Rock and Hard Places (41 page)

Details of the promotional tour vary subtly according to local conditions, but the essential format is constant. The musicians are as pleasant as possible to as many as possible of the record company staff, disc jockeys and journalists upon whose favour future success may ultimately depend. The musicians will shake hands until they cramp, nod to the point of rheumatism and smile themselves halfway to permanent twitches. They must forgo the luxury of even the slightest lapse into sarcasm at what feels like the millionth introduction to someone called Hank Bucket of Plughole Records, apparently your licensee in Alaska, and his ugly, boring wife. They may not scream when asked, for the billionth time, where they got the name of their group from. Give any musician the option of going on a promotional tour or spending a week at home driving rivets into the roof of their mouth, and they will stride grimly but purposefully to the toolshed.

So it’s a bit of a surprise to find the two members of Alisha’s Attic in a highly chipper mood when we catch up with them in Polygram’s offices in Osaka. Dagenham-born sisters Shellie and Karen Poole are new to all this—their debut album,
Alisha Rules the World
, has only
been out in Britain a few weeks—and the excitement of visiting Japan for the first time is having an obvious buoying effect, though they can’t have seen much of it. They’ve only been in the country three days, but Shellie and Karen have already nodded and smiled their way through a heavy schedule in Tokyo and Fukuoka, and so far today they’ve met the staff at the Polygram sales office in Nagoya, visited the studios of ZIP-FM in the same city, caught the Hikari bullet train to Osaka, been interviewed by a local pop magazine and introduced themselves to the Polygram office. It’s about three in the afternoon.

 

I’VE BEEN IN Japan ever since this morning, arriving on an overnight flight from London with Alisha’s Attic’s press officer from Mercury Records, Susie Roberts. Even allowing for exhaustion and jetlag, it has been a strange day. It started at the hotel, with a series of hopeless, foggy-headed calculations with a pencil and beermat, trying to figure out if it was really possible that we’d just paid £120 for a taxi and £35 for four cups of coffee and a cake. We had. Even more disturbingly, we hadn’t been ripped off. Those were the going rates. “I hope,” said Susie, contemplating the wreckage of her expenses advance, “you like living on noodles and water.”

It had gotten still stranger once they’d made our rooms up. My television wasn’t capable of receiving anything but locally-produced hardcore pornography, the fellatio scenes in which made extensive use of an interesting cinematic innovation best described as Knob-Cam—all too literally, a Jap’s eye view. There may be circumstances in which you want your television screen filled by a shot of the inside of someone’s mouth going back and forth, but I can report that it’s not just after you’ve got off a sleepless twelve-hour flight. She wants that filling looked at, I’d thought, trying to blink away ants-under-eyelids post-flight fatigue.

The bathroom didn’t work, either. At least, I couldn’t get it to work. After spending some minutes prodding uselessly at a console above the sink—it is possible to fly faster than sound in machines with less complex control panels—I rang reception. Someone came up, smiled and bowed a lot, and explained it all to me. I still couldn’t see what was wrong with the hot tap/cold tap system. He smiled and bowed a bit more.

The digital bathroom is but one of thousands of symptoms of the technological psychosis that now grips Japan. Since 1945, the Japanese have invented everything humanity is ever going to need, and so the admirably restless Japanese creative impulse now finds itself with nowhere left to go but haywire. Hence alternately frozen and scalded hotel guests jabbing keypads and swearing while they learn the hard way that 17 degrees is too bloody cold and 44 is too bloody hot. Hence the machine outside the hotel doors into which you shove your umbrella upon entering, to have it instantly and tightly wrapped in a drip-preventing clingfilm prophylactic. Hence the presence, in the cubicles in the public toilet in the hotel bar, of buttons that produce a purely cosmetic flush, an ineffectual sloshing of water designed to spare the occupant of the next throne along the distress of listening to the splashes you’re making for real. Hence, I guess, Knob-Cam.

Traumatised and confused, Susie and I headed for the aquarium. The Osaka aquarium is one of the best things in Japan, and very possibly the world. It’s eight storeys high, and is structured so that you walk in at the top, representing the surface of the ocean, and proceed in a descending spiral to the bottom, passing as you go the various finned things that exist at different depths. So as you enter, you see lots of furry little otters cavorting cutely in the shallows, and just before you walk out, you are confronted with a tank full of giant spider crabs which are, indeed, enormous and do, indeed, combine all the most objectionable qualities of the two beasts they’re named after—it’s difficult to warm to a creature whose stomach is below its knees.

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.