Tricky in concert, not performing Maxinquaye

On Twitter, they’re baying for the artist’s blood – or a hauling over the coals for violating the trade discriminations act, at the very least. The offence? Announcing the performance of a much-loved album, and then doing as little of it as possible on the night.

With hindsight, this weekend’s series of onstage car crashes should have been spotted well in advance. The latest nostalgia trend, in which artists past their prime look back on kinder royalty cheques and agree to wind back the years to perform their best selling album in its entirety, is exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from The Charlatans or Oasis (Liam has the Morning Glory anniversary tour pencilled in for 2015). 

It’s an odd practice, in some ways reminiscent of the tribute bands boom in the mid-to-late ’90s. While the Bootleg Beatles and the Australian Doors celebrated acts gone by, these concerts mark the passing – and the mourning – of a sorely-missed art form: the album. The emotional involvement fans had with a particular long player, from purchase to scrutiny of the sleeves to the track listing itself, is something the iTunes revolution killed off almost entirely, and nostalgia tours of this nature obviously pander to a real sense of something sadly departed.

While the album is still an art form Tricky respects (he’s about to put out a triple album), he has never been the kind of artist to return to the same idea, continually looking forward regardless of whether his audience is following him or not. For the most part, over the last decade, they haven’t been, thanks largely to the zeal he put into shaking them off in Maxinquaye’s unexpected aftermath. The “coffee table” audience he picked up along with the accolades seemed to offend him in some inexcusable way. This weekend’s catastrophic gigs almost seemed deliberate, as though he’d lured the Maxinquaye crowd back in order to exact some terrible revenge on their sensibilities.

The crowd at London’s O2 Indigo were certainly of a type; largely white, apparently middle class males, mostly now in their mid-30s – probably not the crowd that the young Adrian Thaws ever imagined himself playing to back in his Wild Bunch days, but very much the crowd that his debut solo album appealed to 17 years ago. They stood patiently as Tricky, now 44, led his band onstage, stripped off his hoody to reveal a ripped torso in permanent boxing crouch, and cajoled his guitarist into a hypnotic number that they may or may not have worked up during soundcheck. 

It was clear from the get-go that his three-piece rock band was ill at ease. The majestic and entirely unique Martina Topley-Bird, with whom Tricky recorded Maxinquaye (and had a child), stood to the side, glancing back at the headliner as if looking for hints. The hints came in the form of fingers pointed and arms waved, Tricky playing his musicians in the way he might a mixing desk, dropping in a guitar loop here, cutting out a vocal line there. It may not have been Maxinquaye quite yet, but it was fairly riveting stuff. Tricky is nothing if he’s not about tension.

And then, after a brief apology for the diversion (“Sorry, I know it’s not Maxinquaye, but that’s all so long ago” – more of a warning shot, with hindsight) came the first notes of the album itself, the stuttering samples of “Ponderosa” daubing a twisted line beneath the Topley-Bird’s sublime vocals. An abrupt ending prompted a look of surprise amongst the musicians, not at the nature of the song’s collapse but at their synchronization. Almost immediately a Tweet began circulating; Martina Topley-Bird had admitted on Twitter that rehearsals for this tour had lasted all of one day.

It didn’t take much longer for the doubts to set in. It has been pointed out by annoyed fans that Tricky appeared to be forgetting his lines, but this was in keeping with the album itself. He rarely gets through a song in its entirety on Maxinquaye, gifting the album to Topley-Bird, who he has said represents the voice of his dead mother, and it’s the combination of the mesmeric vocal melodies and the stoned croak of the producer himself that lends the album much of its intensity. The worry on Friday night at the O2 Indigo was that he kept leaving the stage and ignoring his vocal duties altogether. Those nearer the front could see that he was more interested in chatting with family members and friends in the wings, a collection of people who began spilling onto the stage as though they were at some unusually situated cocktail party. The man was clearly uninterested.

All credit to Topley-Bird, then, who – in the absence of her partner – preceded to prove once and for all that Maxinquaye was, and always will be, her album. Between songs she disappeared from stage, trying to persuade Tricky to return and fulfil what he said he was going to do, but usually returning to perform alone. And in some ways things were all the better for it. “Pumpkin” was sad and tinged with yearning, sung alone in the spotlight with the audience’s full and undivided attention. When Tricky seemed to be tiring of “Hell is Round the Corner”, after all of a verse and a half, Martina stormed the stage and, over a barrage of distortion and thrashed drums, gave the performance of the evening.

During the applause that followed, Tricky gave up altogether and the evening descended into banality. Over the “Bad” riff that formed the backing track for “Brand New You’re Retro”, he introduced his younger brother Marlon, who took the stage with a few of his Bristolian cronies and preformed a track from Tricky’s 2010 album, Mixed Race. All well and good if you’re at a normal Tricky gig, but not – as the now-departing audience mumbled – what people paid the best part of £40 to see. Martina returned briefly, attempted to get things back on course, and retreated after Tricky terminated another Maxinquaye track only 8 bars in. It was the last we saw of the evening’s true star, forced to hand over what was rightfully her evening to a man who was clearly bored of himself.

As half of the club emptied, Tricky gathered fans from the front rows onstage to dance with him. This is almost tradition at his regular shows, but it doesn’t make it any less dull for the onlooker. As 40-odd people danced a merry jig on Maxinquaye‘s grave, Tricky handed the microphone to a large and hairy rocker, complete with the heavy metal t-shirt he’d probably been wearing since 1995, who apparently believed himself to be Eddie Vedder and barked long and loud as though his life had been leading to this very moment. Once he was done, he passed the mic over to a woman who sang as though she was auditioning for The Voice, culminating in a long and uncomfortable vocal orgasm. We could only hope that Martina Topley-Bird was a long way from the venue by this point, such was the ignominy.

The evening ended with a return to the opening jam – hypnotic, earlier; now just repetitive. I’ve since read that this lasted 30 minutes in itself, but I’d had enough by the fifth minute and joined the queue at the taxi rank. Nostalgia may be an unavoidable human trait, but recreating memories is never a good idea. At least we still have Martina’s album.

Tom Waits: Not a hypnic jerk, but a bluesman nonetheless

It sounds like a dance craze, perhaps something based on a Joy Division performance. The hypnic jerks are spasmodic and unpredictable; they tend to grab you in your least dance-friendly moments, just as you’re drifting off to sleep, and shake you back to confused consciousness again. Like an infantile practical joke that you’re playing on yourself and aren’t getting bored of anytime soon, they’re not big and they’re not clever. They seem as though they’re designed to annoy, to be weary of, and – in vulnerable moments – to possibly even fear.

Of course, the hypnic jerk is nothing to be afraid of. I’ve searched around and I’ve yet to come across an example of someone hypnic jerking themselves to death. Like most bullies, they never amount to much more than the dull ache of boredom. It’s through boredom that I’m writing this, in fact,  just waiting until I feel sleepy enough that they lose interest and do something else. In my case they’re boring enough to be entirely predictable; have a stressful job, have a stress-related syndrome. It’s by lifting yourself above this kind of thing, separating yourself and observing it in the cold light of the humdrum, that you move past it.

Late night and almost entirely Wikipedia-based research suggests that the hypnic jerk is not fully understood, but seem to be the dubious prize of people given to anxiety and worry, possibly in high-pressure jobs, fond of caffeine or, somewhat jarringly, heroin. They can manifest in a variety of ways – some describe a sense of falling that ends in a sudden jolt, others sense their pulse racing and believe they’re experiencing the onset of a heart attack – but they always involve a sudden start that prevents you from slipping off into the nightly ether. These are common enough symptoms for most people, but the ol’ hypnic jerk blues can become cyclical if you’re not careful, and some hypnics (I’m not going to call them jerks) find they suffer nightly with them for years.

In my case, they manifest as sudden jolts that knock me into an upright position, where I sit and catch my breath and wonder where I am for a few minutes. I get them repeatedly over three or four hours at the beginning of a night’s sleep, leaving me feeling overly tired the next day. As you might expect, hypnic jerks feed on themselves (which suggests to me that they’re more a mental conundrum than a physical), so I’ll find myself suffering the same problem the following night, and then the next night again. This continues until I step in and take control, usually by stumbling into another doomed jogging regime or, more recently, spending a bit of time doing 20 minutes of what you might call meditation.

The latter is a relaxing pre-bed exercise, really – I’m certainly not trying to attain any form of enlightenment. Very simply, I attempt to concentrate on the actual experience of breathing – trying to feel the air going in through my nose, into my lungs, and noticing the expansion and collapse of my sizeable belly – for as long as I possibly can, hopefully until the mental clammer of work and the residual noise of the commuter life subsides. If it’s true that you are what you think, then essentially I’m trying to ignore myself for 20 minutes. I can highly recommend ignoring me for 20 minutes to anyone reading this. It’s really something special.

The ol’ hypnic blues never affect me for more than a week at most, and then I inevitably fall back into the pre-self-improvement lifestyle that got me here in the first place, and a year later I find myself internally staring at my belly again. It used to be an autumnal thing, though for the last two years it’s been a springtime occurrence, which is kind of nice because it means I can get it out of the way early. Whenever it takes place, however, I’ve learnt to put it in the box labelled ‘befuddlement’ and try and observe it with a sense of detachment. Best not to get too closely involved with the bullying community, I find.

The Beatles...you may have heard of them

There’s little left to write about The Beatles that hasn’t already been said, but that doesn’t mean we ought to stop trying. Even in the world’s most recognisable song catalogue, there are a huge number of classics that never made it on to the Red and Blue albums, and so tend to go unnoticed by the great unwashed. Here, then, is a list of underrated Beatles songs that really ought to be better known, but – for reasons unknown – have managed to be obscured by the likes of ‘Ob La Di Ob La Da’.

1. And Your Bird Can Sing
Revolver (1966)
Kicking off any Greatest Unlistened to Hits of The Beatles ought to be this glistening aural attack, courtesy of a whacked-out-of-his-gourd John Lennon, circa 1966. It first appeared on Revolver, never managed to feature in a live performance, and quickly faded into the background. Despite its lack of fame, it contains arguably the best piece of guitar work George Harrison ever mustered, a McCartney bassline that appears to defy gravity, and the kind of sublime three-part harmonies that Macca, Harrison and Lennon seemed capable of without thought or discussion – the kind of innate ability that softly sent Brian Wilson round the bend on the other side of the Atlantic.

2. Anna (Go to Him)
Please Please Me (1962)
‘Anna’ originally appeared on the band’s 1962 debut album, Please Please Me, having done time in their Hamburg stage show. Although a cover (the song was written by Arthur Alexander), it’s a track that Lennon made his own – the emotion in his voice as it clings to the climactic middle-eight melody suggests that something in the song really resonated (or that he was simply a damned fine actor). Especially endearing are the ever-so slightly ropy backing harmonies that carry his lead aloft – a rare chance to hear that ol’ perfectionist McCartney laying down a bum note.

3. Love You Too
Revolver (1966)
Every Beatles album had to have a George track, and our little collection is no exception. It was a toss-up between this or ‘The Inner Light’ (1968’s ‘Lady Madonna’ B-side – a delicate and delightful ode that sums up Harrison’s philosophy more succinctly than he ever managed elsewhere), but the sheer power of this track’s reversed electric guitars and the mad, hypnotic whirligig that Harrison teased from his sitar win their way on to our track list every time. Proof, should you need it, that a single chord is all you need to write a classic rock track.

4. Don’t Pass Me By
The Beatles (1968)
It’s slim pickings where unknown Ringo tunes are concerned. The band tended to offer him their most puerile ideas, a few of which have since found their way to becoming enduring children’s classics. Even when he wasn’t borrowing tracks from Paul and John, he managed to write his way into nursery schools – ‘Octopus’s Garden’ surely alerted the Thomas the Tank Engine producers to a hitherto untapped talent. Once you’ve got past all of that nonsense, you’re pretty much left with ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’, which everybody knows, and this, which perhaps ought to have a higher place in the world’s affections given that it contains the memorable moment in which the girl he’s serenading gets into a car crash and loses her hair – all for the sake of a rhyme.

5. What You’re Doing
Beatles For Sale (1964)
This could so nearly have been another of McCartney’s ‘work songs‘ (tracks, he explained to Mark Lewisohn in a 1988 interview, that he considered throwaway, an example being the 1963 also ran, ‘Hold Me Tight’). ‘What You’re Doing’ is saved, however, by a melody that veers off in unusually dusky directions, and a backing chorus that largely does away with harmony, favouring a form of controlled barking instead. Add to that a guitar solo that threatens to fall out with itself at any moment, and you have a song that suggests all was not right in Beatles paradise circa 1964 after all. Wonderful stuff.

6. All I’ve Got to Do
With The Beatles (1963)
The Beatles’ second album is often remembered for being the boisterous sound of Beatlemania in bloom, but dig about a bit and you’ll find that John Lennon was already itching to bare his soul. Three tracks in particular leap out for their undeniable mournfulness, the other two being ‘Not a Second Time’ (with its infamous ‘aeolian cadences‘ – Wikipedia will clue you up) and ‘You Really Got a Hold on Me’ (admittedly, a Smokey Robinson cover). ‘All I’ve Got to Do’ is perhaps the least celebrated, which is surprising considering its beauty. Stunning vocal performance aside, the vertical melody suggests that McCartney may have had something to do with its composition, and, if that’s the case, this may be the most overlooked Lennon-McCartney composition of them all.

7. You’re Gonna Lose That Girl
Help (1965)
The definitive Lennon-McCartney call-and-response record (‘Twist and Shout’ being the definitive Beatles call-and-response record), this Help track ranks curiously low on listening aggregator website Last.fm, and we think it’s time that changed. Despite a slightly shifty opening (we’re fairly sure something’s harmonically off but, despite years of listening, we’re still not sure what), the song develops into an infectious foot-stomper, and the joy with which Paul and George belt out those backing vocals is palpable. The guitar solo is excellent, too – Harrison in melodic, unusually melancholy mode.

8. You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)
B-side of ‘Let It Be’ single (1970)
Lennon’s love of The Goon Show comes to the fore in this comedy number, which is little more than a selection of styles and whimsies stitched together almost as light relief from the increasingly heavy sessions that surrounded The Beatles’ final albums. Just how long these miserable sessions dragged on can be surmised from the length of time it took to complete this track – it was recorded over four separate sessions between May 1967 and April 1969. ‘You Know My Name’ is also notable for featuring The Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones on saxophone – quite possibly one of the last things he recorded; he was dead within three months of its completion.

9. Matchbox
Long Tall Sally EP (1964)
We’re going to break with tradition here and allow Ringo a second track, but only because he had no hand in writing it. Occasionally, barnstorming rockers like this Carl Perkins number suited Ringo’s stuck-in-a-barn vocal style, and this is arguably the best of a fairly mediocre bunch. It gets you twitching (in a good way), however, and Starr’s ad-libbing (‘if you don’t want Ringo’s peaches, honey, please don’t mess around my tree’) is priceless.

10. She’s a Woman
Help (1965)
All right, so it’s fairly well known, but listing Beatles tracks that have slipped down the back of history’s sofa is not as easy as it looks. Last.fm once again comes to our aid, recording that faux-ska McCartney belter ought to get more attention than some of the lesser numbers higher up on the list (‘Yellow Submarine’, anyone?). Paul wears his chauvinism on his sleeve as he does his best Little Richard impersonation and brags how his ‘woman’ knows that ‘he’s no peasant’. Seriously – it’s much better than it sounds.

This article was originally intended for the Tapalist website, which is currently on hiatus. 

Noel Fiedling and Julian Barrett © Michael Burdett

The geography of Nick Drake’s London was never exact. His record company famously claimed they had no idea where he lived; received wisdom has it that he spent much of his time in and around Hampstead, possibly Haverstock Hill; the only journalist that ever interviewed him noted that he barely existed at all. And so the shadowy streets and decaying railway arches of Shoreditch seem congruous enough to stage the next movement in the making of Nick Drake’s myth. Michael Burdett – a TV composer by trade – presents a 160-strong collection of photographs entitled the Strange Face Project at the Idea Generation Gallery until February 12. However, Drake fans should not come expecting previously unseen snaps of the tragic singer-songwriter – instead, they’ll find photos of people listening to his music.

If that sounds entirely disposable, readers should know there’s a twist. As a young man working at the BBC, Burdett was asked to throw out some old tapes. In doing so, he came across a tape of Drake’s ‘Cello Song’, marked with a handwritten label that read, simply, ‘with love’. Assuming that it was Drake’s own scribble, he took it home for further investigation and apparently forgot all about it. 20 years later, he came across the tape again, gave it a listen and realized he had something rather precious. Every Nick Drake fan knows ‘Cello Song’ well – it opens the second side of his debut album ‘Five Leaves Left’, as well as the excellent Island Records compilation, ‘An Introduction to Nick Drake’. As Burdett played the tape, he found that it was an alternative arrangement entirely, and probably something that had not been heard by anyone else since it was discarded as an outtake some 30 years earlier.

The stumbling block for Burdett came in getting permission to broadcast it or release it – Nick Drake’s estate were apparently keen that it remained unearthed. Playing it to people on earphones, however, seemed legal enough, and so he did just that, offering random strangers the chance to listen to an unheard Nick Drake recording in exchange for allowing Burdett to photograph them while they were listening.

Cue the next difficulty. Burdett freely admits that he’s no photographer, telling Time Out that he doesn’t even own a camera. If this is true, it’s not obvious from the monochrome exhibition. Some of the photos are exquisite (the Noel Fielding and Julian Barrett above is an excellent example), and the brief narratives that supplement each image – the story behind the ‘photo session’ that went into producing it – are often enthralling. Not every subject knew Nick Drake’s work before they heard the new ‘Cello Song’, and the photographer has included all responses, good, bad or indifferent, much to his credit (not everyone likes Nick Drake, after all). The exhibition works in much the same way as a Nick Drake song does, pulling the audience into its own privacy, leaving them with a sadness, but also somehow soothed. It’s an oddly personal thing.

If there’s one frustration, it’s that you never get to hear the song itself. The pivotal point – the focus of attention – is simply not there, no matter how much you wish it were otherwise. At the opening night, we found ourselves seeking out people who had heard it, just trying to get some kind of firsthand account. Such is the way with Nick Drake. He exists in delicate sounds and half-remembered stories. He barely existed at all.

Originally blogged for Time Out London. 

Christopher Hitchens: 1949-2011

“I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet, that I haven’t understood enough, that I can’t know enough, that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

At the age of 10, I discovered The Beatles. At the age of 20, I discovered Bob Dylan. At the age of 30, I discovered Christopher Hitchens. There are few people that have had the kind of influence on me that this writer had, and I shall miss eagerly searching for his latest feature (whether I agreed with what he had to say or not) immensely. An incredibly brave man. The world shall be a much duller place without him.

Spot the electric junky...

If the death of Gary Speed can be said to have led to anything positive whatsoever, it’s that it has dragged depression back out into the open. Admittedly, early responses from family and friends suggest Speed was not known to be a man troubled by depression, and it may yet come to light that his apparent suicide had nothing to do with the illness at all. However, it would be entirely in keeping with my own experience, as someone who has lived with clinical depression for a decade, for his friends to have been as in the dark as he may have been.

I was inspired to write this blogpost for two reasons. Firstly, James Olley’s piece in yesterday’s Evening Standard, which highlights the problem of depression still going unnoticed in communities where it might be viewed as a weakness, and secondly, an apology I recently received from a GP – an apology made “on behalf of the medical profession” for the six-or-more years I’ve spent taking the notoriously addictive antidepressant, Paroxetine. Having spent a little over 10 years visiting more mental health specialists than I can honestly remember (certainly more than this post will detail), I continue to be amazed by how little people seem to know.

My depression first moped into view when I was 23. Living in Japan at the time, I remember walking across a car park beneath a broad blue sky and thinking something didn’t feel right with it. It was almost as if I could see that the edges were crumpled just beyond the horizon; that it was all surface polish and little else. I can see how simplistic that sounds, but I remember that while I gave it very little thought at the time, it built up. The following day the idea returned, and this time it came with a mild sense of anxiety. It came again increasingly over the next few days, all the while the anxiety building steadily. I felt a nasty sense that I was becoming trapped in a thought cycle, that I couldn’t walk across that area without feeling deeply uncomfortable.

A week or so later – September 29, 2000 – the whole thing crashed. I was hungover at a conference in Fukuoka, south Japan, listening to someone talking about their cross-cultural experience. I suddenly became aware that the speaker’s lips seemed out of sync with their words, probably a result of my pounding headache and usually something I’d not even notice, but I became transfixed and increasingly worried. Try as I might, I couldn’t make what I was seeing stop, and before I knew what was happening I was shoving chairs out of the way, desperately trying to get out of the room. Once I was in the corridor, I began to run, and I didn’t stop running for about 15 minutes (in circles, as it happens – I never made it out of the conference centre car park). Eventually I managed to calm my breathing, but the sense that I wasn’t actually there, almost that I was watching the world around me on somebody else’s television screen, didn’t leave me for about three years.

Interestingly, my exit from the room had gone unnoticed. While it felt as though the world had crashed onto its side with a calamitous thud, my friends told me afterwards that I’d very politely taken my leave without drawing attention to myself. This would be a recurring theme throughout subsequent panic attacks, and seems to be common to many who suffer from anxiety disorder and clinical depression. It goes unnoticed. It’s not that easily detected. People often suffer silently for years, unable to explain what’s going on in their head.

If you think about it, reasons for why this happens make sense. A depressed or anxious person often needs to voice their problems before they can be identified and treated, but it takes a brave person to say, “in my head, the sky has crumpled edges and your voice no longer syncs with your mouth”, because that doesn’t sound like depression to anybody. That sounds like the first step towards getting yourself committed.

This also highlights a semantic problem. I had no idea that my depression might be depression at all, because very few people get through their teenage years without, at one time or another, claiming to be “depressed”. I remember chatting with a friend of mine about five years ago, an intelligent fellow who told me, “I don’t think depression really exists. I know a doctor who doesn’t believe in it.” I can fully imagine that the second sentence might be true (I have a friend who suffers from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, known commonly as M.E., who tells me she has seen doctors who are similarly disbelieving), but I’ve often wondered whether my buddy might have confused “I have depression” with “I’m depressed”. Very different things, obviously, though it may be where some of the stigma comes from. The response to the “depressed” teenager is usually something along the lines of “pull your socks up”, whereas the response to someone displaying signs of depression is always “go and talk to your GP, and do it quickly. You need help.”

It took me a long time to find my way to my current GP, and to tell the truth, it’ll take some time before I’m convinced I’ve found the right one. Here’s why.

Immediately after my initial fight-or-flight experience, back at the conference centre, I called a friend who helped me part of the way home. She was clearly worried, but had no reason to think I might be a danger to myself. Thankfully, I never have been (unless you count the years I spent trying to drown out the confusion with very cheap Japanese lager), but I do remember cowering back into the corner of my apartment, convinced that something had altered permanently. It had, of course – the illness has had an effect on my everyday life ever since, mostly for the good – but at the time, I couldn’t see how that could be a positive thing in any way. I remember thinking that I had to stop thinking, that that was the only way to calm my incessantly galloping heart. But how do you stop thinking, beyond stopping all together? I was petrified.

The first doctor I met told me I was suffering from exhaustion. He hooked me up to a drip for three hours, then sent me home. The next day, I had another panic attack. So I went to another doctor who promptly put me on a heavy dose of something-or-other (the name escapes me) that slowed me so thoroughly that I don’t have any decent memory of that particular fortnight. I do remember having panic attacks but feeling too exhausted to go anywhere. Panic attacks whilst virtually immobile aren’t much fun either, so I stopped taking the pills and didn’t visit that doctor again either.

For three years, I suffered incessant panic attacks and what I assume now must’ve been minor delusions (I remember lying in bed with a hangover and being so convinced that I was still on the train, lolling about embarrassingly, that I felt I ought to be apologising – to nobody). Back in the UK, I went to a local GP who said he didn’t believe in tackling panic attacks with pills, so he sent me to a counselor who was so obsessed with picturing calm brooks and palm trees that I pretty much left her to it. It seemed to do her immense good to natter her way through forests and around foothills, and who was I to stop her? After my sixth session, she pronounced me cured and said she didn’t need to see me anymore. I was glad she seemed to be feeling better. I had a panic attack as soon as I stepped out of the door.

At the age of 25, my girlfriend discovered she was pregnant. I was delighted by the news, hoping it’d give me something to devote my thoughts to other than my ever-circling confusion. As part of her pre-natal care, it was suggested that we both have a checkup at the local clinic. We were living in Muswell Hill at the time, North London, and the GP made history (in my own troubled world) for being the first person to put a name on my illness that made any sense to me. I hadn’t told anyone about the crumpled sky or the bizarre bed/train incident until that point, always having stayed away from detailing symptoms that I felt might impact on how tightly my straitjacket would be fastened, but with fatherhood looming I thought it best to get it all out in the open.

I’d barely finished my crumpled sky monologue before she said the words “clinical depression”. She tapped a prescription into the computer while explaining briskly that I was too far gone to know whether the depression was causing the anxiety disorder or vice versa, but that the drugs promised by this bit of paper would have it sorted in a matter of weeks. 20mg of Seroxat per day and it’d be like the last three years had never happened. I’ve never looked forward to taking medicine so eagerly.

I’ve often wondered if putting a name to it was all I really needed. Like so many other people who suffer from the illness, the confirmation that you’re not mad, and perhaps a little explanation of the science behind why your brain feels so ridiculous goes a long way towards capping the fear. For me though, the Seroxat, the trade name of a locally available product made with the notoriously addictive Paroxetine, seemed to put a little bonnet on it and see it cheerily out the door. For a year or two, I lived as happily as I ever had – probably more so, what with my gorgeous son, my newly-wed wife and my morning happy dose. I even managed to wean myself off them, ever-so slowly, fraction by fraction, until I appeared capable to live without their support at all.

It should be noted that my weaning was not taken under advisement. I made that decision all by myself, foolishly I now realise, and just stopped showing up at the doctors. By this point, aged 28, we’d moved back to Japan, and the doctor – who spoke very little English and seemed to find my monthly visits uncomfortable enough that hastily filling my prescription was all she ever got round to doing – seemed sufficiently unconcerned to never contact me and find out what on earth I thought I was doing.

Three months later, I crashed again, right in the middle of a wedding ceremony (I used to be a fake priest, but that’s another story entirely). Stood in front of 200 paying guests, with 10 minutes left on the clock, I gripped as tightly to the altar as possible, in the hope that my finger muscles could overpower the ever-growing fight-or-flight syndrome threatening to overpower my racing brain. As usual, I made it to the end, and – as usual – nobody watching had a clue that anything was up. But the damage was done. For three more years I continued to do that ridiculous job, and not a single ceremony passed without a sense of unavoidable doom. In truth, I think I survived those three years without suffering a major attack again, but the fear of it happening was miserable. It permeated into the rest of my life and I dealt with it by drinking a considerable amount.

Of course, drink and depression aren’t merry bedfellows, and the combination of the two led to a third complication: a mild but disturbing heart arrhythmia that forced me back to the embarrassed doctor more times than either of us enjoyed in the two years leading up to my thirtieth birthday. Everybody suffers the occasional arrhythmia, of course – I’m told that’s what jolts you awake occasionally when you’re on the verge of sleep. Imagine that almost constantly, and you’ll have some idea of what it does to your nerves. To say it has you worrying about your health is an understatement. Finally, inevitably, they brought the pills out again, this time a daily 20mg dose of Paxil – the trade name of a locally available product made with (you guessed it) the notoriously addictive drug Paroxetine.

This time, I didn’t stop. I took them daily for years. As a thirtieth birthday present to myself, I gave up drinking (it took a few months, but I got there in the end), which I doubt I could’ve done without my trusty pills, but I found that in the meantime, without knowing it, I’d developed a new dependency. It took only a few forgetful days without the Paxil for the chills, the dizziness and the electric shocks to set in. Yes, the electric shocks. Remove the Paroxetine for five days and nights, and it feels as though you’ve been plugged into the National Grid. The zaps leap from the tops of your limbs to your very extremities, and they don’t let up for several days. Withdrawal symptoms – nothing less – to add to your returning anxiety. It’s not a drug you want to give up in a hurry.

To bring this rambling discourse back to the present, it was only when I arrived back in the UK and went looking for my fix from the village GP that I realised what a fix I was actually in. The GP, quite possibly the first I’ve visited who has any real experience of treating clinical depression on a regular basis, listened to my tale with a sheepish, somewhat guilty look on her face. Apologising for her predecessors, she explained that Paroxetine products are no longer the reach-for antidepressant of choice. While its ability to tackle clinical depression and anxiety disorder are well recognised, she told me, the dependency Paroxetine fosters is not worth the trouble. She modestly claimed an 80% success rate transferring strung-out Paroxetine junkies to Fluoxetine (Prosac to the rest of us), which she tells me is easier to reduce should counselling be effective in combating the underlying depression. Once again, I only have the GP’s word to go on here, so forgive me if I don’t accept it without reservation. But that’s where I’m at now – spaced out as the transfer of drugs works its way through my system, but hopeful of a relief from the immediate threat of electrocution.

Of course, I’m not nearly as troubled as I might have been. I know people who suffered with the illness to a debilitating level by comparison. At the age of 34, I’m successful in what I do for a living, and I’m the proud father of two lovely, healthy kids. I dare say I’d even be capable of functioning without antidepressants – 20mg a day is not a high dose, after all – though I’d prefer not to give it a go just yet, and certainly not without supervision. On the occasions that I’ve skipped my pills for longer than is advisable, I’ve found that a combination of eating my greens and walking for a few miles a day has kept me feeling as balanced as I suspect I ever was, and I’m certainly more determined to get things done than I was in my “normal” years. All of the interviews and published articles you’ll find elsewhere on this blog I did during my “depressed” years, so it certainly hasn’t hindered my career or sense of ambition.

I don’t want to round this post off with some pithy remark. I want to point out, simply, that once I finally managed to spill the contents of my confused mind across the desk of a clued-up doctor, things happened very quickly. No, a cure wasn’t forthcoming, but help was at hand, as was a plausible explanation.

A combination of poor understanding, on the patient’s part, on the part of some GPs, and on the part of the public at large, means that the illness goes undetected, unspoken and unsupported all too often. Whether any of this was the case for poor Gary Speed may well remain a point of conjecture, but depression is a real and very powerful illness indeed, and, statistically, it will trouble someone sitting within spitting distance of where you’re reading this right now, at some point in their lives. It may even trouble you, though with a little help and perseverance, hopefully not for long.

For more information on coping with depression, see the Depression Alliance UK homepage.

A bank of pee-powered games machines in Balham, South London

I spent this morning reviewing the world’s first pee-powered games machine, a hands-free device launched at The Exhibit bar, Balham, South London. Sent by Time Out to blog the experience, my word count limit meant that I didn’t have the opportunity to report on some of the more geeky aspects of the launch. So, for the really interested urine-driven gamers out there, here’s the full transcript of my interview with developers Gordon MacSween and Mark Melford, dealing with questions like, “Wasn’t the world’s first pee-powered games machine released in Japan in January?” and “What’s in it for the women?” For the complete lowdown, read on.

Who came up with the idea?

Mark Melford: I think Gordon did.

Gordon MacSween: And it’s probably not unique. Do you know the story of the little fly in Schiphol airport in Amsterdam? It was a little social study that they did. They had these urinals with a little fly on, and they found that they didn’t have to clean up as much. People just couldn’t help but aiming for the fly. That’s been pretty much borne out, although we’re encouraging people to steer left and right. I just thought the fly was ok, but a bit boring; wouldn’t it be better if it was moving? That stayed as a discussion topic for quite a while until I saw that two guys from MIT had actually done this as a final year project. It was fine – it worked, and they got their degree, but it was pretty complicated, and it was a one-off. It had wires coming down and a big plastic molding, but it was enough to spark my interest. I thought that if there was a product that you could just fit to the wall, power up the internet, switch it on and start playing, then that would be saleable. So I pitched it to Mark, who picked up on the potential for entertainment advertising.

MM: I had a media consultancy business, so I was working with a lot of broadcasters and newspapers on strategy and driving more revenue through ad sales, so this apparently whacky idea, when you think about it… You’ve got an audience with a man for one minute.

GM: My wife would kill for that!

MM: The average “dwell time” length, we discovered, is 55 seconds for a man in the UK. Slightly longer for a man who is smiling, because it’s a funny thing. I thought there might be some media value in that. There are quite a few trends, particularly in out-of-home media, that make this quite timely. Spending on the digital signs around London that you see is growing at around 30% a year. More specifically, the location-based signs that you see, like the screens in taxis, hair salons – if you can capture someone when they’re still, and they have a dwell time of a few seconds, you can see that there’s a lot of interest in that field. Captive Media has a good heritage. Then there’s the executive channel, putting screens in elevators in the City, and there are a lot more very interesting concepts out there ­– putting big plasma screens on waste bins across London. It’s a crazy idea, recycling bins across London with a plasma screen on the side. It’s all because people respond much more to a moving image than a static one, according to the research. It shows that the recall rates are anything up to 8 times higher. So a digital screen in a place where people look at it struck me as a really interesting idea.

GM: The company that makes our product also made the ones at Liverpool Street Station, along the escalator. Our criteria [for producing the product] was that it had to be beautiful, so it’s attractive to the venue, but it also had to be rugged and 100% waterproof. But those ones at Liverpool Street ­– in order to keep your attention for the 50 seconds you’re on it, they’ve had to put in 60 screens.

Have you had any ideas about how to develop the pee-controlled games console for women yet?

MM: Yes we have. We are product designers, but we have to recognize our limitations, so anatomically speaking, there cannot be something like this for the ladies. But girls have a different problem: they have to queue at busy venues. So we have been trialing a simple screen that looks like these and carries a lot of the same content as these, either just showing the content or we’re experimenting with very simple forms of gesture recognition, so they can swipe, with a screen next to the hand-dryer or the mirror, but most importantly visible from the queue. Upstairs here [at The Exhibit], in the ladies bathroom we have a screen with a ladies’ channel showing specifically things that women have told us they’d like to see – celebrity gossip, fashion and make-up tips.

GM: What we have now that we didn’t when we started thinking about this is the software to manage thousands of screens if you need to. So we can say we want this stuff only to go into the ladies’, then we tag it for the ladies; if we want it only to go to London, we tag it for screens in London. So the bar owner can choose exactly what he wants, and he can say, “I want this only to go out after the watershed,” or “this is only for the weekend”, and we can schedule that in for them.

You’re saying this is the world’s first, but we saw something similar from SEGA in Tokyo in January (the Toylet). How do the two products differ?

GM: There were two aspects to it for us. On the one hand we thought someone’s doing the same thing; on the other hand, we looked at their product and, in a sense, it was the same as the MIT product I mentioned earlier. If you’ve got to take the product off the wall and drill it and put cables up, it’s going to be very difficult to make it vandal-proof. So we set out and developed and patented contactless sensors.

MM: I think [Sega] are trialing it. We’ve been reading that there’s an official launch coming up. In fact, it was publicized as being November 21, but it doesn’t seem to have happened.

GM: They definitely haven’t done what we set out to do. Theirs has a target and it measures how long you pee on it, and then at the end of the game it does things that we might regard as being in poor taste – but that’s a cultural thing. Whereas, we’ve done something where you can drive something left and right and you can play games on it. In the end, our bigger impression was that if someone as big as SEGA are looking at the same area, then it has probably got legs. It’d be daft to say we’re not worried about SEGA, because they’re massive, but we’re certainly not concerned about their initial product.

It sounds like SEGA’s has to do with pee power and pressure, which makes me worry about giving myself a hernia.

GM: Well, quite! Ours is much more to do with good aim. During our trials in Cambridge, what happened was that the first night we put it in, I was wondering what would happen, and I heard this group of Americans coming in and this one guy was high-fiving his mates, shouting “24!” [his score on the On the Piste game], and I thought, “this is good…”. And so I went back in the following week and asked the owner how it was going, and he’d say “40″, and then “60″. And I’m thinking, how are people doing that? And it turns out people are learning how to stop and start [their pee flow] to get higher scores. We’ve got 3 scores so far over 100.

GM: So I don’t think ours will give you a hernia; rather it’d give you the sort of exercise your doctor might give you!

So far I’ve found that I’d need to drink a lot to get the score up to anything respectable. A couple of cups of coffee doesn’t really cut it.

GM: Volume is good! First thing in the morning is tough, but once you break the seal at night… We tend to drink a lot of water so that we can test it out more often.

How many venues have taken it up so far?

GM: Well, we’ve been trying to keep it under the radar, so the plan was always to have this one and then the one in Cambridge. But in the meantime, one way or another, we’ve been approached by a company ­– a big mall in Bristol – and we’re now doing the installation surveys for them. We’ve had quite a lot of interest from the States, but we’ve had to say we’ll come back to them. The plan is, after today, we’ll start to talk to bar chains and exhibition centres. The nice thing about this is it’s quite easy to get people to talk about it.

What games do you currently operate on the system?

MM: On the Piste is, by design, about as simple a game as you can imagine. It has to be. And then there’s my personal favourite [a version of the classic Atari wall-smashing game, Breakout], which we wanted to be as retro as it possible, so that we could demonstrate the concept. Clever Dick is our quiz game: very simple multiple-choice questions and answers. It’s so simple – in fact, we started with three options, but that was too much processing for a man with his willy in his hands. If you have a look at the Clever Dick game, [reading the questions from the screen]: “Two pints of lager would put you over the limit, true or false? Alcohol is a depressant, true or false?” We’re working with Drinkaware. This is an example of gameification, and we’re using that format where the guy is trying for a high score, while we’re putting across a serious message.

What’s the future for this platform?

GM: It’s a little bit further away, but because all the units are linked to the internet, you could have multiplayer games.

What, with men heading to the toilet together for a game?

GM: Well, that already happens. The idea of the “Toilet Party” is something we’ve seen in Cambridge.

Sorry, the “Toilet Party”? 

GM: Well, that’s a phrase I use for when girls all go off together to the toilet in a huddle. It turns out that men were starting to go off in pairs! And the whole urinal etiquette, where men just don’t talk to each other at urinals…we’ve see men queuing up and then looking over each others’ shoulders and saying, “You’ve gotta hit the target!” So the chatter starts there. It’s been interesting.

And people are actually managing to stay within the urinal? The first thing that struck me were potential cleaning costs…

GM: In Cambridge, they’ve told us that there are two things they’ve found there are less of: less mess, which we sort of expected because we tried to design the game so you’re not splashing about, and less vandalism. When we put it in, people thought it’d be [ripped] off the wall within a week, and it’s still there after 4 months. But because people are having a laugh, there’s a lot less vandalism. People tend to get less angry. So, if you put a little bit of thought into the way you design the game, people get better. It rewards aim. And of course you don’t go too far right because you know any minute you’ll have to swing left.

Tenniscoats in Tokyo

It’s a late night on Hannana Dori in Tokyo’s Meguro Ward. From a window above the P-Koen atelier and shop comes the sound of a couple arguing. But listen carefully and you’ll realize that it’s not a domestic row; rather, the pair are in heated debate over what their “sound” might be. It dawns on you that it’s a band in distress; that what you’ve happened upon are those dreaded “musical differences.”

For most long-term bands, the phrase is nothing less than a death knell. However, for Tenniscoats — Takashi Ueno and the mono-monickered Saya (who won’t reveal her last name, but confirms that it isn’t Ueno) — a duo that have been working the capital’s underground circuit for more than a decade, musical differences are there to be thrived upon.

Fans of the band are used to buying albums that leap with impressive dexterity between avant-garde experimentation and acoustic pop whimsy, often on several albums released within the space of a few months. Never comfortable sitting in one place, they appear to be in a constant state of transition — musically as well as physically. Months are spent abroad each year, partly because they have a larger fan base in Europe and Australia than they do at home, and partly because there are other musicians to meet; other styles to be learned.

Their latest album, Enjoy Your Life, is an acoustic collaboration with low-fi godfather Jad Fair. At first glance, it is most notable for the spontaneity that went into its creation. The album was recorded during promotional duties for Tokinouta, an acoustic collection that came out in April, though beyond their pared-down production, the two albums show little similarity. Where Tokinouta is introspective, folksy and soulful in a way that the duo have only ever toyed with before, Enjoy Your Life is as frivolous as its title would suggest; while the older album sounds like a work that was allowed to gestate, the new collaboration appears purposefully unfinished. Only the Technicolor popup cover has any gloss to it, which is unsurprising given that Fair only met Saya and Ueno the day before recording took place — a session that lasted approximately 10 hours.

“We had no rehearsal time together before starting the session,” Fair explains, recalling what must have been the quickest recording of an album in his long career. “I had some lyrics written down, but more often than not I don’t stick to what I have. Lyrics are changed to fit with the flow of the song. Saya and Takashi brought ideas to the session, only a couple of which we did at a show in Tokyo the day before.”

That’s not to say it makes for a poor listen, of course. The honesty of the music and performance will attract fans of folk music, and “Boku wo Hitori ni Shinaide” is as creative and devastatingly gorgeous a song as anything Saya, an enchanting singer even in her reediest moments, has sung on before. It’s an album peppered with bum notes and tripped-over lyrics, but it’s also a study in the joy of creation, with giggles throughout.

Speaking to Saya, it’s clear that she doesn’t think of the album as usual.

“It’s not just an album of songs,” she says, “it’s also an album of improvisation, especially on tracks like ‘Tonari Gumi,’ an old Japanese song that Jad sings, even though he speaks no Japanese.” Listening to that track, which sounds like something you might find on a bonus disc, it’s hard not to smile as take after take breaks down into laughter. “Sorry … so lovely!” giggles Saya after their third attempt. “Well, thank you,” drawls Fair, ever the perfect gentleman.

Enjoy Your Life is far from Tennsicoats’ first collaboration. In fact, over a career that has spanned more than 10 years, the pair have created a surprisingly small amount of noncollaborative work. In the past, Saya has self-deprecatingly called the duo lazy, though the vast amount of material they have produced attests to the fact that they are anything but. Instead, their collaborations represent a constant effort to better themselves. Whether they’re creating avant-garde audioscapes with sound artists Tetsuya Umeda or Lawrence English, touring Britain with Australian musician John Chantler, banging out albums with Scottish indie group The Pastels, or creating sumptuous masterpieces with Swedish sound-painters, Tape (if you don’t own Tan Tan Therapy, then shame on you), there’s a sense that they are students as much as participants, always honing their craft and moving on.

“I think one thing that stands out for me is their work ethic,” explains Chantler, who played on their acclaimed 2007 album, Totemo Aimasho. “On stage it all appears effortless, but behind the scenes they are going nonstop — practicing, arranging, organizing. I’ve done two tours with them and in both instances they played completely different sets every night, and the regularly played stuff got honed more and more. Even a simple kick-snare rhythm was subject to discussion and demonstration as to how it should be played. They really get inside the music.”

English, who has worked with Tenniscoats via his label Room40, concurs: “They have an outstanding ability to work music out of even the most unmusical objects and situations. When we were recording Temporacha (2009), I remember Saya setting up a kalimba on a rattling old heater. The motion of the vibrating kalimba brought the whole heater into vibration — it sounded incredible. It’s this kind of natural exploration that just impresses me so much.”

And it’s this continuous search for the next Tenniscoats sound that brings us back to Meguro and the argument in the night. Ueno passionately insists that the duo “make music that can be played by everyone,” while his partner disagrees, saying that theirs should be “sophisticated music.” It occurs to me that the only trouble you’ll ever have with Tenniscoats is finding a suitable tag to file them under on your iPod. For the sake of a fascinating band, long may the musical differences continue.

Back in my days as an angel: Pic by Mio Kobayashi

Fake priesting seems to be getting some attention again, thanks largely to On the Virgin Road, or iamafakepriestinjapan, as its URL prefers it. What interests me most about this is that it hasn’t been picked up as a decent blog topic before – I certainly wish I’d thought of it back in my stole-wearing days.

Yes, that’s right. I was a fake priest in Japan. Not that it’s much of a secret; I must’ve told the stories more times than I actually performed weddings – 1,092 weddings all told, between the years of 2003 and 2009. I got pretty good at it, too; so good in fact that there was a point during my peak years (yes, I had peak years) that a “chapel” in Kitakyushu secured my services long-term, as newly-weds-to-be were apparently asking specifically for me. I’d like to humbly admit that I have no idea how they’d even heard of me, but that wouldn’t be true. 2005 was the year, after all, that I began appearing in fake priest commercials. 

It’s true that I never saw one of these, though a number of my friends told me they’d seen me reading from Corinthians in Japanese during a JAL flight between Tokyo and Fukuoka. It didn’t surprise me at all. During “the peak years” I’d occasionally be flown out to the Goto Islands in Nagasaki (which, incidentally, already had a history of religious invasion), and sometimes be requested to perform dog weddings.

A dog wedding does exactly as you’re hoping it does: two dogs, one in a gown and one in a tuxedo, walking down the aisle and signing singledom away with one mucky paw print (the owners would dip the mutts’ paws into a bejewelled tub of paint). I even went so far as to star in a commercial for a dog wedding, though it was a service that never really caught on. I’ve always hoped this was because Japanese people are not as easily fooled out of their cash as the bandits who dream up things like dog weddings think they are, but the company that hired me explained that it had more to do with a lack of extra advertising funds. What some people will do with their money during a recession beggars belief.

The peak years lasted between 2005 and 2007, a time when I could rattle off the scripts in my sleep, although I always kept them glued inside my copy of the King James Bible to be on the safe side. I was good at my job, I was being paid ridiculously well (15,000 yen per 15-minute wedding; approximately 6-8 weddings per weekend, and 3 or 4 during the week) and I had a huge amount of free time with which to pursue my writing career. Had I not been a fake priest in Japan, I’d never have found the time to freelance, or the money to support my family. No two ways about it, fake priesting served me well.

In 2008, I was approached by a literary agent in New York who had heard my odd tale and asked me to write it up as a book proposal. I spent a few months trying, but quickly found that it had very little substance – much the way I felt about the job itself by this point. It was great for a few anecdotes, but ultimately soulless – and I use that word with caution. Not in the slightest bit religious, I spent years dismissing the god fearing folk who told me I was destined to burn. What ultimately got to me was the fact that I was, quite literally, living a lie.

While these weddings took place in establishments that screamed fakery, the amount of people who appeared to have had the wool pulled over their eyes unnerved me. Nobody seemed to question why “Chester Cathedral“, a vast gray monstrosity that sat 250 people and had bigger stained glass window than the church in the village I grew up in, sat on a nondescript road in Fukuoka’s Kasuga district. If they did, they seemed to dismiss it easily enough.

Maybe I shouldn’t have allowed it to get to me so much, but the idea of a such as myself performing pre-wedding counselling sessions, as I was occasionally asked to do, really began to make me feel deeply uncomfortable. The standard line used by most members of the fake priest community was that we were just actors, but I occasionally found that the people I worked with closely – the choirgirls and ushers – were under the impression that we were the real deal. If they weren’t in on it, the chances were that the bride and groom weren’t either.

The last 12 months were unpleasant. I started having severe panic attacks in the middle of ceremonies – white knuckle rides that, by all accounts, I did an impressive job of covering up. Somehow I was able to get to the end of each wedding without collapsing, though my heart was pounding, my fingers were locked around the edges of the altar, and my mind was swimming in the absolute surreality of it all – “what the fuck am I doing here in front of 300 Japanese people, dressed in a smock, reading scripture I don’t believe in a language I don’t fully understand?” I still dream I’m doing it, but never during a comfortable sleep.

In a way it helped me forward. I used any energy that I could find in my subsequent depression to work harder at my other job, my writing and editing, and eventually I managed to claw my way out of the pulpit. If I’m surprised by anything now, it’s only how quickly I managed to forget the script, words I used to read so well that they’d regularly summon me for a performance in small towns in the Honshu hills. Forgive me the cliché, but it seems like a story from another lifetime. And thank the good lord for that.

Kamikochi - Not what Michael Palin saw

During a brief stopover in Kyushu in the early 1990s, British broadcaster and former Monty Python Michael Palin stopped in at Huis Ten Bosch, a faithful recreation of a Dutch town, replete with gouda, tulips, windmills and a clock tower built out of bricks shipped from Holland. Not sure what to make of it all, he dubbed it ’cultural karaoke’ and quickly moved on. It’s a phrase that I’ve had reason to recall many times, albeit never before when discussing a mountain range.

But it’s in the heart of the Japan Alps that the phrase fits once again. I’m on a fraying bus, rattling along the road between Shin-Shimashima Station and Kamikochi, trying hard to ignore the taped, shrill voice of a woman that loops on the bus Tannoy. She’s imploring me to enjoy the views of the astounding countryside, and to be fair, she has her work cut out: of the five or six passengers, I’m the only one still awake. It’s not so much the beautiful views that hold my rapt attention, however. It’s the abundance of cookie cutter Alpine restaurants and lodges that line the roadside, each looking as though the blueprints were copied from a Heidi picture book, not one demonstrating any architectural familiarity with the country we’re in.

It’s a phenomena that continues the next day when my guide begins to speak proudly of Walter Weston, ’the grandfather of Japanese mountaineering’. Weston was a British missionary who spent years wandering around the Honshu mountains during the Meiji period, often attributed (mistakenly) with having given the Japan Alps their name. He’s referred to here with the same reverence most mountaineers might reserve for Hilary and Tenzing, so when I wonder out loud if his pedestal might not be doing a disservice to the thousands of Japanese folk whose lives were spent hobbling around the upper echelons of this spectacular region prior to Weston’s arrival, my deliberations are met with a kind of disbelief. Clearly this is not the place to ponder the philosophies of Michael Palin.

That said, there’s precious little else to do in Kamikochi beyond pondering and wandering, which is precisely what makes it the perfect weekend escape from Tokyo. Not that this is a groundbreaking revelation; Tokyoites have been coming here for the best part of a century, at one point arriving in such heavy numbers that most of their weekend was spent in the car, sitting in a traffic jam (photos from the Showa era make it look like hell on a mountainside). It’s still busy, of course – arriving and departing require careful planning – but the mid-’90s decision to make Kamikochi car-free means that the area has flourished in a far more attractive way. During our hike, our guide explains that he carries a Japanese machete as protection against bears, an indigenous population that is pleasingly on the up.

These days, visitors to Kamikochi tend to arrive on the rickety bus. Leaving their cars at Sawando, the nearest settlement, they line up in vast numbers to be transported to the village centre where, it must be said, the local architecture takes on a more Japanese aspect. Calling it a village might be too much, in fact – it’s little more than a collection of hotels and souvenir shops huddled around a particularly popular rope bridge (Kappa Bashi) – but its location is mesmeric. Seated at the foot of the Hotaka mountain range, it is naturally protected from human interference (its designation as a national park in 1916 helped fend off would-be developers) and summer typhoons (they don’t tend to scale the 3,000m summits successfully).

That’s not to say the area doesn’t suffer from extreme weather; between November 15 and April 27, the roads and hotels are closed in anticipation of heavy snow. ‘I came up here once at the dead of winter,’ a young worker at my lodge told me. ‘It was amazing. Nobody was here, just me and the mountains…and the snow. It was so deep, the taxi driver wouldn’t come much closer than Sawando. I had to hike the rest of the way.’ If he hadn’t actually seen The Shining, this guy had at least partially lived it.

Travellers to Kamikochi can expect a good selection of hikes, varying between the simple to challenging, each guaranteed a breathtaking series of views that change according to the season. By the time the area shuts down in November, it has already become a snow-lover’s ideal vacation, while the summer season is attended by glorious azure skies. Whichever time of the year you choose to visit, it’s well worth contacting the local travel bureau (see the Sacred Kamikochi link below) and trying to arrange a hike with Kazunari Ohukara, a septuagenerian who has been hopping around in the Kamikochi hills since he was 18. As mountain men go, he’s a peach, albeit one with sun-bruised skin and a tendency to chase wild monkeys mid-sentence.

With Okuhara-San as your guide, every tree has a story. He wears his deep love for the area on his sleeve, and no bridge is crossed without the old man turning and promising it a return visit, bidding it a fond farewell as he would any old friend. Sounds mad? Eccentric, certainly. When I ask him which his favourite peak is, he tells anyone who’ll listen that he has climbed Mt Roppyaku 220 times. Then he turns towards the peak and breaks into a loud serenade, ending with what may be a failed attempt to get a decent echo going. Suffice to say, he leaves an impression.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1dpzLARx0A]

Returning to the real world from all this would be a shock to the system, were it not for the Tokyo-esque bus queues that great you at Kamikochi bus station. These can last for hours on end, so the best thing to do is head over there after breakfast (or as soon as you arrive, if you’re on a day trip), and get a ticket for a specific bus. You’ll need the ticket itself plus a numbered boarding ticket to ensure you’re booked youself a seat. Once this is done, make the most of the time you have in the area. From the active volcano, Mount Yakedake, right along the river to the Kamonji-Goya hut, where fresh iwana (river trout) are prepared in the traditional fashion, it’s easy to see why Kamikochi has become so beloved of Japanese holidaymakers. If only Michael Palin had stopped off here instead.

Travel tips

Where to stay

Kamikochi has accommodation for all budgets. With rates starting from ¥8,000 (per person) per night, Kamikochi Nishi-Itoya Sanso is a very reasonable deal indeed. The inclusive meal is excellent (Kamikochi does very well generally in the culinary department, making good use of the fresh ingredients found in the region) and the staff are friendly. The shared bathtubs may prove overwhelming for many foreign visitors, but they are segregated and have decent instructions on bathing etiquette in English. Elsewhere, the Kamikochi Gosenjaku Hotel offers a slightly more refined stay, with rates starting from ¥28,000 per person. If these prices seem steep, the camp site offers decent facilities. Special offers, booking in English and general visitor information can be found at the Sacred Kamikochi website.

What to eat

While your hotel will most likely provide you with a decent dinner and breakfast, the river trout at Kamonji-Goya (about an hour’s hike from Kappa Bashi) is not to be missed. The fish is prepared over the flames of a traditional irori fireplace, and visitors get the chance to peruse Walter Weston’s remaining effects – specifically his ice pick and rifle, both of which hang from the wall.

How to get there

Kamikochi is not accessible by car, though it is a relatively easy (if not overlong) trip from the capital. The Tokyo to Kamikochi trek starts at Shinjuku, where the Azusa trains run through to Matsumoto in Nagano Prefecture – the journey is a little shy of three hours long. From Matsumoto, take the Dentetsu Kamikochi line through to its terminus at Shin-Shimashima Station (approximately 30 minutes), before changing to the Kamikochi bus, which takes a fairly spectacular hour-long route around (and even through) some of Japan’s highest peaks. Ahead of your return journey, be sure to collect a numbered boarding ticket several hours before you plan to depart.