Art Of Noise: And What Have You Done With My Body, God?

I last wrote about Art Of Noise six years ago. (Read it now, there's useful backstory in there - just be warned that almost every single link on the page has died in those six years.) This was when the band had just completed a series of gigs promoting their 1999 album, The Seduction Of Claude Debussy. Given that this was the first thing they'd done for about a decade, I wondered at the end of the piece what they would do next.

I didn't expect they'd wait six years and then release a four-CD set of twenty-year-old shit from their cutting room floor. And yet, given the ZTT label's long history of remixing and recycling, I suppose it's not that unexpected at all.

REPOST: Return Of The Rising Monkey (Part 2 of 2)

Dateline: Japan, 2004. My second visit to the Land Of The Rising Sun, as The Belated Birthday Girl and I run around Fukuoka, Nagasaki, Kagoshima, Matsuyama, Takamatsu and Hiroshima in fourteen days: an undertaking so mammoth it requires two pages to cover it. Part Two: Takamatsu to Fukuoka, plus links.

Originally posted on The Unpleasant Lair Of Spank The Monkey 01/03/2005

REPOST: Return Of The Rising Monkey (Part 1 of 2)

Dateline: Japan, 2004. My second visit to the Land Of The Rising Sun, as The Belated Birthday Girl and I run around Fukuoka, Nagasaki, Kagoshima, Matsuyama, Takamatsu and Hiroshima in fourteen days: an undertaking so mammoth it requires two pages to cover it. Part One: Fukuoka to Matsuyama.

Originally posted on The Unpleasant Lair Of Spank The Monkey 01/03/2005

Ultravox

As their first three albums are re-released, we take a look at what one of Britain's most influential bands was doing in the Seventies, before any of you had heard of them. Unlike me. Ner ner ner-ner ner.

REPOST: J-Pop Jamboree

From high-velocity Japanese psychobilly to ten-year-old fish propaganda songs, here's a wholly uninformed analysis of the current state of Japanese music, based entirely on whatever I happened to hear during a two-week visit.

Originally posted on The Unpleasant Lair Of Spank The Monkey 25/05/2002

REPOST: Land Of The Rising Monkey

Dateline: Japan, 2002. The Three Wise Monkeys of Nikko are legendary for seeing no evil, hearing no evil and speaking no evil. A good example for an australopithecine arts critic, so here's just the good stuff I saw (and ate) when The Belated Birthday Girl and I visited Japan.

Originally posted on The Unpleasant Lair Of Spank The Monkey 25/05/2002

Simian Substitute Site for August 2006: Monkey Music

For those of you who weren't here in the old Demon Internet days, a brief explanation. Back then, I was always worried about how my website tended to be slightly less than child-friendly, what with the occasional cheeky picture and the use of naughty words for cheap comedy effect. Hence a tradition that stood me in good stead all the way through eight years or so of The Unpleasant Lair: The Simian Substitute Site Of The Month. Each month, I'd find a nice inoffensive site involving monkeys, and put it up as a link for the kids to follow in case my stuff made them scared or damaged enough to end up like, let's be honest, the rest of us.