The Joy Of Jet-Leg:

5:26AM on Monday morning. I'm wide awake and empty-headed. Thankfully, I've another 4 episodes of The Office to watch, so that's a comfort, otherwise, I'd be starting work. I've been less awake than this during interviews I've given. Jet-lag is always worse for me when I fly eastwards. Getting to Tokyo was weird, but ok (it's always a little weird getting to Tokyo...), coming home is trippy. My body thinks it's 7:30PM. Yay! Well, at least I got my taxes done.... and I ate all the green tea kit-kats I bought at the airport. There's tons of green tea candy and ice cream and cookies in 7/11's over there. And green tea is non-fattening and good for you, right?

On the flight home Matt and I prayed and prayed and arrived at the airport early (Which, I think was the deciding factor) and got our upgrades. With a little more finagling we all sat in row together. The first thing we did on the plane was open our laptops and start watching the latest episode of Grey's Anatomy we'd downloaded from the night before. I can only imagine that the people in the rows behind us in coach were giving us evils. I would have been. Three men, watching the same TV episode, only seconds apart on three different computers? In a certain light it's a charming eccentricity, in another, an annoying affectation. I guess it all depends upon whether or not you're sitting in business class at the top of a 13 hour flight or in coach. Thank you St. Hubbins.

This was the scene at the gate in Narita Airport. We were ever so grateful for our upgrades.....



When we got back to JFK a) the escalator to go up towards immigration was broken which I took as a personal slight and symptom of everything that's crappy about the West (Never saw a broken escalator in Japan, not once, not anywhere. Must be because they spend all their money on escalators and infrastructure instead of armies and invasions and a largely cosmetic war on drugs. Truth be told, I was still in a pissy mood even after the flight and 7 hours sleep and kind of looking for a fight), b) in the immigration hall the lines were long and to "entertain" people there were TV's showing CNN. For the entire 25 minutes we were in line CNN was reviewing the Anna Nicole Smith story. Did I miss something? We've been gone over a week and this is still on the news? I get it; she had a tragic life and she was abused by almost everyone around her from what I can tell, but really? It's that newsworthy....? There's nothing else CNN should be covering except from the death of an-ex pin-up and the feeding frenzy for her money? Got to love America, all this freedom to talk about important things, like ex-nude models dying. We were glad to be back; loving our freedoms. We felt like freedom lovers right there, in that immigration hall. Yes, we did. I read my 87 emails instead and listened to my phone messages. The "man" was telling people to not use their cellphones but my earpiece was covered by my wiggy hair and I got all my messages right there, under the man's nose. That's right - fighting the power....

Btw, recommended read: Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes - if only for the chapters on Chopsticks and Bowing. Slightly fetishised view of the culture, but he is an expert on semiotics so that's okay, then...

I never really have any regrets about coming back home to New York, but I am always sad to leave Japan. I have only ever been treated very well over there, even if, on occassion, some of the beating-around-the-bushness of things gets a little wearing, I've noticed that over the last 10 years or so it's become more relaxed although people over there are still very solicitous. And when it comes to good manners, I'm not cheap I'm free.

Anyway, just to make things worse, I realised I'd missed this gig while I was out there. And no, I don't mean Neko Case at Lincoln Centre, I mean Steven Seagal and Thunderbox in Nottingham. See? Definitely no God. Or one with a sneaky sense of humor...otherwise how else can you explain this cruely comic timing?

The Last Night in Tokyo:

Look at this little guy - it's a fish with legs. He was in a tank at the photo studio we went to. I'd say it's officially okay to believe in dragons again, should you want to. I know I do.





These are some photo’s of the Tokyo skyline. They probably don’t translate well, but never mind. It’s an overwhelming city, and beautiful because of its size and scale. 28 million people... Looking from any one of the viewpoints we’ve seen it from (The Park Hyatt, The Mori Tower, The Prince Hotel – see below….) its an easy place to feel lonely in. Even more so than New York or LA, for me. People never admit to feeling lonely, do they? It’s still a taboo….being on tour is very lonely. Not that I don’t like the people I’m with – I consider them good friends (although I know they barely tolerate me and throw food at my luggage when I'm not looking….) – but it’s a different kind of relationship. And as we’re not quite in prison I can’t see myself holding hands with Matt when looking at some of the views below, handsome devil that he is. (That time on the bus in France doesn't count! Everyone should watch the movie Edmond with William H. Macy, btw.) But looking out over a city as vast as Tokyo makes me feel small and unsettled. It’s not a bad feeling per se, just a feeling. This sense gets stronger the further I go into Asia. In Hong Kong and Beijing and Xi’an I’m very aware that the world I inhabit – which has a certain (sometimes dubious) status in the West - has no relevance in those places. The things I’ve done, the people I’ve worked with have no context in China. That’s even more unsettling. And sometimes it’s exciting to think there are new places to go in the world where everything would be back to square one. Time for my meds.



The big orange and white tower is the Tokyo Tower in Roppongi. This is dawn. One of the perks of jet-lag.






The moon over Shibuya...



The moon over Shinjuku...





On our last morning in Tokyo I got up at 5:30AM to go see the Tokyo Fish market. It’s an intense place; full of buzzing scooters and people running around to get fresh fish. It was quite bloody too, which is something I don’t always associate with fish, and there was a weird smell of blood, fish and even cigarette smoke on occasion. I was encouraged to see that people were out buying a small amount of fish for their restaurants or something – it made me think of how fresh the seafood is here. Also, seeing the sheer volume of fish on sale made me wonder how many more fish are there in the ocean. Tons were on sale here – and it’s the same 6 days a week. It’s impressive to see such a volume of fish being sold. And now I’m sounding like an intro to a Monty Python sketch….

Here's some tuna after the auction. They paint the purchase info on them then move them with little dumper trucks...



Of course there are supply stores all around the market and they sell the essentials. Calculators, weighing scales, old men eating breakfast...



These are tourists waiting to get into a sushi restaurant near the market. Don't know why this one was so popular...there must be a reason but to be honest even the one I went into was really good. It's not like the fish can be much fresher anywhere here - it only has to travel about 20 yards from the net to the plate. There were a few places selling curries too (must be good when you've been working with fish all morning) but it was that kind of Vesta Curry mix you get in the UK, not a full-on Ruby.....



Huge piles of styrofoam boxes that people would rummage through to find the right size for their fishy purchases...



Gutting....



And gutted...




Edward Hopper picture at the Tokyo Fish Market....




Full-on way to slice frozen Tuna.



Tuna waiting to be taken away. Kind of creepy and dead.



This reminded me of a poem by Roger McGough or Adrian Henri - one of the English beat poets. This is the only poem I can quote. Do you think that might be why I don't have a girlfriend?

The Squid,
has an ID.
ID is not nice,
But the squid loves ID.



There's no escaping Paris Hilton.

OSAKA

Apparently Osaka is the setting for Blade Runner and there's a famous square that's used in the movie. I've been here about 5 times now and I've never seen it. Not that that means anything.

Through the middle of Osaka run several miles of coverd malls - long long covered walkways, full of stores. To me, they're the defining feature of the city. Albert played at Club Quattro - I haven't been there since maybe 1996 (?). It hasn't changed. It's really clean and well-maintained everywhere except for the dressing room which has been covered by graffiti by (mainly) Birtish bands, or rather, road crews. Most of it is dull and vulgar with the very occasional pearl scratched in there. But mostly it just made me think what a dull bunch of twats road-crews are when they get to Japan...



These guys were hanging out at Osaka Station. Just a comfy place to sit? I think this scene has sinister connotations to it too, or have I been living in America too long? (Btw, did anyone see the movie Little Children? What's with the sex offender who just commits any sort of sexual crime? Like, at first he's a paedo, then he goes on that date and abuses that woman...it's like he's the bogey man or something. I'm surprised he wasn't out raping corpses too, as once you've commited one kind of sex-crime you might as well have committed all of them, right? .....and then, and this is the bit that pissed me off, at the end of the move (SPOILER ALERT!) he castrates himself....? wtf?! That's convenient! Handy that he chooses to do that. Saves the writer / director the dilemma of how to resolve his story line without upsetting all the middle class sensibilities of the main cast. At least they didn't have to get their hands dirty with him or take a position....that was such a cop out. So very very middle class. Really undermined the whole movie for me). Anyway, here's a cute photo of some old men sitting on a plastic panda. Yeah, really fucking cute.

Today is an angry day, I think.




The bullet train runs exactly on time. I love that about Japan. None of that unpunctual American and British crap. (Don't you love it on flights when they announce they've arrived on time? BFD! You're supposed too! What? You want extra points for delivering your half of the bargain...? Wow. By that logic, we should all get a round of applause when the ticket money's charged successfully to our credit cards...). I think that one of the best things about Japan is the ability to make things work very well. Sometimes, I think this meticulousness can get overbearing. My dinner date one night told me she found it a little stifling after having lived in the west - there is much red-tape-overbombing in Japan. But on the plus side - high suicide rate notwithstanding - isn't it great the trains run on time?

Oh, and I had a dinner date too. And it wasn't anyone from the tour. That's even better.



And apparently there's a big gambling problem on Japanese trains. So much so that they had to put signs up telling people not to throw their unlucky dice into the toilet when they lose.



And finally, how cute are these? Individually wrapped toothpicks....such a waste of resources. Someone's got too much time on their hands. And I'm so common I was tempted to steal them all to take them home. You can take the boy out of Coventry...

Tokyo Drifter:

Albert on a giant video screen in Shibuya.



Albert’s first show in Tokyo was a launch party for his Japanese Label – Rough Trade Japan. They held the party in the exclusive salon above the Louis Vuitton store in Harajuku, It was incredibly tastefully decorated and, as one might expect from a LV store in Tokyo, very high-end. So much so that one of the label reps was dispatched to sit with us in our “dressing room” (an unused floor of the closed store) to make sure we didn’t fuck with any of the clothes; a smart and at the same time slightly patronizing Japanese way of treating us. The audience seemed like a very cool Tokyo crowd, but at the same time, they didn't seem so grating to me as they would have had we been in LA, London, or New York. Maybe it's because it all went over my head?

Wandering around Harajuku is interesting. I walked around a store called La Foret – a six-storied department store catering to twenty-something girls about town (it was suggested to me as a place to go to check out the Harajuku vibe – I don’t normally hang around girls clothes shops. Not since my conviction, anyway). The clothes were great – I didn’t see anything naff at all. Not like the other “famous’ department store I looked in--Shibuya 109--which caters to younger girls and had a load of nasty clothes, the sorts of things Bai Ling and Paris Hilton would wear. The girls were much younger there too. I left very quickly, as I felt like I should only be in there shopping for my imaginary niece. Strangely, across the road near our hotel were lots of porn shops advertising, surprisingly enough, young girls. I only have two rules / maxims that I haven’t been proven wrong on yet. The first is – and this is the most important – Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever ever, ever, ever, ever trust a hippy. Not for a second. Not with anything. Not even with an ant for a nanosecond. (And I have friends with hippy tendencies but they’re not hippies. Real hippies are wankers--I’ve never met an exception to the rule yet, ever. I’d rather talk to a Nazi – at least they’re up front about being tossers… anyway, I’m digressing) The second maxim I hold onto is that you can gauge a nation by it’s advertising and its pornography. Japan has some weird-assed porn, so to speak. Lots of young girls being forced into humiliating sex. I’m not sure what it means, but it’s interesting to note. And not particularly erotic, so I'm told.

This is a girl being photogrpahed outside of La Foret. It looked liked an amatuer photo-shoot but for all I know she's # 1 in the J-pop charts. (Although I suspect she's some kind of Japanese sub-Kelly Osbourne..)



And this is a great example of Japanese fastidiousness. At night, these roadworks are very busy with workmen. During the day, everything is stored neatly until they need to use it again. Can't imagine seeing this kind of attention to duty on the M1 or the I-95.






I visited my favourite-named bookstore in Harajuku. I wonder if they know what this really sounds like in the west – I suspect not. I was looking for an English language section in a bookstore to try to find a copy of Shakespeare’s King Lear (of course I was, what else?). Stupid as that sounds it’s good to have a mission when you’re shopping abroad- it makes it more interesting, otherwise I find I wander around aimlessly looking at things I don’t really want and feel bored. I got close – there was an English version of Macbeth. There was also a couple of good English titles: Teaching Infant and Pre-School Aquatics, A Pictorial of English Coastline from the Air, and Roland Barthes- Empire of Signs, which I ended up buying as I can’t leave a bookstore without buying anything. I like bookstores, even when the shelves are unintelligible to me, as they were in Book Off.


We visited (twice in three days) the Park Hyatt Hotel to go to the bar on the 52nd Floor, made famous by Lost In Translation. It’s one of the best views of a city anywhere – even rivaling Sugarloaf Mountain. Tokyo goes on forever, like LA, but it seems as dense and as built up as Manhattan. The photo below doesn’t really do it justice, but it seems every building has softly flashing red lights on it, as far as the eye can see. The main drag below is Shinjuku, which is one of the dodgier areas of the city...




The food was some of the best food I’ve eaten anywhere. For seom reason their steak sandwich is absolute perfetion-- everything you could imagine a steak sandwich to be. And while that sounds wanky, if you ever go there and try one you’ll know what I mean. I suspect it’s like eating human flesh in that sense…..and we're doing that later on tonight in Osaka. I'll let you know....

Tokyo:


I’m a little jaded. I remember the first few times I came to Japan and I was sooooo excited. Now I’m a little more used to it and I’m still excited, but tonight I try to sleep on the hour and a half drive in from Narita to the hotel instead of staring out of the window to look at everything… Of course, I can't. And instead tick-off the landmarks in my head. the hotels near Narita, the Ferris Wheels, the site of Summer Sonic, etc, etc...




Our hotel is in the heart of Shibuya. With The Strokes we stay in a different part of town but this time we’re back in the middle of Shibuya. It’s good. I like Shibuya. I remember coming here 12 years ago and spending a fortune on Pizzicato Five CDs at HMV when I was on tour with Pulp. 12 years ago, Jaysus....

After we arrive there’s a brief Production Meeting and Label Promotion Meeting. Both are very traditional Japanese ways of doing things. It’s where we go through the schedule and the details for the forthcoming week. Today it’s quick and easy. Back in the day they would last a long time and be much more formal. Things seem more relaxed these days, which is good and bad, I suppose. Maybe it's to do with my perception of things here but I remember it used to be a lot more formal; now its more casually professional.

Afterwards, I go for a walk through rainy Shibuya. It’s busy (It’s 9PM on a Saturday night) and full of young people. It’s exciting, but I’m no longer curious about what’s in the stores: the mobile phones will be worthless to me outside of Japan; the record stores sell the same stuff as I can get in New York; the clothes will be too small for me. I’m waiting until the morning before the promo to go to Tokyu Hands – the best store in Japan for just 'stuff'….no doubt I’ll come out with too many nice pens again.





I eat at a noodle bar. The ordering process is great: you select your meal from a machine outside (pick a number for your meal); you pay the vending machine and get a ticket; you go inside, and give the ticket to the staff (who all shout out a greeting in unison everytime a new customer comes in); they serve up boiling hot noodles in minutes. My bowl of Pork and Noodles was amazing and cost about US$7.50. The glass of iced water was so cold and the noodles so hot I gave myself a wicked toothache for the first half of the meal…it reminded me of where I was. I think things in Japan are frequently extreme in weird ways. Maybe it’s a jetlagged perception but the noodles seemed super hot (how?) and the water was very cold. It’s like nothing’s done to a half measure here (Its an observation not a gripe, btw). It’s good to be in a place where people are polite, and sometimes--I feel--especially so because I’m a foreigner and speak no Japanese. Staff at the noodle shop and Starbucks (I know, shame on me. What can I say? I need coffee. I gots me a case of that jet-lag…) are all very solicitous and helpful, making sure I know how the ordering and paying and waiting in line system works. It wouldn’t quite happen the same way in Manhattan…




Back at the hotel I was impressed at the small football field I could see from the elevator on top of a neighboring building above Shibuya Station. Tomorrow’s schedule is busy for some of the band with promo. We’re all going to the label offices in Harajuku for a press day. I’m exicted, I haven’t been there for ages. And the best thing is, that’s where Gwen Stefani comes from. I wonder if there's a statue of her there or anything...?

Back Out There.


After a month or so at home it’s time to go back out on tour. Albert and the band are in LA and I go to meet them there so we can all fly to Tokyo together. Sounds easy on paper, right?

At JFK, on the day after the Notheast Blizzard, the airport isn’t functioning at 100% yet. My 9AM flight is delayed (after we board, of course). I’m grateful, because so many flights were cancelled the previous day the standby list for my flight is seventy-one names long.

We sit at the gate for a couple of hours while the pilot waits to get the all clear from the tower. The Port Authority were still trying to clear ice from the runway and as our aircraft was full we apparently needed the entire runway to take off from. By 11:30 we pull away from the gate to get de-iced. Then we return to the gate. There’s a problem with an engine. (It's a drag but I'd rather they find out while we're driving and not flying...)

We’re told we can get off while they research the problem. When I come back with a coffee we’re told we’re changing planes. I get my stuff and go to the new gate where other passengers are being removed from another flight – allegedly to accommodate us. No one knows what is going on. So many flights have been cancelled at JFK that terminal is packed an people are getting upset and huge shouting matches are happening at other gates. I call our travel agent, there are no other flights available to LA from the New York area until Sunday. Everyone who can call someone gets the same news. No flights anywhere.

Eventually, two hours later, we board our original plane. The fuel valve problem is fixed. At 3PM it looks like we’re about to take-off when a Gate Agent comes up to me and tells me to get my stuff and get off the plane.
-No.
-Mr Priest, you need to get your things and get off the plane
-Why?
-It’s from the captain.
-So? Why?
-We need your seat to send crew back to LA
-No. I have to go to LA.
-You have standby seats and we need them.
-No I don’t.
-Sir. Get your bags and get off the plane.
-I don’t have a standby ticket. I have a regular ticket. I bought this seat.
-Sir you need to get your bags and get off the plane.
-I also have seven passports for seven people flying to Tokyo from LAX tomorrow morning and if I don’t get this flight I don’t get there then they don’t go to Tokyo and we cancel a concert tour.
-Sir you need to get your bags...

After another five minutes of this, me and the guy next to me (he was asked to leave too), were told to sit back down, it was okay. Not a word of explanation or apology. Not that I’d planned to leave until security were called. The passport / Tokyo part of the equation was a fact and I wasn’t going to get off that plane unless someone with the authority to arrest me was asking me to move.

But after 6 1/2 hours, I didn’t care--I had to get to LA on that flight. There were no other alternatives. I'd seen flight after flight cancelled during my two hours of waiting inside the terminal. The place was in chaos. No one knew what was going on.

Eventually I got to LA – seven hours late. Just enough time to eat and go to bed.

Personally I think it’s a sign (Along with my head injury in Nottingham and my stolen luggage in Vancouver) that I shouldn't be on tour anymore.