Carmen Maki’s Musical Half-Century
Both Carmen and Terayama were brought up by single mothers – who were themselves often absent – with little or no memory of their fathers.
Dancing Fools and Watching Fools: Alan Booth’s Journey
Just as the gap between the writer and reader has shrunk, so has the gap between the writer and the written about
R.I.P. Yuya Uchida: Sayonara to Japan’s Mr. Rock’n Roll
His party political broadcast, mostly in idiosyncratic English, turned out to be a classic of the genre.
First Love: The Hell Version
“You have a wife, don’t you?” “Yes, she’s as cold as ice. When she’s asleep, I often dream of setting her on fire.”
The Sound of the Waves: Carmen Maki Does Terayama
She is still going strong. The flame still burns.
Sunset on the Lake of Lion’s Tears: Terayama and Shinoda in the Early 60s Part 2
All is resolved somehow and the goat goes back to the wide open pastures of Hokkaido.
Sunset on the Lake of Lion’s Tears: Terayama and Shinoda in the Early 60s
Our hero is disengaged, transgressive and filled with a restless energy that makes him dangerous – rather like his creator
Buraikan: Sex and Booze and Samisen
Imagine that the counter-culture of the late 1960s was transposed to the last decades of the Tokugawa Shogunate.
Aum & Japan: 23 Years On
Highly educated people often lack a grounding in reality and are suckers for the certainty of cult-like intellectual systems
Inflation on Mars: the Global Implications of Corbynomics
The assumption that low inflation and interest rates are here to stay would be discredited – not just in the UK, but globally