Rock and Hard Places

by Andrew Mueller

  The real attraction is the central tank, as tall as the aquarium itself, and wide enough to comfortably accommodate dozens of sting rays, white pointers and hammerheads, schools of less excitingly dangerous fish and, most incredibly, two whale sharks. They swim slow laps of the tank, as vast and improbable and ridiculous yet strangely graceful as 747s circling a runway.

  Back outside in the sun, we got mobbed. A shrieking posse of uniformed schoolgirls bore down on us, a white-socked lynch mob with instamatics, and took dozens of photos of each other standing next to me and Susie. The penny dropped on the train on the way back to the hotel: Susie has striped blonde and red hair. The Spice Girls were, or had just been, in Osaka. They thought she was Ginger Spice. What worried me—though it should worry the relevant Spice Girl more—was which one they thought I was.

  SOMEONE FROM POLYGRAM Osaka produces their business card from a little silver business card holder, hands it over, smiles and bows. So does somebody else. And somebody else. I get my cards out of my wallet, hand them back, find myself involuntarily smiling and bowing, and suddenly wish I’d thought to have some cards printed especially for this trip, if only to find out whether or not anybody actually reads them (“Andrew Mueller, fully qualified bat-wrangler and moose surgeon: no job too small, childrens’ parties a specialty, early closing Tuesdays and Hannukah”).

  Alisha’s Attic’s debut single will be released in Japan in a few months’ time. They’re here now to meet the people who will be running the campaign when they return to formally seek the office of Pop Star. Polygram’s view is that Shellie and Karen could find a lucrative niche somewhere in the middle ground between The Spice Girls (popular, but perceived as a touch strident) and Shampoo (two squawking adolescents from Plumstead who remain the biggest-selling British act in Japanese history). This is why the people at Polygram listen, beaming rapturously, to Shellie and Karen’s earnest, self-conscious speeches about their hopes for a harmonious working relationship and an exciting future. It’s why they burst into thunderous applause when the pair trot out the few halting Japanese phrases they’ve picked up. It’s why they queue up to pose for photographs, and proffer CD booklets for autographs. They’re laying on the superstar treatment for two relative unknowns in the hope that it will prove a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  After a bit more bowing, smiling and distribution of business cards, a small swarm of Polygram employees, each wearing bomber jackets embossed with the company logo, organise us across town to the studios of FM802 and FM Osaka. At both stations, Shellie and Karen wander about introducing themselves to everyone, while the Polygram entourage scuttle around them with a ghetto blaster playing the first Alisha’s Attic single, “I Am, I Feel,” on an endless loop, and a cardboard sign bearing the Japanese for “I swear to support Alisha’s Attic” to use as a prop in yet more souvenir photographs. Tottering a few steps behind, feeling my way through another blizzard of business cards, I think I can see where this particular jape is heading: “What do you mean, you won’t play it? You swore that you would. We have the negatives.”

  Another logo-spangled Polygram minion is toting several plastic carrier bags full of sponge cakes in pretty purple boxes. The cakes, each decorated with another pro-Alisha’s Attic diktat, are an expression of the ancient and noble Japanese custom of gift-giving. Whenever someone sufficiently ancient or noble hands over their business card, a cake is silently, anciently and nobly produced from one of the bags and handed to either Shellie or Karen, who pass it anciently and nobly onto the recipient, who responds with perfectly genuine-looking expressions of surprise and delight (and who then, doubtless, picks all the writing off the top, takes it home to his wife and says, “Darling! I’ve got a surprise for you!” To which she replies, “It’s not another bloody cake, is it?”).

  “Everyone’s really nice,” says Shellie, or Karen, though most likely both. They’re right. Everyone is really nice. What do they want?

  ANYONE WHO GOES to any major Asian city for the first time always says it looks like the city in which Ridley Scott set Blade Runner, his long film about robots. Osaka actually is that city. We leave it for the airport in a train which, suitably, looks like what people in 1980 thought trains would look like in 2000. Our destination is Sapporo, the major city of Japan’s northern island, Hokkaido. We get in late. I open my minibar and wonder which marketing genius decided to call a soft drink Pocari Sweat, and what sort of idiot is ever going to drink it. I wonder if a pocari is some kind of veldt-dwelling scavenger dog, or if I’ve got it mixed up with something else. There’s nothing else in the minibar. I drink it. It tastes like the sweat of a veldt-dwelling scavenger dog. I turn the television on. More Knob-Cam. I’m sure that filling is coming loose.

  We’re back in business early the following morning. More bomber-jacketed Polygram folk take us to do the cakes’n’cards thing at the local Polygram office, and at Sapporo radio stations AIR-G FM and NorthWave FM. At both places, Karen and Shellie deliver their increasingly familiar address about harmony and an exciting future to assembled staff, and in both places are cajoled, bowed and smiled into singing a bit. They knock out one perfectly harmonised a capella verse of “I Am, I Feel,” which is a decent little pop song by any reasonable standards, and everyone claps and whoops with such expressions of awe that you’d think they’d never heard music before.

  At NorthWave, Shellie and Karen are press-ganged into an impromptu live interview with the DJ who is evidently NorthWave’s resident “personality.” Which is to say he’s a complete, total, all-the-medals, copper-bottomed, chateau-bottled, ocean-going, four-wheel-drive, armour-plated, uranium-tipped, olympic-standard, now-with-wings dickhead. He has some sort of alter ego called “The Fly.” You can tell when he’s being “The Fly” because he yammers drivel into a distorted microphone instead of a clean one. He asks Karen and Shellie to engage “The Fly” in conversation. Karen and Shellie are far, far too polite.

  All we see of Sapporo is what we drive through. By late afternoon, we’re back in the airport, where most of the departures concourse is taken up by a vast fresh seafood market. Rows of tanks bustle with fish, lobster and infinite examples of the bizarre, unclassifiable ocean-dwellers that only exist in the novels of Jules Verne and Japanese restaurant menus. It would be an extraordinary enough spectacle if it were down by the docks. Here, it feels like wandering into a rodeo in the middle of a shopping mall. I don’t even have time to wonder what kind of person buys live seafood before getting onto a plane: everybody is. I like to try to fit in. I order a sushi salad. I will live to regret this.

  Our flight down the east coast to Sendai touches down after a lurching, storm-tossed approach that causes more than one of our party to wonder if the pilot hadn’t learnt his trade crashing into American frigates. It’s the kind of flight where you notice, as the aircraft pulls into the terminal that, up and down the plane, complete strangers are holding hands. It’s early evening in Sendai, and we only stay long enough to distribute more tapes, goodwill and cakes to local Polygram staff and Sendai FM. I am feeling a hitherto unknown affinity with the Easter Bunny. The Shinkansen bullet train takes us to Tokyo.

  The bar at Tokyo’s Roppongi Prince Hotel appears to have been decorated by Ridley Scott’s less clever kid brother. The walls are covered with a gold and black lunar landscape, and the arches holding up the ceiling have been painted to look like ancient Roman columns. The combined effect almost obviates the need for alcohol, but the evening proves even stranger than the decor. The occupants of the bar are myself, Susie, Shellie, Karen, their manager (a former Page Three model), a drunk Japanese businessman, an embarrassed-looking woman whom the drunk Japanese businessman keeps loudly introducing as his “cousin” while roaring with laughter, several members of the Harlem Globetrotters, who are also staying here, two seventeen-year-old actresses from a teen soap called Byker Grove, who are in Japan trying to sell themselves as a pop duo called Crush, and their manager, who someone tells me is the mother of the singer from Saint
Etienne, though by this point I’m prepared to believe anything.

  The drunk Japanese businessman keeps gesturing at Susie and asking me, in what he probably believes is a conspiratorial whisper but is actually a deafening, slobbering bellow that all but moves the furniture around, where I got her. Actually, I tell him, she’s paying for me, which is true enough as far as it goes, but makes him laugh so much I briefly wonder if I’m going to have to call for assistance. His “cousin” gets up, smiles, bows and leaves.

  THE THREE DAYS we’ve been allotted in Tokyo are given over to the print media. I miss the first of these—the Sapporo airport sushi comes back, and brings a load of its mates. I haven’t felt worse since a dodgy moussaka somewhere in Turkish Kurdistan reduced me to a week-long all-banana diet. Feverish and verging on the delirious, I spend the day shivering and damp on the futon in my room, watching coverage of the US presidential elections. CNN’s informed talking head is a Democrat congressman from New Hampshire called Dick Swett. Thus the hours of purging luridly coloured emissions through every orifice bar my ears are interrupted, every half hour on the half hour, by pauses to weep with laughter. Every so often, a hotel employee comes and knocks on my door, bows, smiles and asks if there’s anything I need, and every time I answer, there’s less of me.

  The next day, still feeling like someone’s set me on fire and beaten it out with a railway sleeper, I sit in the interview suite at the hotel while representatives of various fashion, music and style magazines file in at half-hourly intervals to ask Shellie and Karen the following questions: What was it like working with Dave Stewart? What’s it like being sisters in a band? Is the fact that their father is Brian Poole, once of The Tremeloes, in any way significant? Who is Alisha? What do they think of Japan? So, at half-hourly intervals, Karen and Shellie say “Great,” “Fine, no problem,” “No,” “Sort of an alter ego,” and “Not as weird as East 17 told us it would be.”

  I interview one Tokyo journalist about the interview she’s just done. I ask her if she’s aware that Japan is talked about by third-division English pop groups as a veritable rock’n’roll Shangri-La, that the general perception is that Japanese pop consumers are at once the most enthusiastic and ignorant on earth, happy to scream at, spend money on, and sleep with, any clump of British clowns who can hold a guitar the right way up.

  “People do think we’re easy,” she agrees. “But everyone comes here now, and we can afford to be picky.”

  But they’re not. “Big in Japan” is the defiant boast of every bunch of tuneless timewasters who couldn’t get arrested in Britain if they ran through Downing Street naked but for an Irish tricolour and a grenade-launcher, and it’s usually true. I know of musicians back in London who couldn’t give away their records at home if they came with a £20 note stapled to the sleeve, but who’ve come to Japan and had to be smuggled in and out of the back entrances of hotels for their own safety.

  “We just like music,” she smiles. “And maybe we are not so cynical as you.”

  And maybe she’s right. That evening, we are mini-bussed across town to Harajuku, the Tokyo suburb famous as the spot where Japan’s somewhat demented yet oddly demure fascination with western pop culture is given its fullest expression. It’s just like Camden Market, except that everything’s three times as expensive and there are marginally fewer Japanese people here. Karen and Shellie pose for photographs in a fashion boutique where, I cannot help but notice, one set of shelves is decorated in clippings from old issues of Melody Maker. Taking this homage to a frankly disturbing level of fastidiousness, each shelf is upholstered with cuttings by a different writer. Mine is the fourth shelf from the top. I hope they’re not arranged in descending order of preference. The bloke who’s got the shelf above mine is a sub-literate plodder with the aesthetic sensibilities of a chair leg.

  AT THE HOTEL that evening, there’s a small cluster of giggling teenagers waiting in the lobby with autograph books, photos of Alisha’s Attic and pens. They squeal delightedly while Shellie and Karen sign their stuff, though I can see that Shellie and Karen are thinking what I’m thinking: nobody in Japan has heard of them—who are these people?

  “Yeah,” says a friend of mine, back in London, whose own band had been through the same thing a few years previously. “The record company pays them.”

  22

  WHAT TIME IS LOUVRE?

  To France with Radiohead

  JULY 2003

  LIKE MOST PEOPLE—AND even, if they’re honest, most rock critics—I arrived in my thirties aware of, and not much bothered about, the truth that my musical tastes were unlikely to expand much further, if at all. I knew what I liked—and, by and large, liked what I knew. It remains, I suppose, theoretically possible that some or other brainstorm will bestir a hitherto utterly dormant affection for techno or reggae, but it also remains theoretically possible, and about as plausible, that a long and complex sequence of early deaths and tenuous genealogical links will lead to me being crowned King of Tonga. And if that happens, I hereby promise that my first decree will order the adoption, as national anthem, of a Derrick May remix of Bob Marley’s “Jammin.’”

  The older I’ve gotten, the more likely it has become that my reply to the question of what kind of music I like will be: “Both kinds: country and western.” The longer the road rolls beneath whichever conveyance is bearing me, the more my ears hunger for the truth—as Harlan Howard had it—set to three chords, with tears-in-the-beer vocals, crying violins, twanging guitars, lonesome lap steels, duelling banjos and the sort of piano you can imagine being played by some gold-hearted hussy in crinolines and fishnets while Gary Cooper and John Wayne hurl barstools at each other.

  But I still listen to Radiohead, arguably the least country and western white band in the world. They seem one of few bands left even interested in trying to attempt something as ambitious as a soundtrack for the times—and one of very, very few bands left capable of creating such a thing. The album they’d just made when I climbed aboard their bus for this trip in 2003, Hail to the Thief, was—and is—a masterpiece, a superb articulation of the angst felt not just by Radiohead, but by the people rather like Radiohead who constitute much of Radiohead’s audience: that vast global constituency of youngish, fundamentally decent, middle-class liberals born into a fortunate life which presents no real impediment to their happiness bar the nagging suspicion that their comfort is related to the fact that someone else, somewhere else, is being paid ten cents a week to sew stripes onto their training shoes.

  For such a crowd, Radiohead’s singer and principal songwriter, Thom Yorke, is the ideal everyman: an aggrieved, affronted figure whose rage was borne of impotence, who was nevertheless willing to rebel against whatever you’d got, but didn’t quite know where to start.

  “WELCOME ABOARD,” SAYS Thom Yorke. “Coffee? Instant okay? I think there’s a cafetierre here somewhere, but I’m not sure where . . .”

  Thom rummages noisily in a drawer in the kitchen at the back of the bus. Radiohead have just taken delivery of this imposing, midnight-black vehicle, which will be their home for a couple of weeks of European festivals. Today, we’re doing London to Paris with a complement of Thom, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien, Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, Radiohead tour manager Hilda, a crew member whose name I don’t catch and me (I’m assuming there’s a driver, as well). We’re meeting the rest of the band in Paris, at the howlingly fashionable Costes Hotel.

  “Have you stayed there before?” asks Thom, as he continues his search.

  I haven’t. What’s it like?

  “Unbelievably expensive, full of the most awful wankers, and decorated like a brothel.”

  You’ve stayed there before, then.

  “We always stay there. It’s brilliant.”

  The downstairs area of the bus, where we are now, contains the kitchen, the toilet, four blue and gold leather seats around a table, a sofa-cum-bed, a vast television hooked up to a PlayStation and DVD player and a stereo. Upstairs there
’s a lounge area, eight bunks, two more vast televisions, at least one more stereo, and, up the back, a separate room with a double bed and a mirrored wall.

  “Maybe I should take that,” says Ed. “I have trouble fitting into bunks.”

  This seems fair enough. Ed is six and a half feet tall, and tour bus bunks are, generally, less roomy than jockeys’ coffins.

  “Exactly,” he nods. “Made for shortarses.”

  “Hmmm?” says Thom. Thom, even when he stands up following his efforts to locate the cafetierre is, it might charitably be said, bunk-sized. He regards Ed quizzically, something like a jaguar deciding whether or not to pounce on a faintly annoying rodent.

  “I mean,” giggles Ed, “for completely normally proportioned people much like you, Thom. As opposed to grotesque freaks like myself.”

  Good catch, Ed.

  IF THOM YORKE the human being was anything like the Thom Yorke of received wisdom, his reaction to Ed’s mild dig might have encompassed any or all of the following: i) Ed’s instant dismissal from Radiohead; ii) the total destruction of every inanimate object on both decks of the bus; iii) Thom’s relocation to a tin shack deep in the woods, there to perch atop a stack of tinned food and argue with the clamorous voices in his head. However, today as in several meetings going back over eight years, Thom Yorke the human being and the Thom Yorke of received wisdom seem nothing more than a coincidence of names. Thom is unstoppably talkative, laughs frequently and is only reluctant to submit to a proper interview because he and Nigel and I get too absorbed too early in a discussion of the world at large. Thom is vexed about Iraq, especially his own early views on the conflict. “I bought it,” he admits, glumly. “I thought, okay, if he has these weapons, they should be taken off him. You’d think I’d know better.”