Category: Writing
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Tenniscoats: “They literally play themselves to sleep”
Back in 2008, I flew to Tokyo to meet Saya, the mercurial vocalist with Tenniscoats. We initially made contact in conjunction with our 4th Tada Sampler, and – truth be told – I’d become something of a Tenniscoats junkie in the interim. Though she’d been delightful in our email correspondence, I found myself vaguely nervous…
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Depression: an insider’s tale
I wrote this piece back in November 2011, formerly published under the title “Crumpled Skies and Electric Junkies”, but the site that it lived on has since fallen into disrepair. At the time, it received a lot of goodwill, and seemed to touch one or two people going through something similar. I’ve since been asked,…
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Visiting Kamikochi
During a brief stopover in Kyushu in the early 1990s, British broadcaster and former Monty Python, Michael Palin, stopped in at Huis Ten Bosch, a faithful recreation of a Dutch town, replete with gouda, tulips, windmills and a clock tower built out of bricks shipped from Holland. Not sure what to make of it all,…
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Tōhoku earthquake: a live blog from a shaking building
On Friday March 11, 2011, I was at work in Hiroo, Tokyo. As editorial director of Time Out Tokyo, I was most probably tidying up for the weekend – reading the weekend roundup articles that my colleagues put together religiously each week, trying to decide how to spend an average springtime Saturday. What I remember most clearly…
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Tinariwen and ‘the great game of poesy’
‘We are singing about life, the great game of poesy. We are speaking of the truth from and at our eyes… the mode of nomadic life from the Tamashek people we love.’ – Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, Tinariwen
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The 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…
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The Joe Odagiri interview
The closing ceremony of the Middle East Film Festival is a glam affair, starry as the desert sky. But as the cameras flash across the red carpet, capturing Orlando Bloom and Eva Mendes in the way in which they’ve become accustomed, one figure stands aside, happy to go unnoticed. His name is Joe Odagiri, and…
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The 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.
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Graham Coxon: ‘This isn’t a folky album’
I interviewed Graham Coxon, a huge hero of mine, for Time Out in 2009. At the time, Graham was promoting The Spinning Top, an album that owed a lot to late 1960s folk troubadours such as Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. I remember it as a tough interview. I rarely get starstruck. Maybe chatting with the man…
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Haggling tips from an Abu Dhabi newbie
When I first arrived in the UAE, I met up with a family friend who’d spent more years in the Middle East than in his native Ireland. Keen to impart some of his local knowledge, we arranged a trip to Dubai’s Global Village where he agreed to verse me in haggling culture. ‘The golden rule,’…