Tokyo hunger strike

Naoya Okamoto and comrades hunger strike in Tokyo

Protesting is no longer an unusual sight in Tokyo, which might be why the small sit-in outside exit 12 of Kasumigaseki Station attracts scant enquiry. It’s a common enough scene: a small gaggle of local university students, an array of brightly coloured, homemade placards, a guitar and… pouches of salt. It’s the constant dabbing at salt that seems to draw attention, in fact. One protestor is dipping into it so frequently, he looks like a kid on a sherbet trip. What to make of this, I wonder? How to reconcile this image with the fact that what I’m witnessing is a hunger strike?

Booker T Jones interview

Everyone knows Booker T. Jones, though not everyone realises it. Despite being one of the most influential musicians of the last half century, he is best known as a session man and songwriter, plying his trade in the background, producing tunes that have been in the foreground more times than you could ever recall.

Booker T. was there when you began raiding your parents’ vinyl collection in your teens, blazing loud behind Wilson Pickett on ‘In the Midnight Hour‘. He was there when you fumbled around on the dance floor, wracking up the emotion as Otis hammered home ‘Try a Little Tenderness‘ (yes, that’s him on keyboards in the video). Heck, he was even there when you learnt what soul music meant, defining a genre on the seminal Sam & Dave track, ‘Soul Man‘ (although not at his usual Hammond B3, as we shall see). As a member of the MG’s, the house band at hit-producing Stax Records, Booker T. pumped out classic upon classic throughout the ’60s and ’70s, and in their downtime the band recorded eternal slices of soulful funk – you probably know and adore ‘Green Onions‘, ‘Hip Hug Her‘ and ‘Soul Limbo’ (the latter better known to Brits as ‘Test Match Special‘).

The man himself is taller than expected (early footage makes him look so boyish, you’d almost think he was five foot nothing), and has the manners of a southern gent well into his sixties. He’s almost apologetic when I wonder aloud how I might go about asking questions that he hasn’t been asked before, and he’s unfailingly polite in discussing the music that made him famous 50 years ago, a subject he must have to deal with on a daily basis. In more recent years, Booker T. Jones has been in the studio with the likes of Drive By Truckers and The Roots, laying down two of the most acclaimed albums of his long career, Potato Hole (2009) and The Road to Memphis(2011), and it’s with these recordings fresh in his mind that we sit down in a quiet room beneath Blue Note Tokyo to discuss a career that has, even in some small way, affected most of us.

QR crazy

My personalized QR code

QR codes have been around for yonks. I remember putting them into the artwork for our Cut Flowers posters (a band I played with years back), and thinking they were the very height of modernity. They’ve never had quite the same level of success abroad that they’ve had in Japan; the reason for their appeal here apparently has a lot to do with spelling (the average Japanese net user might be able to remember the phonetics of a URL, but can they still spell it once they get home?), so it’s not much of a surprise to see that QR codes are still around and slowly continuing to evolve.

Strange facts and useless lists

How many Tokyoites can you squeeze into a Mini Cooper? How many times has Godzilla attacked Tokyo? Why was Paul McCartney banned from having bananas?

Japan March 11 earthquake, as it happened

March 11 started fairly normally. An editorial meeting, a longish Friday afternoon lunch, a comfortable run in to the weekend. And then capital shook, the sea swallowed Tohoku, and Japan changed for good. Almost 6 months later, the country is preparing itself for a rice harvest that many expect to be dangerously contaminated, and the inept government has just accepted the resignation of the 6th prime minister in 5 years.

Millions of column inches have been filled contemplating the catastrophic effect the Great East Japan Earthquake has had on the country, but – given that we blogged through the first major aftershock, minutes after the initial quake – Time Out Tokyo‘s response must have been one of the first. Not that we predicted the financial and political fallout, of course, but we did what we could to help the confused foreigners stranded in Tokyo at the time, an effort that ultimately landed us a Time Out International award.

Tim Robbins interview

My interview with Tim Robbins was always going to be a peculiar one. The actor-turned singer was in Japan for a week of concerts at the Blue Note Tokyo, supporting his 2010 album Tim Robbins & The Rogues Gallery Band, but I was warned beforehand not to mention any of his movies – a tough ask considering that the Oscar winner has been part of the Hollywood furniture for more than two decades – and it was politely suggested that he’d only want to talk about his music. No Susan Sarandon, then. I duly set about studying the man’s only album, and the music that might have inspired it.

I needn’t have been so meticulous. Tim Robbins is a walking encyclopaedia of musical minutiae (seriously, next time you find yourself in a lift with him, ask him about punk, folk, lo-fi…you get the impression he commits it all to memory like words from a script). And so I sat with him for 30 learned minutes, bouncing between family memories (his father was an admired folk singer) and his experiences of fame (‘It’s all in your head’), hearing about how he won’t be ‘going Indonesian’ on his next album, and the Robbins secret to ‘living free’. A wide-ranging interview, then, to say the least, and possibly his first since 1994 (I’m kinda proud to say) not to use the word ‘Shawkshank’…

Alan McGee interview

No Alan McGee, no Oasis. How you respond to this simple equation is entirely down to you. But no Jesus and Mary Chain, no Primal Scream – you start to realise we’re talking about a man who howled with nascent indie in its cradle, was present at its birth, and probably severed its umbilical chord with his gnashing teeth.

Hatsune Miku: ‘live’ in concert

Hatsune Miku, live in concert

Before you read on, I should clear something up. I’m not the kind of person you’d expect to find at a Hatsune Miku concert. I don’t own any kind of games console, and I spent most of the journey to Zepp Tokyo reading the recent Keith Richards autobiography. I stepped onto the platform at Tokyo Teleport wearing rolled up blue jeans, desert boots, a parka and a Fred Perry bag. I’m the kind of person you’d expect to find on a London street corner circa 1964; the kind of person who would dismiss the idea of a hologram concert as futuristic witchcraft.

Hatsune Miku: 'live' in concert

Hatsune Miku, live in concert

Before you read on, I should clear something up. I’m not the kind of person you’d expect to find at a Hatsune Miku concert. I don’t own any kind of games console, and I spent most of the journey to Zepp Tokyo reading the recent Keith Richards autobiography. I stepped onto the platform at Tokyo Teleport wearing rolled up blue jeans, desert boots, a parka and a Fred Perry bag. I’m the kind of person you’d expect to find on a London street corner circa 1964; the kind of person who would dismiss the idea of a hologram concert as futuristic witchcraft.

Johnsons Motorcar

‘Blacko,’ barks the intense slab of face from behind the trestle table; ‘Who’re you shootin’ for?’ It takes a second to realise that the first statement is the face’s name, and the second is aimed at the camera hanging around my neck (which I forgot about when I thought the intensity might escalate into vehemence).

I’m at Marz to shoot a different band, but Blacko has an urgency about him that I think would be unwise to ignore. He implores me to stick around to see the last band, his band, and I agree quickly and prudently. ‘Its Irish music’, he promises in an equally intense Dublin accent, ‘but with a difference.’