We’re back from the land of neon and noise and I’m so sad because I didn’t want to leave. Tokyo is the most magical place. It’s like Piccadilly Circus times a thousand. So bright and colourful. And so loud!

Thankfully, Malcolm (keyboard player-turned tour guide extraordinaire) helped us get over the culture shock. He used to live over there, and it was to our great delight (and amusement) that he started spouting Japanese and told us when to take our shoes off and what to do when it came to toilet slipper etiquette! We’d have been lost without him, and the vegetarians would’ve ended up eating snake, we’d have walked into the wrong type of karaoke bar and we’d have offended everyone in sight with our western ways. So thanks Malc! Or should that be Big B…

The gigs were amazing. It was so lovely to catch up with The Pipettes at British Anthems. We supported the girls (and boys) at our first ever gig, and have watched them skyrocket, us clinging to their polka-dotted coat tails, ever since. But there we were a year or whatever later, both playing to 4000 Japanese fans, light years away from that first dingy gig in Notting Hill. Brilliant!

We had to do an official signing in a proper line-up after the show having said nice things to video about HMV, and me doing a quick photo shoot backstage for a clothing company in return for some free clobber. Oh yes. Amongst other items, I now own a gold corduroy puffball Japanese coat-type thing. Ivor thinks it looks like a spacesuit, which, given the circumstances and feeling like we might as well have been on Mars, is not that far off.

Then we had our own headline show at Astro Hall, which was great apart from a few technical hitches involving guitar pedals exploding. Japanese audiences are different – more polite but really attentive, so we were able to play a long set including some of the slower songs on the album as well as our ‘lil Christmas cover for the first time live. Eek!

Whilst the rest of the boys were visiting shrines and getting thrown out of guitar shops, Andrew and I had lots of promo to do including a couple of live radio sessions in coffee shop windows and a visit to Sony HQ where we were greeted with a standing ovation from the office staff. It was surreal. We had journalists popping in and out all day with their notepads and Dictaphones. I had to do a few interviews and idents on my own, while Andrew did his best Frank Spencer impression knocking over all the MTV awards.

The gigs finish early over there, which meant we had most nights free for “getting on the sauce” and other Brits Abroad-type shenanigans. After the first gig, we had arranged with the Pipettes to go and do some karaoke. We met in the hotel lobby (NB they put all the British bands in the same hotel with windows that don’t open…) and just as we were about to leave, The Enemy turned up challenging us all to a bit of late night karaoke action too, which struck me as not unlike that street fight scene in Anchorman….

Anyway, we had fun. Ivor, Rusty and Paul did ‘Band on The Run’ and ‘Life in The Fast Lane’. Andrew wowed the audience with ‘The Look of Love’, Malcolm gave us his brilliant rendition of Suspicious Minds (you could tell he’d done this before), and I duetted with Riot Becki on ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’, as well as getting down to Shampoo’s ‘We’re in Trouble’ with Johnny Cigarettes, who I later found out is a journalist for the NME and Q. Ho hum… He chose it!

We had such a brilliant time. I just wish it could have been for longer. I was up at 6am on the last morning before our flight– an insomniac in the city that really never sleeps – and I went for a wander and a coffee, living out my Scarlett Johansson fantasies (no, not like that boys) as the wistful blonde in a sea of neon, and as I walked back to the hotel for the last time over that crazy pedestrian crossing I shed a tear for Tokyo.

Ali x