Welcome to this year's 'Tour Diaries' from Japan!  Alan, Marcus and myself left Heathrow on Friday night and arrived in Tokyo on Saturday afternoon... a little shell shocked but in fine spirits. After our 12 hour flight, and 3 hour car journey to the centre of town, we went straight to our rehearsal location (just underneath the famous Rainbow Bridge) to make sure our instruments were all in order.  It was great to see all those friendly faces again.. a better bunch of guys you could never hope to meet!  John Lewis our tour manager met us at the airport, and it was great to see my good friend again and catch up, although we have many months ahead to do that. After we checked in at our hotel I bumped into my dear friend Luis Conti, better know as YODOBASHI man. He is on the tour with us playing percussion. We went for a dinner together and had a great laugh talking about a fine array of subjects. 

So, into rehearsal we went the following morning after little sleep.  Due to jet lag it takes a good week to really get over it. We are rehearsing for the World Rock Festival this weekend so it's full on. The temperature here is 40 degrees so you can imagine !!!!!! All, I'm glad to report is going really well.  Yazawa is in top form and singing as well as always. We haven't had much time to get out and about as yet as it's heads down and 'pedal to metal' as they say. Snake Davis is also out with us, playing sax.  What a great man, and a real pleasure to share time with him. 

Well, that's the story so far... Stay tuned for more as we go along. 

Geoff 

A few pics of the crew as they are as important as we are:

		Mitchi and Bimbo (front of house and monitor engineers) (Click here for larger version)
		Tschuie my wonderful tech and good pal (Click here for larger version)
		Tommy our programmer funny guy !!!!!!! (Click here for larger version)
		John Lewis (TM to the stars) (Click here for larger version)