Ah, Bisto! Homeward bound again, back to the land of marmite, baked beans and builders tea. A sacred place, where the trains are over-priced and below-par, the summers are short and the queues incredibly orderly. Yes, back to Blighty, leaving behind Osaka, Shibuya, The Room, Meguro and all the Okino brothers’ friends and colleagues in Japan. Big thanks to Yoshihiro Okino for making my mix of ‘Faster Than The Sun’ a classic at Noon in Osaka after only playing it for 2 months. That’s at least 2 more downloads chaps. We WILL have money for chips on Friday. YES!

       I may be taking it easy for a week or so now, for I feel a great milestone has been reached in my career. Apart from wanting to spend some quality time with wifey, I also need time to recharge after this outstanding achievement. Some of you may think that being signed to Reinforced aged seventeen, or being thirty and having been an international DJ for 10 years an accomplishment enough. But no sir! Nothing can match the incredible pride that I feel welling inside me, larger in fact than the tremendous rage I have accumulating at being on an aeroplane again, for another eleven hours, surrounded by idiots.

    My great feeling of pride comes from accomplishing something I doubt I, or indeed anyone in the western hemisphere, had hoped to achieve in their lifetimes. Those of you unable to imagine Club Indigo in Kumamoto or The Room in Tokyo, I will aid you with a brief description. They share some attributes, both are smallish nightclubs with a heavily devoted client base, low ceilings, simple décor and a small but well stocked bar. The main difference is that Tokyo has about 8 million inhabitants, and Kumamoto around 2. So when a Western DJ (not a DJ from The Wild West, that would be ridiculous, although I’m quite into exploring the cowboy look for future sets) arrives in a smaller city, the reception and buzz can be quite significantly larger than in Tokyo. They cheered when I entered the club on Friday. The capitol city dwellers are fairly spoilt for DJ talent, and thus not quite so excited at a foreign guest. For example, the week I was in town, Karizma played to a packed Club Loop on a Tuesday night. So they may be a little unimpressed when old Domu turns up, again, to play in their little club on a Saturday night. But something magical happened in Kumamoto that inspired me to try and do the same in Tokyo. And I did. And that was that I somehow managed to get about 15 or 20 Japanese music fans, DJs and assorted bar staff to do the conga to Harold Melvin’s ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’ at six in the morning. Now Shuya Okino isn’t one to band around the term ‘Legendary’ that freely, nor am I usually one to blow my own trumpet (although I am aware that in many ways the point of this blog is to make you all realise how great I am), but he freely banded around that in 17 years of The Room in Tokyo, no one had ever achieved this feat, at the beginning, the end, or any part of a DJ set, and was in fact now ‘legendary’. And I challenge you to find out if their exists an entry in the Guiness Book of World Records - “How many nights in a row has a DJ from Bedford made 20 people in a small Japanese nightclub do the conga to ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’?” Answer, two.

    On the point of records, I have thought for many years that they are fairly pointless, and that there is a limitless chasm of ideas for new, more ridiculous ones as time goes by. You could be up the Eiffel Tower, with one friend called Ben and another whose nickname was Jonathan Cucumber. Ben liked Frazzles, Jonathan had a ferret, and you had just had a haircut. Now I reckon if that sequence of events happened to you in your lifetime, it would be a world record. And If it happened again, only this time higher up the Eiffel Tower, or you got up or down the lift or stairs quicker, then maybe you could break your own record. My point is that any old non-sense could be made into a record. But maybe the conga incident represents improbability, as does my other example, rather than record breaking. Perhaps it is impressive to get two nightclubs in Japan, on two nights running to end on a conga line to the same song. But I have been to at least three weddings whereupon playing The Beatles ‘All You Need Is Love’ everybody forms a circle around the bride and groom and do a kind of hokey-cokey ring around them, doing kicks as you close the circle around the recently adjoined. Who invented that? Did our parents do it at weddings of old, so much so that our generation had absorbed it deep into their very souls. And then, at three different weddings, where I would have been the only common factor, inadvertently and instantly reacted the same way? Curious, it may be. But I should now confess that in Tokyo they needed a little shove, mainly by me announcing on the microphone “I want you all to do a conga.” So perhaps it isn’t comparable to any kind of synchronicity or karmic vibe, nor in fact is it any kind of testament to my skill as a performer. Basically I was acting like a tit as usual, and I wanted everyone else to look one too. Mission accomplished. Happy days.

    So much more I could tell you about this trip, though. Like the woman on the bullet train whose only job was to gesture that all the luggage racks above our heads were in order as she passed through, twittering to herself about how neat it all looked. Although she did have a very impressive uniform, I wasn’t totally convinced by her hand signalling. She had a good bow, by that I mean the physical act, not the decorative ribbon, and kept her act going well into the toilet/vending machine/carriage-interchange section of the train as she left clear sight. But I don’t think her hands were ‘Trumpton’-ish enough. Those of you familiar with Windy Miller, the firemen and all the other various inhabitants of ‘Camberwick Green’ will know what I mean by ‘mitten hands’. I find just thinking about it hilarious. Perhaps I will make a little video to demonstrate my point, but basically it is gesturing with your hand, keeping all your fingers together, but leaving your thumb pointing up, as if you are wearing mittens. Have a look at the popular 60’s claymation characters on Youtube, I hope you find it as amusing as I do. And perhaps try to use it in your everyday life, maybe to amuse small children or the mentally deficient.

       Enough of this absolute drivel. See you next time, hopefully by then I will be totally acclimatised and ready to make some new music! Then, with any luck, I will have something interesting to talk to you about, rather than this load of old nonsense. So till then, taters me hearties and much love!