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.

Roughly every 3-4 years, my little indie record label, Call And Response Records, releases a compilation album. Some of them have specific themes like covers of a particular artist, or marking a particular milestone in the label's life, or in one case both. Most of them are broader expressions of What We Like, and by extension a window from our specific viewpoint into the Japanese indie music scene.

This is an article I wrote for Japanese music magazine Ele-king, the Japanese version of which appeared in its Summer 2024 paper edition. The theme of the issue was "outsider music", though the editor allowed us to define that term as freely as we wished. Since there's no English version available, I'll post it here for my wonderful fans who definitely exist.

As you get older, social media can become a cavalcade of tributes to the dying heroes of rock, and it's easy to tune it out. The death of Damo Suzuki this year hit me hard, though, partly because he was one of the rare ones I'd actually met and spoken to. More than that, his vast network of sound carriers had included many people I know, so his musical spirit had touched the lives of many people around me in tangible and untangible ways.

I hadn't written for The Japan Times in many years, mainly because I can never be bothered to pitch stories, but I'd interviewed Damo for them in the past and always enjoyed talking to him. Perhaps remembering that, the JT found my email address, possibly under a stack of dusty indie band CD-Rs somewhere, and asked me to write his obituary.

OBITUARY: Damo Suzuki forged a path outside of mainstream pop and rock

Before the sad news of Damo's death, I'd already been writing about Can because of the new live album Live in Paris 1973, released by Mute Records in the UK and with a Japanese edition from Traffic. The Berlin-based writer Wyndham Wallace wrote the official liner notes for Mute, but thanks to Japanese labels' convention of having a local-based writer contribute additional notes to the Japan release, Shoe from Traffic asked me to write an essay of my own about the album. If you buy the album, you can see Wallace's article in English and Japanese, but since mine's only in the Japanese booklet, the label have kindly allowed me to post the English text here.

My last update to this site was three years ago. This is partly because no one really reads blogs anymore, and author websites are only really useful for active authors. This second part is relevant because I do actually have a new book on the way, which means I've also remembered this website exists.

I've also remained active in my other writing work over the past few years, primarily for Ele-king magazine. Some of them are available online, while others were published only in the paper edition, but here's a rundown of what has been published, with links to the articles where possible:

This year was quite a dry one as far as my writing went. I’ve never been much of one for pitching articles to magazines in the first place — I’ve never really got over the nagging sense that writing about music is a stupid thing to do and feel silly begging for money to do it — and increasingly the conversation about music in Japan is one that has little need for my contribution anyway. Instead of worrying about whether my words are helping whatever media outlet it is meet their targets for page views and engagement, it’s far less stressful to retreat from those anxieties and simply write about what I want on my Clear And Refreshing blog.

Writing is work. I mean that in the sense that it's literally my job that pays for the food I eat and the roof over my head, but also in a more abstract sense — even the decision to use an em dash just before this part of the text instead of a colon or semicolon was tiresome and triggered its own mild drizzle of self-loathing. And zoom out to a wider panorama and writing is exhausting; it's where I try to order, make sense of and explain my thoughts about myself and the world, and then once I'm done with it, I stick my name on it like the pompous ass I am and announce, "Here is my wisdom, World: drink deep and rejoice!" Who needs that? No one, and probably not even me. It's tiring. It's work.

Which is fine, because the flip-side of work is play. In any case, a fair amount of my work — the work that gets published with my name on it at least — is really not much more than finding ways of justifying all the playing I do with a patina of intellectual respectability. And I'm extremely lucky that at the end of 2020 I still have work of any kind, and especially that it's the sort that I can do from the safety of my room. So if that new reality of life and work spent shut in a small room didn't really change my work, it had a big effect on my play.

Work has commenced, albeit in fits and starts, on my second book, but my occasional pieces for The Media are still coming out every once in a while. Here are links to all the ones I can remember.

After a long, long wait, the English audiobook edition of Quit Your Band! is now available. Currently, it only seems to be available via Audible, but I think it's due to go up on iTunes soon.

In addition to occasional writing gigs, and despite Quit Your Band! fading into the past in both Japanese and English editions, I've been featured in a few different things as well over the past few months, in my capacity as a journalist and as a general Tokyo indie scene face. I'll put some links and explanations below:

While this site has been quiet, there has nonetheless been a fair amount going on (follow me on Twitter to get news as it comes in, in among the occasional 2AM political rant). I've written a few articles. Here's a summary:

Following the death at the age of 60 of Mark E. Smith of Manchester postpunk band The Fall, Japanese music magazine ele-king asked me to write an article (an obituary, I suppose), about him. I can't claim a deep or extensive knowledge of his enormous back catalogue of music, but nevertheless I count myself as a fan, not least because he was one of the most extraordinary poets in the English language of the modern era. For Japanese-speakers, the ele-king article is here. I'll post the original English text below the fold.

Last week, on the one year anniversary of the English edition’s release, the Japanese translation of Quit Your Band! came out, with the title バンドやめようぜ！ ("Band Yameyouze!”)

When writing Quit Your Band! I made a conscious decision that the book wasn't going to be a guide to the music itself so much as a book about the world musicians inhabit and the background against which their music exists. Under this structure, the artists I talk about really function as examples for broader points I want to make about trends in music culture or aspects of how the scene’s infrastructure work, and they fall into two main categories.

Over the past few months, I've had the interesting experience of being on the receiving end of quite a lot of media coverage about the book, mostly from Japan-focused web sites, magazines etc.

I've heard that book trailers are a thing, so I made this out of a pile of old film & TV footage, iMovie, and a set of vague memories of Godard from film studies classes.

My January column for The Japan Times was about legendary 90s pop producer Tetsuya Komuro, who has a new album coming out and who, since his unceremonious plummet from the limelight, I’ve been finding myself feeling a bit more affection for than I used to at the pinnacle of his 90s ubiquity.

You can read it here.

A bit late posting this, but my 2016 indie roundup column for The Japan Times is available to read here.

My Japan Times column for November coincided with the release of my book, Quit Your Band!, so I was faced with the awkward task of trying to tie the latter in with the former without being dreadfully cheesy about it. The approach I took was, rather than talk about my own book and make the column essentially an advert for myself, to write about other books people have written about music in Japan.

You can read the article on The Japan Times site here.

My Japan Times column for October was about the "Mama's Tattoo" event collective, but also about women in Japanese music in a broader sense.

Read it here.

Hello. This is a web site, and this is me writing on it. I'm a writer, so that's what I do, when I'm not finding creative new ways to avoid being creative. I'll write more on it when I have more writing to write about.