in Afghanistan and Bosnia left their own stains on the man's tenure. There was an optimism around that you could scent in the air. I remember one American student carrying around a cuddly Clinton toy. Try as I did, I couldn't imagine our then unesteemed premier being treated in the same way.

In an early meeting, we had the house rules of the dorm laid out to us. No smoking inside. No drinking outside. No opening the windows. It seemed that the Land of the Free insisted on treating its young adults like kids for as long as it could. The dour greyness of England began to look a little more libertarian than I'd previously given it credit for. We were also told that as the American academic semester was longer than a British term, we wouldn't be able to get any grades to send back home anyway and therefore it didn't actually matter if we didn't attend every class.

I tried. Made all my classes in the first week. Pictured some sort of 'Breakfast Club' kind of set-up – the cool kids, the pretty ones, the dorks and the misfits, all sitting on chairs in rows with an armrest attached to write on – and it was pretty much like that too. I had good intentions for going again in my second week, but it never quite happened. And that was it – I never took another class there. I dropped out of college, soaked up the Florida sunshine, grew my first beard, let my hair grow long, and took three months off from my life.

I won't pretend that it wasn't a hell of a lot of fun, at least at first. Once you figure out how to break someone else's rules without getting caught, you can largely maintain a lifestyle you're used to. Being a Brit in the States had its advantages too. That 'cute accent' can open doors otherwise closed to someone who's just a part of the crowd. Whilst trying to open a bank account, the teller had me repeat the stalwart British word 'bloody' a number of times, as it sounded cool to her. I'd grown up feeling apart from the crowd, but this was the first time that I'd actually felt 'exotic'! Despite the plunder committed in the name of Queen and Country, the pioneering imperial swashbucklers that carved out a quarter of the globe for Britain established the reputation of the Englishman as a gentleman. It might not always be true, but sometimes it's beneficial not to shatter someone's preconception of you.

There were other noticeable differences too. Nobody actually walked anywhere. If the convenience store was 15 minutes away on foot, hop in the pick-up when you need to go. Even just a short trip across campus was done by car. With the cafeteria, you bought a monthly pass, then could stock your tray up with as much food as you liked. My first time in there, with eyes bigger than my belly and essentially a free banquet in front of me, I piled it high and gorged myself till could fit nothing else inside – and this was only lunchtime. But it was too much to keep up, so I imposed some sense of moderation on what I lined my stomach with.

Of the three of us, I was the first to land an American girlfriend. I'll call her Dionne. We met at some club or other and the British accent did the trick again. Back at the dorm, stood under a lamppost and with no-one else around, we got to know each other better. At some point, out of the corner of my eye I noticed a scrawny kid approaching. He turned his head as he passed us, and then realised that his girlfriend was locked in an embrace with another. He ran off, screaming and threatening suicide and she ran after him. I was left standing there.

Matt came by, having been out in pursuit of his own quarry. I told him what'd gone on and he commended me, as if the situation were a badge of honour. I'd earned my first plunder stripes.

After that, I had no particular desire to get any further involved. Over the course of a week, notes got passed, meetings hooked up and the next thing I knew I was in a relationship. A nice girl at first, the disturbed streak didn't really surface until a little later on, by which time it was a little too late. A stranger in a strange land, I'd fallen back on a local to be my compass and guidebook, not quite the bold and intrepid explorer I'd imagined on the flight over.

Despite the challenges of this alien landscape and the undercurrent of a relationship on the edge running through my days, life was pretty good. The weather was knockout. I was a young man stuck in an adventure with a lot of partying to do.

Contrary to my youthful expectations of Americans, I met some fantastic folks there. As warm as the sun on my head, genuinely friendly and peaceful people who also liked having a good time. I discovered people who were just like me, yet lived on the other side of the vast ocean that divided us and were just brought up with different TV shows and cultural reference points. We fell in with a like-minded crowd pretty swiftly, and before long I located the musicians amongst them and joined up as one of their singers. We almost even made it to a show once, were even packed into the van, instruments at the ready. Never quite got there though.

Being so far away from home offered a unique perspective on the life I led and the kind of person I was back in England. It was as if I'd put that person on pause and could assess him from a distance. The vexations that had troubled the soul of that young British boy smoothed themselves out in the Floridian sun. Fairly early on in my stay, it dawned on me that I had made peace with myself and my past.

Of course, to find a silver lining you also need the clouds. In any environment, new or old, you can always find downers to piss on your parade, some circumstantial and some that you carry with you. No matter how far you run, you always bring yourself with you. I was funding my trip with a meagre Student Loan. Matt and Richard tripped off to New Orleans for their own Mardi Gras adventures, sleeping rough on the banks of the Mississippi in the process. As close as I got to steeping myself in classic Americana was sitting on the dock of a bay whistling Otis refrains.

The keg parties at friends apartments were good-time affairs but they'd be countered by others that got completely out of hand. We ended up at a frat house party once, with far too much testosterone on display for my liking. A gang of the house frat rats chugged back whatever was fuelling them and decided to throw a large couch onto the fire. Naturally, the police arrived. Not wanting to be implicated, we made a sharp exit when word got out that someone had taken it upon themselves to steal the car the cops had arrived in.

Adding to the element of danger, there were a couple of shootings near the dorm, one on the campus itself and another in the parking lot of the convenience store we used. The entire place usually seemed to be crawling with cops. As the only one in the gang over 21, I was often called upon to be the guy that went to the liquor store. I didn't particularly mind, but I didn't want to get deported if I was caught. The amount of rules and restrictions on the freedom of the individual made England's nanny state look like a negligent babysitter in comparison.

One road trip near the end of the stay left me with a tale I still tell. The Grateful Dead had a tribe of followers that would throw parties and festivals across the country in the spirit of the original 60's cultural explosions. Florida's own Rainbow Gathering that year was to take place deep in the heart of the Ocala State Forest. I and another English pal decided to go and hang out in the woods with the hippies for the weekend and convinced a couple of girls to give us a ride. I picked up the goods at the liquor store on the way.

Dionne had warned me about the state law on not having open bottles of alcohol in a car. My friend Tim however, was much more carefree and as soon as we were on the highway, he opened his first bottle of Mickey's Malt Liquor. We were looking forward to a little hedonism in a natural environment.

We exited the highway at our turning and headed down a dirt track surrounded by deep forest. A mile in, we were stopped by a police road block. An officer approached and gestured to us to wind the window down. We did as we were bade and he asked in an officious tone whether we had any drugs, liquor or weapons in the vehicle. Another officer had begun snooping around the back of the car with a torch. Naturally, we replied that we didn't have anything. He asked a second time and we replied with the same answer. He then asked all four of us to step out of the car.

Jail? Deportation? Four kids, breaking the law with an American cop in the post-Rodney King era. It called for some quick thinking and my instincts kicked in with a solution. I was going to have to take the rap for Tim's open bottle to prevent us all getting into even hotter water.

Having spent much of my time there changing my vocabulary and slightly Americanising my accent to be better understood, I suddenly switched to 'genteel and naïve Englishman' mode.

'Well officer, now you mention it, I do have a bottle of beer.'

He asked me to step over to his car and bring the quart of Mickey's with me. I did as I was told and he informed me about the state law on open liquor bottles in cars.

Ramping up the 'gentleman abroad' act, I replied something along the lines of:

'I see, officer. I was unaware of that, but I'm awfully grateful to you for having alerted me to it. We don't have such laws in my country, you see. I hope I haven't caused you any inconvenience.'

'You realise that you could have gone to jail for this, son?'

'Could I really? I'm terribly sorry. Would you like me to put my hands on the bonnet?'

'That won't be necessary. Please dispose of the liquor by the side of the road.'

I emptied the bottle out next to the car and got a $25 fine. We were all a little shaken by the experience but they were very grateful that I'd stepped in and saved everyone's skins. Best of all, it had taken attention away from the further seven litres of red wine we had stashed in the boot.

On another weekend, I trekked down to the Everglades with Dionne to meet the folks. Despite the pleasant warmth and subtropical feel of the place, there was more than a hint of retirement village about it. 'So this is where rich old Americans go to die, slowly', I thought to myself. Mom was nice and friendly. Pop was strict and keen that I kept to his house rules, but welcomed me anyway. After arriving, we took a trip to the beach. I lounged in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, basking in the glory of being somewhere so exotic sounding. Occasionally, I'd keep my head down to avoid the gaze of the beach police, who had laws to uphold even that stretch of sand. Nevertheless, watching pelicans fly past backdropped by a Mexican Gulf sunset made for a remarkable contrast to the scavenging English seagulls that tried to grab at your fish and chips on Brighton seafront.

As we rolled into the campus parking lot back in Tampa, Tom was standing in her space, awaiting our return. Before the car had stopped, he began kicking the fender and smacking the windows. Clearly, I was going to have to deal with the situation.

The following day, I agreed to meet with him. I found him under a tree. Sitting down, I told him that I was in a relationship with her and that he had to give up on what he was holding on to. He was broken by this news, but appreciated my directness and honesty in coming clean to him. After that, he slunk away. I sought Dionne out to bring her the good news. To my surprise, she flew off the handle and disappeared. Unbeknownst to me, she went to seek solace in the arms of Matt, my fellow explorer.

In the weeks that followed, what should have been a turnaround in our fortunes turned to shit instead. I stepped into Tom's newly vacated shoes as the spurned and paranoid lover, trying to find out where she was. My mood spiralled downwards. Confused and dejected, I eventually wrote her a letter with my suspicions – no reply.

It finally dawned on me that my American fling was over. I sat on the bench outside the dorm, broken-hearted. Once again, I was alone, a stranger in a strange land, and I wanted to go home. Broke and on a heavy downer, my father was in the US at the time and wired me some cash to bring my flight forward. I said my goodbyes to the good guys, packed my things and got out.

A friend from LA offered me a ride from Tampa to Orlando. Out on the open highway, my mood began to lift as I left the life I'd led behind me. We reminisced about the times we'd had and my experience of expatriation. As every road trip needs a soundtrack, we switched on the radio. I flipped through the channels in search of something good.

'...sitting in a railway station, got a ticket for my destination...'

Simon & Garfunkel's 'Homeward Bound' drifted out of the speakers and hit me. Sometimes a song has an uncanny way of jumping on you unannounced and perfectly summing up your moment. I was going back, homeward bound, my American dream tried, tested and put to rest.

Reflecting on it all once the jetlag had worn off and I was used to narrow streets and bad weather again, I knew that I no longer hated America as I'd done as a child. I actually rather liked it, even loved some parts of it. I'd learnt more about myself, the country I'd visited and my own one too, and by extension I'd learned more about the world itself.

One thing to be said for expatriation though. Once you've tried it, you've opened a door and there's no looking back. Your country will seem that much smaller than it used to and you develop a taste for exploration. In 2003, I did the same thing. I said goodbye to the good guys in Brighton, packed up my things and got out of Britain.

I've been living in Tokyo ever since. But that's another story.

TRAVEL // Branded By The Bush (2007)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 08:07:00 +0000

My second trip to Tanzania was longer than the first one and left even deeper impressions. This time I had some real chances to explore, including my first real safari - out in the wilderness and amongst the wildlife I'd longed to see since I was a very small boy.

The destination was Saadani Safari Lodge, a lodge in an astonishing place recently upgraded from the status of a Game Reserve to that of a National Park. The banda (beach hut) we stayed in was set on the exquisite coastal setting of the Indian Ocean, and the lodge offered safaris into the bush and out on the nearby river.

It was here that I earned my first bush stripes, on account of having gotten stuck in a dry river bed at the end of the stay and had to find our way out of the searing heat and unknown potential dangers of whatever lurked in the bush.

Back in Japan, I realised that I had a great story to tell. During the summer that followed my return, I began writing for 'Outdoor Japan' and was keen to use this opportunity to tell my tale. I ended up writing a cover feature for them on summer music festivals, but the 'survival in the African wilderness' yarn I was longing to tell would remain untold that year.

In 2007, I started writing for Asia Player - an English-language 'lad mag' based in Tokyo. Mostly, my contributions came in the form of a monthly music column, but Asia Player also finally gave me the longed-for chance to tell my own 'Boy's Own' story. It was great to also have the chance to write about 'the bush' and it not actually be about humanity's 'nemesis de jour'!

In the end, they changed the narrative a little and the piece ended up with the perspective of the narrator making for slightly confusingly reading. However, it's online and can be found here.

The piece as it was originally intended can be found below. All photos were taken on location by myself, except for the hammock one (taken by Hans Jamet).

Branded By The Bush

It was an unfettered paradise of such wild tranquillity. What matter now of timetables, bullet trains and pinnacles of modern convenience? His eyes drank in the vista. Still he was thirsty and still it went on. Apparently, you could sometimes spot elephants coming down to frolic in the surf.

He was there with his brother-in-law, a Frenchman keen to show the wilds of Africa to the new arrival. To get there, they had travelled through barren terrains, crossed the Pangani River on a dilapidated ferry and passed Maasai herders walking their livestock along the same centuries-old well trodden paths.

A swarthy and welcoming South African showed them around when they arrived, recommending starting with the pool. Beers in the water, lounging around in the shade, topped off with a siesta in the banda. The hut opened out onto the widest, empty stretch of long and glorious coastline the Tokyoite had ever seen. Lulled by the gentle fall of the breakers on the waves and a cooling breeze to billow the mosquito nets around him, he fell into the calmest sleep.

The purpose behind the expedition was for immersion in true wilderness – the first real safari. They began their adventure in an open Land Rover with an old British soldier and a local guide for company. Acacias and baobabs dotted the scrub. The only other signs of humanity were the tyre tracks running in parallel with the lion ones in the mud.

After a little training of the eyes, an abundance of wildlife began to appear – graceful waterbuck hiding out in the long grass, elegant giraffes striking poses against the savannah skyline, gangs of warthogs scuttling through the undergrowth, brightly coloured rollers flitting from bush to bush. That evening, with the breezes of the Indian Ocean wafting through and at tables lit overhead by lobster pot lanterns, they ate with their safari companions and drank themselves senseless.

The following day, they set out on a small boat to explore the Wami River and entered the territory of Conrad's dreams and nightmares. Submerged hippos eyed them from murky depths. Crocs on the banks gave a flash of tail to remind of their presence. The river bank was teeming with life. Monitor lizards basked in the sun while brilliant kingfishers darted, flashing red or blue amongst the vegetation. Herons and ghostly egrets perched atop the forest canopy or loitered, stock still in the shallow waters.

They later headed out in their own vehicle, surveying the bush from the luxury of an air-conditioned Toyota Land Cruiser. The Frenchman was in his element, playing up his role as the knowledgeable Africa man, an expert in his field with tales to tell.

It had been an almost too perfect experience – heavenly beaches, complete immersion in raw and unbridled nature, the remarkable contrast between teeming Asian hub and wide open spaces under African skies. Something was missing. The guys that spent their lives in the bush had tales of struggles endured and how they'd earned their stripes. The Tokyoite had nothing but surface. Tick boxes in a field guide. He'd not had the bush seared into his being. It came at the last minute.

Early morning, checked out, one final safari before hitting the road. Through the open scrubland and cushioned from the searing heat in their Land Cruiser. Down a dip...must be a dried river bed...looks like tyre tracks...wonder what's down there...let's follow...

Immediately, the vehicle that had cocooned them from a world of hidden predators, tsetse flies and baking hot sun became stuck in the soft sand. Every attempt to extricate themselves from their trap only got them stuck deeper in. The Tokyoite tried to dig them out, but the car merely sank more. They had no choice but to walk through the bush and try to find help to pull the Toyota out of the sand.

Grabbing what they needed, they locked the car and abandoned it in the river bed. The Tokyoite covered his head with a fishermans' wrap. The Frenchman grabbed his long bush knife and they set off, two Arab samurai ready for the elements and any surprises. A vital bottle of water completed the kit. Trekking through the undergrowth, every sound or shadow triggered an explosion in the imagination. Overhead, two vultures circled, coasting on currents and waiting for a moment of rich pickings.

A mile or two on, they came across a track, serving as open road but providing little mercy from the sun. Water was rationed, and parched throats cried out. At one point, a villager from a nearby settlement appeared on a bicycle. The Frenchman stopped him and spoke in Kiswahili. He instructed the man to fetch help, greasing his palm and promising more if he returned. The man went back to his village, telling of a white man on the road and his money, but never reappeared.

They finally arrived back at the lodge, out of water, drained of energy, but emboldened by the experience. The lodge was owned by a Greek guy, raised in Burundi who had escaped when the massacres were raging. They spilled out their story and he began to organise a recovery team – slowly, as this place ran on bush time not Tokyo time.

Back at the river bed, the car was intact. The cobbled-together recovery team pulled out jacks and winches, gathered branches to lodge under wheels for leverage, did everything in their means to free the machine – all to no avail.

At the lodge again, the two original strandees were ordered off recovery duty and sent to the pool to recuperate. Rarely had one man ever been more grateful for an hour in water. Their ride was eventually returned, hauled out by Land Rovers and bigger winches.

Back on tar, the wilderness looked less wild when seen through glass and with a road stretching out ahead. The Tokyoite was changed though, now forever branded by the bush.

TRAVEL // Oceans & Islands (2006)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 12:39:00 +0000

In the twists and turns of our life's journey, we sometimes take different paths from those that we might expect to take.

As a result of a couple of trips down to the Japanese subtropical archipelago of Okinawa back in 2004, I had it in mind that my future led me to become a reporter down there, zipping about in the heat in a jeep and interviewing people about fishing yields and the incursions of US military bases. It was a dream prompted by an offer from the publisher of 'Okinawa Index', a guide book I once wrote for.

Ultimately, it was not to be and in time I bedded down in Tokyo and got used to life in the big city, finding plenty of ways to keep myself amused and busy. I ended up producing what I believe to have been the first collection of modern Japanese protest music, which was not an easy task!

I lost touch with the publisher and assumed that I'd never hear from her again. To my surprise, I got a call out of the blue at around the time that the CD was due to be released. She was in town for a party and did I want to hook up again? 'Why not?' I thought, 'you never know where these things can end up.'

At the party and later over dinner, she told me that she was planning another guide book and would I like to contribute again? Although I hadn't been back down there since the last trip, I agreed pretty much straight away.

Grabbing moments in lunch breaks (often how I write in Tokyo), I pieced together an overview of my previous two visits, spiced it up with some of the trips I'd managed after the taste for travel I'd developed since Okinawa, and wrapped it up with my desire to return there.

Once again, even after submitting the piece, I didn't hear from the publisher again. To my knowledge, the guide book was never made, and so the article was never published.

Instead, it makes its debut here and is titled 'Oceans & Islands'.

All photos by Dom Pates.

Oceans and Islands

The ocean has had me under its spell ever since I first laid eyes on it. I was born within five minutes walk from the sea, in the coastal resort of Brighton. It's a little like an English San Francisco - a hilly and cosmopolitan seaside city, full of creative types and tech companies. There is always some sort of a buzz going on but perhaps most impressive is the ocean location. Gazing out to sea always makes your troubles feel much smaller.

A few years ago, tired of England and in need of a little more adventure in my life, I decided to pack up and go to the other side of the world. In a rather bold move and used to a more relaxed way of life, I threw myself into one of the biggest and busiest cities on Earth - Tokyo - to see if I sank or swam. Once I found the water was warm enough, I began to explore the group of islands that I'd landed in.

I'd never lived in such a big city before, so often found need to seek out a little peace, away from the bubbling torrents of the metropolis. A trip to Okinawa needed no passport and was only a couple of hours flight from Tokyo. A little slice of the subtropics to get the skyscrapers out of my hair for a while.

To my grandparents' generation, it might as well have been the moon. They first heard about the place as some exotic location on the other side of the planet where the last land battle of WWII occurred. I, however, spotted it in my guidebook and thought it would be a nice place to visit.

Immediate first impressions were mixed. It was warmer than where I'd come from but seemed old and fading. Then I began to explore and got a little more under Naha's skin; the vibrancy of Kokusai-dori, the traditional treats and gems in the maze of the old market, and the unexpected surprises you can only come across when wandering round a city and following your nose.

One such surprise was the Baobab Bar. Designed inside and out to look like the sacred African tree, I was drawn in. I made a new friend there with whom I set off on an adventure the next day. Our voyage of discovery took us to the tiny island of Kudaka that, unbeknownst to us, was celebrating their New Year that very day.

I experienced things to tell the grandchildren about - drinking, eating and dancing with the villagers, scenes of island life unchanged for many generations, playing sanshin at the house of a stranger who invited me in. I had become an adventurer, with tales to tell of it.

My second visit was at the request of Okinawa Index, after a chance meeting on Kudaka. This time, I got even deeper under the skin of the place and it got deeper under mine too.

The visit came with a packed itinerary too. I tried my hand at glass blowing at the Onna Glass Factory. At Ryukyu Mura, I watched a water buffalo pressing sugar cane and sat at a weaving loom. There was a scenic photo shoot to take in, along a rugged and beautiful coastline that took my breath away. I even squeezed in a visit to the Peace Park that commemorates the battle that caused my grandparents to hear of Okinawa over on the other side of the world.

Since my first forays into the former Ryukyu kingdom, I've become a travelling man. I've seen the Great Wall of China and the Olympic transformation of Beijing; been to the DMZ that straddles the Korean peninsula, one of the most heavily landmined places in the world; glimpsed at the Himalayas from the Kathmandu Valley, during the Festival of Light; taken in an Arabian sunset in a desert just outside Dubai; and lived a month in East Africa, with its safari wildernesses and the splendours of the Swahili Coast. Despite all this, Okinawa sticks in my mind like a limpet to a rock.

After my second visit, I picked up a new project. Following a request for help from a UK-based organisation, I set up Peace Not War Japan. The UK group raises consciousness and funding for the international peace movement by releasing CDs of contemporary pro-peace music, and I started a similar venture in Japan. We released our first CD of Japanese pro-peace music in the summer of 2006. The music comes from across the country and covers a range of genres. Okinawa's influence is felt strongly too. Ryukyu Underground donated a track, a version of the island standard 'Hana'. We also have songs from Soul Flower Union and Kotobuki, two groups very influenced by Okinawan songs and stories.

Proceeds from the sale of these CDs will be donated to Japanese peace groups, so it is a chance for me to give something back and contribute to the growth of peace in Japan.

For the sake of balance, when you take something, it is very important to also give in return. These beautiful islands have given me so, so much already - perhaps it's my turn to give now.

TRAVEL // In Hiroshima - Meditations on Peace and Humanity (2004)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 05:24:00 +0000

As a child of about 10 years old, I remember having a great fear of nuclear war destroying the Earth. This was during the early days of the Reagan/Thatcher era and a time of Cold War nuclear posturing between the two World Superpowers - the US and the USSR.

I went on an anti-nuclear march in London with my parents, that ended up in Hyde Park. At midday, a klaxon sounded and everybody lay down on the ground, as if to simulate what would happen in the event of a nuclear strike. Somewhere near me, the then-leader of the Labour Party Michael Foot (a committed believer in unilateral disarmament, with whom I would share a train carriage and an hour of conversation on a train back from the Glastonbury Festival many years later), lay down with the marchers.

The march left a deep impression on me and a few of years later, I created a collage of an anti-nuclear protest march in my school art class. Some of the banners in my creation included the phrase I remembered so clearly as having seen at the march - 'No More Hiroshimas!'

As soon as I got my first three day weekend off from work after arriving in Tokyo (about 10 weeks on from my arrival in Japan), I took my first trip outside of the capital. There could be no other place to go for a first trip than Hiroshima.

The piece found below was initially written up in my diary as I sat in the Peace Park (where the epicentre of the bomb's strike was), immersed in my thoughts. I later twisted it around a little and got it published in my trusty outlet, Tokyo Notice Board. Wasn't sure whether they'd take something of such a heavy nature as they mostly published slightly more frivolous articles along the lines of 'Isn't Tokyo funny?' or 'What's different between Japan and my home country'. However, publish it they did.

That visit also laid the foundations for the peace work (Peace Not War Japan) that I later started here too. Personally, I'd recommend that everyone should visit Hiroshima at some point in their life. It shows what people are capable of doing to each other and provides deep grounds for thought and reflection on the nature of war and peace.

All photos shown here are taken from that visit.

In Hiroshima – Meditations on Peace and Humanity

Outside the Park, the city goes about its daily business, the wheel still turning as if it had never been stopped. Modern day Hiroshima looks as if it were constructed from flat-packs, neatly yet hastily reassembled with little serious artisanship. Yet it is testament to the incredible rejuvenative powers that humans possess, the power to rebuild, to start afresh where once there was nothing. Inside the Park, an appropriate oasis of calm in a city with admittedly less of the eye-popping bustle than Tokyo, hordes of schoolchildren pass through. Some draw pictures or recite poems. Others lay wreaths at the Cenotaph. All feel the effects, the traces or the memories left by the fates that befell their ancestral countrymen, women and children.

It could have been any group of people that it was dropped on. Potentially, it could have been any nation that dropped it. Historical circumstances just so conspired that it was America that dropped the Atomic Bomb on Japan. It didn’t cause the greatest number of deaths within that section of that period of conflict. The Americans killed tens of thousands in the bombings of Tokyo. The Japanese themselves, during the Rape of Nanking, brutalised the Chinese in greater numbers than the combined mortals effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hitler’s concentration camps. Stalin’s Gulag. Leningrad. Millions were slaughtered in the name of the growth and eventual decline of the British Empire. But there is just something about Hiroshima, having been victim to the first bomb thus more so than Nagasaki, that represents the sheers horrors and inhumanity of such brazen and naked warfaring.

In the distance, another child chimes the Peace Bell.

Is any one of these children capable of growing up and taking the decision to wipe out such a vast number of his fellow species in one fell swoop (the gene surely cannot be that selfish)? Potentially, although one would certainly hope that a childhood visit to a place like this would leave enough of an impression to last long into later days, and bequeath an understanding of an unknown individual’s right to life. Japan seems quite at ease with its humiliation becoming a focus for tourism. Maybe it goes well beyond such things. It just happened to be Japan that it fell on. Japan therefore has a duty to hold a mirror up to the potentials for human folly.

It rather takes your breath away to walk around the place and think about quite how immediately levelled everything once was.

Then there’s the museum itself, set in the grounds of the Memorial Peace Park, to further knock the breath from your body. It includes an exhibited replica of ‘Little Boy’, the actual A-Bomb that exploded over the city at 8.15AM, August 6th 1945. It’s not much bigger than a Western style bathtub and almost looks like something from a cartoon, an ACME-stamped, Wile-E Coyote number. You just imagine that something that could completely level a city would be a little bigger than that.

What beasts we are. What barbarities against ourselves we are capable of. How tragic that, despite cries of ‘Never again!’ almost sixty years ago, we continue to perpetuate the cycles of violence that deny others the right to live in peace with one another. How right for so many the world over to have protested against last years war, that which we could not stop and it now developing into a struggle for liberation against occupation. How suitably appropriate to have personally bookended 2003 with the march in London and a visit to Hiroshima. Will we ever learn?

TRAVEL // Happy Accidents & Following Your Nose (2004)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 10:12:00 +0000

Arriving in Japan kicked off opportunities to travel to places I could once only have dreamt of. My very first trip to explore parts of the rest of Japan outside of Tokyo took me to Hiroshima, a city I first became aware of through anti-nuclear marches I'd been on with my family as a kid. It was a profound experience and I was surprised by how normal things looked.

The second trip (and one which also led to an interest in travel writing) was to Okinawa, the southernmost group of islands in the Japanese archipelago - a place of subtropical Asian vibes mixed with hints of a US military occupation due to the vast number of bases there.

Ambling around Okinawa and having my own adventures developed my confidence in wandering around unknown places. It also led to a deep love of the area and the promise of a future down there.

The article found below is the full length piece that I wrote about my experiences there. An edited version was published in two different publications. My paid dumping ground for pretty much anything I wrote about Japan, Tokyo Notice Board, published it in September 2004.

On the small island I visited (Kudaka) that is described below, I also met the Editor of an English language series of travel guides named 'Okinawa Index'. It was one of the happy accidents described in the title. She asked me to write the piece, and it appeared in their 2004-2005 'Okinawa Island Guide', along with some of my photos.

After the grind and tribulations of my later years in England, being in Okinawa was perhaps the first time in my life that I felt exotic - both from the quality of my surroundings and how I was received as a guest.

The same editor later told me that she was considering me for the role of reporter on an English newspaper she was planning to set up. I would have required me to be able to speak Japanese and she needed to find a good Sales Manager before setting it up, but for a while I held out the prospect of leaving Tokyo behind me and heading off for a life of a reporter on a group of subtropical islands.

Never happened in the end and at the time of writing, four years on, I'm still in Tokyo. Nevertheless, it was a fabulous idea that would have taken me in an entirely different direction from the one I subsequently took. In the end, my visions of a Graham Greene/Ian Fleming/Ernest Hemingway kinda lifestyle dissipated in the shadows of Tokyo's towers. But what could have been!

The pictures shown here are also taken from that first trip.

Happy Accidents and Following Your Nose

Life is but a series of accidents, some happy, some sad. History is the story of such accidents, a tapestry of unintentional design. One never quite knows what is around the corner and it is either our fear or our curiosity of the unknown that leads us in different directions.

I’d spent my Christmas and New Year holed up in Tokyo. As much as I might love the place in many ways, it’s still somewhere that the need to escape from every now and again becomes overpowering. The furthest I could go whilst remaining in Japan and somewhere very high on the wish list of destinations to visit was Okinawa. So I gathered up a few days off, boarded a plane and headed south.

Greeted by smiling faces on the people wandering around the airport and with none of the hunched shoulders that Tokyoites worn down by the pressures of life have, I was relieved to be away and keen to explore. With wider streets, palm trees and a temperature that certainly didn’t feel like January, the smile on my face at my good fortune began to spread. A bus took me into Naha, the capital of the main island, which was where my first Okinawan adventure was to begin.

At first glance, the city appeared to me less than striking. But first impressions can often not be lasting ones and I always find that a new city needs to be wandered around a little first. There were hints of how I imagine Havana to look – fading and starting to peel at the edges, with a sense of being somewhere yet to fully catch up with the vagaries of being a modern city. However, there were enough kanji (Chinese characters) symbols, ubiquitous vending machines, neon, street tech, and other assorted ephemera to remind me that I was still very much in Japan.

Shisa, creatures that resembled some crossbreed between lions and dragons, guarded the entrances to buildings and streets, and were everywhere. A range of many other Asian influences converged on every corner, topped off with American twists. Furthermore, there was enough of a hint of the subtropics – colours, vegetation, sounds – to remind me that I wasn’t in Honshu (Japan's main island) any more. The simple, stringed sounds of the sanshin seeped out citywide. Despite Naha retaining the bustle of a capital city, it was clear that island life had a more laid back approach than that of the screaming metropolis that had formed my first impressions of Japan.

My accidents were happy ones.

Whilst wandering through the back streets as I waited for check-in time at my hotel, I chanced upon an African themed bar. It was designed to look like the interior and exterior of a baobab tree and I resolved to return later in the evening. Return I did and I wasn’t disappointed. The barman, a long haired Tokyo escapee, welcomed me instantly and recommended some fine Okinawan food to replenish a famished traveller. A little later, another customer came in and joined me at the bar. He worked for a Japanese NGO and had spent most of his time recently in Iran. I asked him what was his favourite country that he’d worked in, and he answered Tanzania. Having spent a week there myself last year and that being the reason I’d chosen the Baobab bar, we rapped about Africa for a while.

A little later, a couple of guys came in for cocktails and to jam on the bongos, didgeridoos and marimbas that littered the bar. I soon joined them and struck up conversation with the one who spoke good English, a certain Mr Lucky. We drank together, shared stories and jammed on the various instruments that lay around, joined too by the barman. To my surprise and giving me an early indication of the generosity of the Okinawan spirit, Mr Lucky asked me about my plans for my stay and when I told him that I was just following my nose, he offered to take me to another island the next day. It was to become a day that I’ll undoubtedly remember for many years.

He picked me up from the hotel early the following morning and we drove out to the southeastern coast. As Ryuichi Sakamoto played on the car stereo, the city’s outskirts came and went. We passed through sugar cane plantations to arrive at the glittering sea. What joy it was to gaze once again on unfettered ocean. Boarding a ferry for the tiny island of Kudaka, we waved goodbye to the mainland and set off in search of whatever came our way. I received a wide smile from a beautiful girl on the ferry that could have sent me back to Tokyo happy enough. However, there was much more to come.

Another happy accident. We arrived on Kudaka, an island of less than 2 km2 which hosts a mere 112 households and is known to Okinawans as ‘Island of the Gods’. Legend has it that Amamikiyo, the first Ryukyuan, descended from heaven and taught the people how to farm. Kudaka still runs on the Chinese lunar calendar, unlike the most of the rest of the Japanese mainland, and we had coincidentally landed on New Year’s Day!

The islanders were about to celebrate the event with a festival. It was a great surprise and an unexpected bonus for our visit. With the sun on our backs we followed the small crowd that had alighted with us from the boat and wandered through the low and winding streets of the island to arrive at what seemed like a village square. The islanders were gearing themselves up for the celebrations that were to follow. Children in brightly coloured kimonos milled around, sipping from cans of soft drink and welcoming us with smiles and waves. A camera crew from the main island prepared themselves to record the main event. Village officials scurried about, ensuring that everything was in place. The musicians, including two sanshin players and a drummer, tuned up and checked over their instruments.

Lucky and I looked on, awaiting what was to come, and were consequently invited to join in with the celebrations. Here, there was no option to simply be an onlooker, but more an obligation to participate. I was the only gaijin (foreigner) on the island yet I barely noticed that fact. At 11am, we opened our first of many Okinawan beers and began to bond with the people of Kudaka. The music started soon after and before long, much dancing followed. In trying to get a picture of what was happening and what lay behind this celebration, I learned that female shamans named yuta have played a longstanding part in Kudaka’s history and traditions, having once been consultants to the old Ryukyu kings and still play a strong role in Kudakan society. They were mostly kept housed away from the main gathering, yet occasionally came out to dance to the music, a bewitching subtropical sound that removed me even further from any thoughts of crazy old Tokyo.

After a little while, Lucky and I set off to explore. The vegetation we passed was wild, lush and unclipped, differing considerably from the regimented styles I’d come to know from the Japanese gardens I’d seen around Tokyo. We found a deserted beach that gave me more of a taste of what Okinawa has to offer when the climate’s a little warmer. Sitting on the sand and pebbles, any remaining woes fell off my shoulders. As we gazed out across the vast empty expanse of sea, we talked like old friends. Lucky was a sky watcher and he extolled in the joys of life in Okinawa. I told him that I felt like I’d come home. We rested awhile, relaxing and looking at pretty shells, then returned to the party a little while later.

When the locals noticed that we’d come back, we were invited to eat and drink some more, and we sat to enjoy the event. At various points throughout the afternoon, we were encouraged to join in with the dancing. This was no time or place to be shy, so Lucky and I got up and danced, a ritualistic style that involved shuffling on your feet with your arms raised upwards and waving your hands in the air. I felt almost as if I’d travelled back in time, and certainly stood out as the only non-Japanese person present. After the dance, I sat down with some of the locals and was engaged in conversation by an old man. He spoke next to no English and my Japanese is very limited, but he still managed to convey to me that I was most welcome on Kudaka, and that all people lived under the same sun and were thus of the same blood.

On their New Year’s Day, Kudakans open up their houses to all and so a little later I slipped away and followed someone I’d been drinking with to another islander’s home. We sat on tatami (grass mats for the home), drinking green tea and eating sashimi (raw fish). In all my travels and of all the people I’ve met, I have yet to experience such friendliness to a stranger and feelings of welcome than I did on that day in Kudaka. After she left to catch an early ferry back to the mainland, I rejoined Lucky where the party was carrying on at someone else’s house. The musicians from the main event were all there and the merriment continued unabated. I was even asked to try my hand at playing the sanshin.

As the afternoon wore on and started to turn into evening, we decided that it was time to take our leave. Drunk on welcomes, island living and much Okinawan beer, I promised the islanders to return next year.

On Okinawa, I felt like I’d come home. Tokyo was so tough to return to afterwards.

TRAVEL // Czech This Out (1997)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 08:21:00 +0000

'Czech This Out!', complete with its cheesy pun of a title, was my first published piece of travel writing. It appeared in the University Of Brighton's student magazine Babble. I was asked to write the piece extolling the virtues of the guide book - presumably Rough Guides were sponsoring the page.

Prague is a beautiful city that I was fortunate enough to visit twice. The second occasion I managed to rent an apartment there for a few days, which was an entirely different experience from staying in a youth hostel (and much more pleasurable, I might add).

The architecture of the place was one of the things that fascinated me enough to visit initially, alongside their more peaceful methods of revolution. I discovered that the Czechs had taken the ideas of Cubism that much further than painting and incorporated its ideals into architecture and design during the earlier part of the 20th Century. Clearly something I had to witness for myself. I also found some quite remarkable modern buildings there too, such as 'Fred & Ginger', an office block that was designed to look like a dancing couple.

Another good way to learn a little more about the place and the people is through the novels of Milan Kundera.

Czech This Out!

With our intended trip to New York thwarted, Hazelle and I left England after a miserable wet June fortnight and found ourselves basking in a week of glorious Prague sunshine instead. Every once in a while, and against better instinct, one must resign oneself to becoming a tourist. We decided that we were happy to do just this and set off with a camera in one hand and a guide book in another.

Prague is undoubtedly a remarkably beautiful city. Much of its architecture has survived 600 years of European war and destruction. The city is fundamentally European, yet permeated throughout with a rich aroma of the East. Feeding off the River Vltava, many cobbled streets mingle and intertwine as trams rumble past each other. As befits such a romantic city, the place is awash with (mainly Western) young couples, walking arm-in-arm along the river, or sitting facing each other at a table in a bar or restaurant.

As one of the smaller European capitals, Prague runs at a totally different pace to, say Paris or London. It allows you to slow down to a comfortable walk. West of the river, in the Hradcany district, lies Prague Castle which houses the towering majesty of the Cathedral of St. Vitus (the foundation stone was laid in 1344 although the Cathedral itself was not completed until 1929). If you turn around on the Charles Bridge you'll face the National Theatre, crested with its golden roof. Refused funding by the Austrian State who were partly ruling the lands at the time, the Czech people dug deep into their own pockets to fund this most impressive monument to a long-standing theatrical tradition (the current president, Vaclav Havel, was himself a playwright before the Velvet Revolution of 1989 swept him into power).

In the Old Town Square (one of the gathering places in the city), tourists and 'Praguers' gather on the hour around the Astrology clock, with its metal cockerels, bowing Apostles, and sword-wielding skeletons. The Jewish cemetery is another lure for the hordes of tourists that pour into Prague; it is a smallish area located in the former Jewish ghetto with an estimated 100,000 buried there, some twelve layers deep. The place evokes an awed calm and holds an air of clustered tranquillity. A former synagogue on the site has now been converted into a museum to commemorate victims of the Holocaust.

There are many ways to spend ones time in Prague - plenty of bars and cafes to chill in, museums and galleries to visit, tourist attractions to see. The Czechs have been subject to countless occupations through the ages and can on occasion be rather wary or weary of foreigners. However, most of the ones that we met were pretty friendly and helpful, and I've never felt safer on the streets of any other European city. English is fairly widely spoken although some German can also be useful if you don't speak Czech. And Western money can go far. Our youth hostel was £7 per person per night, and of course the beer is cheap too!

So, was our Rough Guide a little more than just a rough guide? Along with the street map purchased at the airport, it was indispensable, and found its way into our hands on almost every twist of yet another cobbled street. From places to go in the day to places to places to stay in the night, useful phrases or a history of its places, basics to districts - all contained within those insightful pages.

'OK, so we can't find this place. Let's go for a drink instead.'

'Where d'you fancy going?'

'I dunno. Let's consult the guide book.'

And through a process of elimination, somewhere perfect for the mood of the moment can inevitably be found.

I think we'd all rather love to be able to do without such a tool and trek through our travels with an adventurous heart and a desire for self-discovery. We found though that to guide us through the sheer magic of Prague and to be able to get the most out of our experiences, we couldn't have done without the firm parental hand of our Prague Bible.

TRAVEL // Deep Ends (2004)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 08:24:00 +0000

We get many things from our parents in our lifetimes - from the fundamental life support systems that they bring us into the world with to the prejudices that they pass on to us. They sometimes also pass on the lessons that they learn from their own lives.

One such important lesson that I got from my father, a much more widely travelled man than myself, is that when you visit a new place, your first impressions of it often fade as you become more used to wherever it is that you find yourself. It is therefore a good thing to do to write down those first impressions to preserve them, unless those initial feelings may soon disappear under the blanket of familiarity.

He saw me off at Heathrow when I first left for Japan and those words rang in my ears. Upon arrival, with everything around me shiny, alien and new, I noted all that I saw, observed or became curious by.

These first impressions became 'Deep Ends', the article below. It was also the first time that I ever received a payment for any of my writings, which was a most pleasant experience even though it amounted to roughly £15 (not a great sum by any stretch).

The article appeared in a publication called 'Tokyo Notice Board', a mostly classified ads rag that would pretty much publish anything written in English about Tokyo and Japan (we all have to start somewhere!). I also had the additional pleasure of seeing something I'd written, again for the first time, translated into another language.

Rereading it, in the place that I currently call home and have pretty solidly settled into now, I realise that some of these first impressions have become my firm and standard lines about how I feel about this place. It's funny now though to compare how I felt about the place at first with how natural it feels now!

Just goes to show...wherever you lay your hat, after a while that's your home...

Deep Ends

Deep ends...

At the grand old age of 32 and with barely a trace of preparation or idea what on earth I’m doing or going to do here, I’ve gone and thrown myself into Tokyo. England had become stale for me. So, for want of something else to do, I dropped myself into the last major urban conurbation in the Northern Hemisphere – before the vast sprawl of the Pacific gets under way and the International Date Line starts the loop of time on the planet all over again on another day.

There is rather a ‘last great city on earth’ feeling about it. The creation of this place makes for quite some achievement in the annals of human endeavour. In true volcanic style, Tokyo seems to have started as an ominous urban swelling that then burst forth, throwing up buildings that dwarf even the imagination and truly scrape the sky, with neon and lighting that sear the retinas as one flits past, and such a hugely vast sprawl of people which defy the scale of exposures to previous big cities. It feels like one could spend a number of lifetimes just wandering the myriad of Tokyo main drags, side streets and back alleys, just staring at stuff as the new sights and sounds fill up the mind as a barman would a beer glass.

Whilst not quite the melting pot of a London or a New York – foreigners very definitely stand out here, and for a boy raised on the multiculturalist traditions of the West’s urban hotspots, it feels surprisingly homogeneic for a city of so many people – Tokyo nevertheless makes up for it in different ways, including with its sheer scale of numbers. It should be acknowledged that this is most definitely not somewhere one should choose if opting for a quiet life.

So, why am I here? How come I’ve found myself in this place, of all the places in the world that I could have chosen, when the language can’t even be guessed at? Why, when I was starting to feel a little of the wearying of the years in my bones, come to somewhere that waking up and leaving the house can have the impact of staring into the nozzle end of a garden hose and getting someone to turn the tap on when you are likely to be least expecting it?

I suppose that if you are going to set yourself a challenge, it might as well be one that is going to stretch you. After all, what point progress if baby steps are only ever taken over giant steps? Armstrong’s fears could have kept him in the capsule. It is far better a story to tell to say ‘Hey, sure I moonwalked!’ than ‘Damn, I got there and then bottled it’. And sometimes you just have to tell yourself that you’ve always managed to float or even swim before when out of your depth, so why not this time?

ARTICLES // My Life And Bushido Ghosts (2006)

noreply@blogger.com (Globalism) — Mon, 28 May 2007 00:48:00 +0000

Probably the most common question I get asked in Tokyo is 'Why did you come to Japan?', even after having been here for almost four years. I sense that were I here for 40 years, I'd still get asked on a fairly regular basis.

It's a fair question to ask, I suppose. During the Edo era (1603-1868), when Japan was ruled by the shogunate and populated by samurai, the country was effectively closed off from any foreign contact. From 1635, the Japanese were prohibited from ever leaving the country and if they did, prohibited from returning. It's not a place steeped in traditions of mixing with peoples from other races.

Nevertheless, here I am. I think that something like 1% of the people living in Japan today were foreign born, so it's still a little bit more of a unique experience living here as a 'foreigner' that it would be in Europe or the US for example.

In 2005, I was asked to write an article for the Hiroshima-based (and presumably now defunct) bilingual magazine 'PEACE'. I titled it with just that same question I am always asked, and it covered not only some of my motivations for coming here but also a little family background (much of my extended family has tended to expatriate themselves or have travelled widely) and the similarities and differences between my life here in Japan and the one I led back in Britain.

The following year, I came across another writing opportunity based on the theme of 'Home and Exile', through my subscription to the Brighton Fringe Mailing List. This time, it was for a new publication being set up in the UK, called 'Don't Look Back'. I sent off the same piece that was published in the Hiroshima mag, and they were interested enough to ask me to rewrite it and submit a new piece. This I duly did, coming up with the piece found below - 'My Life and Bushido Ghosts'.

After submission, I never heard from them again, so I actually have no idea whether it was published or not or even whether the magazine ever went to print. I hope that they did, although it would be nice to know whether my article ever went anywhere!

The title was a Japan-slanted pun on the Brian Eno/David Byrne 1981 album 'My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts'. Bushido means 'the way of the warrior' and commonly refers to the samurai code of conduct. The reference to ghosts comes from my feelings of finding my own 'ghosts', people from my past that kept springing up at the most unexpected moments as I neared the end of my time living in the UK.

In a way, writing the piece itself was an exorcism of sorts. Here in Japan, I don't have so many of my own ghosts and the old ones have lost their spook factor too.

Perhaps next time I'm asked why I came here, I can now just give the questioner this URL and suggest that they find out for themselves!

My Life and Bushido Ghosts

Exiles, immigrants, expats, foreigners, outsiders, refugees – whatever you want to call us, we’re all displaced peoples. The square pegs, the forced out, the seekers and the wandering drifters, each uprooted and elsewhere. It happens to the biggest of us – Napoleon removed and sent to die in Saint Helena, The Stones as tax exiles in fading French chateaus. It happens to the smallest of us too – ghost ships washed up in Barbados, filled with desiccated corpses of young African men, Iraqis fleeing their home tinderbox in any direction they can.

Here in Tokyo, I label myself an ‘expat’. To me, it says that I exercised choice over my displacement. However, to the rest of this still closed global hotspot, I’m just another foreigner and that is what I’ll stay. Always on the outside, looking in. Party perhaps, to the appetiser, but never the full meal.

This is as it has always been. Born in England to an English family, then raised and schooled in Wales, I began with one foot in each camp yet not quite fully fitting into either, ‘different’ from the start. Identity is always so interchangeable and muddled through in the UK that it’s a tough job to convincingly claim to be a nationalist.

About three years ago, I tied up all my loose ends, condensed my life into two suitcases and a laptop and jumped onto a plane at Heathrow - bound for the other side of the world with a blank slate in my head and an empty diary in my bag. Leaving a childhood home or home country, when it’s time to go, it’s time to go.

I’ve often been asked why I came to Japan, but rarely ever why I left the UK. Most people leave home at some point and all have their reasons, whether they walked out with head held high or were kicked out with tail between legs. I did so for two main reasons. Firstly, because the world is changing rapidly and becoming ever more interdependent, I wanted to experience and understand that transition. To taste and perhaps even help shape some of that emerging global identity. To become a citizen of the future, not a relic of the past. Secondly, my ghosts crowded me out.

Even my original and later readopted hometown of Brighton had begun to teem with them after a while. They laid in wait for me on street corners, in pubs and supermarkets, in the books that I read and the songs I listened to, in the successes of others rightfully mine, and the new bonds made that I was excluded from. Most of all, they laid deep down inside of me, weighing me down and forcing me to chase my tail instead of following my nose or my dreams. I ran away to the new world and I ran away from the old one.

Of course, Japan has its ghosts too. A Tokyoite once told a tale of awakening feeling pressured, only to see the disembodied head of a samurai resting on her chest, and his body slumped in the corner of the room. Then there’s Hiroshima’s living ghosts, the hibakusha (A-bomb survivors) and the terrible tales they still tell about one fateful summer day in their childhood and its aftermath. But perhaps as Japan’s ghosts belong to others, I don’t see them in the same way as my own.

Exile, expatriation and exploration seem to run in the family. Both parents are well travelled and weave snapshots of recent human history into the family narrative. My mother, who actually recommended Tokyo to me, spent a little time in Soviet-era Moscow and Leningrad. It can be difficult to visit somewhere that my father's not been before me. He was in Berlin a week before the fall of the Wall. My sisters, fellow siblings-in-exile, respectively live in Toulouse and Dar Es Salaam.

It goes back further and stretches out wider too. On Dad’s side, an uncle in North Carolina, a cousin born in Zambia. On Mum’s side, an uncle who sent himself to Cameroon, and another uncle in Germany, who’d rejected London at the end of the 1960’s and headed off with a camera round his neck. Hitching on some autobahn or other, he was picked up by a busload of hippies on their way to a Pink Floyd show and later married one of them.

Yet further still, the bloodlines intermingle with the bloodshed and fault lines of the last century or so. Another uncle, this time belonging to my grandmother, seemed to have lived the whole Empire boy dream. He found himself in Shanghai in the 1920’s, where he hooked up with a Russian girl he met. She turned out to be a minor royal that had fled the Revolution in 1917, and was now down at heel, selling matches on the street. Together, they fled China to escape from the invading Japanese and on to Batavia (now Jakarta). The Imperial Army had their sights on Indonesia too so they fled again, ending their days in Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was).

Completing the circle, it was a visit to my sister in Tanzania, during the week that the Americans and the British began their assault on Baghdad, that I decided I was finally ready to up sticks, put Blighty behind me and head far East. At the turn of the millennium, the rock ‘n’ roll gang I fronted began getting our first taste of fame by bursting into the national media by accident. Amidst our meteoric rise, however, I was ousted in a coup and thus began my English decline. In time, my senses became dulled by my daily grind and I needed to reawaken them with new experiences. Tokyo lured me with dreams of a high-tech, glittering city of the future.

My life here is both similar and different to the old one in England. I eat more fish than I did before and am also more used to earthquakes, but as I did in the UK, I teach English for cash and occasionally still sing in a local bar band. The all-efficient technology is so pervasive, however, that it’s barely noticed after a while.

My social circle is drawn from a much wider pool than my British one was. A Californian pal tells me tales of living on otherwise uninhabited Hawaiian islands. A Nepalese friend invited me to join him and his family in celebrating the Hindu Festival of Light, at home in Kathmandu. I became the global citizen I was aiming to be.

One part of the story remains untold. As with any haunting, you can only run from your ghosts for so long. In time, if the exile is ever to come home, he must also become exorcist.