This article was for an Ele-king special edition on Japanese singer-songwriter Shintaro Sakamoto. Sakamoto has always been a presence in my musical life here in Japan, both as a solo artist and through his old band Yura Yura Teikoku. He lives in my neighbourhood and his mural adorns the walls of my nearest local live venue the UFO Club. Yura Yura Teikoku are a foundational band for a lot of the musicians around me, and he's one of the most impressive Japanese live acts I've ever seen.

This is a piece I wrote for a collection of essays and stories on the loose theme of Tokyo and which looks now as if it might not end up coming together, so in the meantime the publisher told me it's OK for me to post it online just to give it a little air.

I wrote this piece as another of the short, more friendly pieces of cultural interest content that Ele-king uses to take the soften the blow of all the heavy, academic text that's where the real substance is in their books of essays on political and social issues or touching on critical theory. The book came out in December 2025 and was either titled "Critical Theory, Marxism and Cultural Studies in the UK" or "When Popular Culture Meets Radical Thought: An Introduction to Mark Fisher and Contemporary British Thought" or both.

This piece was originally for the regular edition of Ele-king, which focused on technopop this autumn. As usual when writing about Japanese music for Japanese magazines, the value of my insight mainly comes from my outsider's perspective (despite, from this year, my having lived more of my life in Japan than I did in the UK prior to moving here!) so I took the differences between UK synthpop and Japanese technopop as my starting point.

This is an article I wrote for an Ele-king special edition on the broad topic of "America". Most of the essays in the magazine/book were by serious academics, and I was in there really as a bit of light colour. The theme of the article was one that had been knocking around in my head ever since the bleak nihilism of the last US election landed and started rippling out into the world, and originally started as an idea for a DJ event where no American artists would be played, as a way of starting to imagine what a post-American pop universe might sound like.