Yoko Ono. Y'know, John Ono's wife

This was the first interview I ever did with someone of note, and even though it was a phoner, I was terrified. Yoko Ono has something of a reputation as a ‘difficult artist’, and I was well aware that she’d probably spent most of her life being asked about her former husband than her own art – getting the balance right was extremely important to me.

She turned out to be a delight, of course. I remember describing the experience afterwards as not dissimilar to chatting with a high level Japanese student of English, only one who kept throwing disarming comments into the conversation. At one point after the interview was over, she asked me why I was in Japan. I told her I was married to a Japanese woman, to which she replied, “Oh, that’s sweet! My husband was from England, too…”

Angry Bob, not so angry after all

This was one of the first interviews I did working for Time Out. Jeremy Lawrence, the editor of Time Out Dubai at the time, popped his head up over the computer screen and asked nonchalantly if I fancied interviewing Bob Geldof in, oooh, an hour? Cue 50 minutes of frenzied research on African policy, all of which led to nothing at all when it turned out he just fancied talking about his time as a music journalist.

I remember him being a bit curmudgeonly, but generally fairly gentle with me, perhaps sensing how green I was. I also recall that he left the conversation mid-sentence, pretty much hanging up the phone without even rounding off what he was saying. He was talking about Bono’s music taste at the time, though, so I didn’t feel I missed out on much.

Tokyo - Strange facts and useless lists

How many Tokyoites can you squeeze into a Mini Cooper? How many times has Godzilla attacked Tokyo? Why was Paul McCartney banned from having bananas?

All the questions you never had about Japan’s great capital, answered here before you’d ever thought of them…

March 11 started fairly normally. An editorial meeting, a longish Friday afternoon lunch, a comfortable run in to the weekend. And then capital shook, the sea swallowed Tohoku, and Japan changed for good. Almost 6 months later, the country is preparing itself for a rice harvest that many expect to be dangerously contaminated, and the inept government has just accepted the resignation of the 6th prime minister in 5 years.

Millions of column inches have been filled contemplating the catastrophic effect the Great East Japan Earthquake has had on the country, but – given that we blogged through the first major aftershock, minutes after the initial quake – Time Out Tokyo‘s response must have been one of the first. Not that we predicted the financial and political fallout, of course, but we did what we could to help the confused foreigners stranded in Tokyo at the time, an effort that ultimately landed us a Time Out International award.

My interview with Tim Robbins was always going to be a peculiar one. The actor-turned singer was in Japan for a week of concerts at the Blue Note Tokyo, supporting his 2010 album Tim Robbins & The Rogues Gallery Band, but I was warned beforehand not to mention any of his movies – a tough ask considering that the Oscar winner has been part of the Hollywood furniture for more than two decades – and it was politely suggested that he’d only want to talk about his music. No Susan Sarandon, then. I duly set about studying the man’s only album, and the music that might have inspired it.

I needn’t have been so meticulous. Tim Robbins is a walking encyclopaedia of musical minutiae (seriously, next time you find yourself in a lift with him, ask him about punk, folk, lo-fi…you get the impression he commits it all to memory like words from a script). And so I sat with him for 30 learned minutes, bouncing between family memories (his father was an admired folk singer) and his experiences of fame (‘It’s all in your head’), hearing about how he won’t be ‘going Indonesian’ on his next album, and the Robbins secret to ‘living free’. A wide-ranging interview, then, to say the least, and possibly his first since 1994 (I’m kinda proud to say) not to use the word ‘Shawkshank’…

No Alan McGee, no Oasis. How you respond to this simple equation is entirely down to you. But no Jesus and Mary Chain, no Primal Scream – you start to realise we’re talking about a man who howled with nascent indie in its cradle, was present at its birth, and probably severed its umbilical chord with his gnashing teeth.