"Sometimes years go by, it seems," Jonathan Donahue sings within seconds of Mercury Rev's ninth album, "The Light in You," giving the first snapshot into the mental state of a band that has returned from the brink. Seven years, in fact, had passed since ...

'Music gives people hope." Nile Rodgers understands this statement better than most. The 63-year-old grew up the son of drug-addicted parents, dragged from pillar to post across the East Coast of the United States, but it was his love of jazz and rhythm and blues ...

'I'd never seen anything like it!" says Ride frontman Mark Gardener as he recalls the first time the recently reformed shoegaze pioneers stepped foot on Japanese soil. "We touched down at the airport and there were 300 people there, all with daffodils, chocolates, toys and ...

When London indie-rock foursome Wolf Alice makes its Japan debut at the Summer Sonic festival this weekend, it will be three years, two EPs, one debut album and countless incendiary live gigs since it first sent alternative music blogs into a frenzy with a ...

It doesn't take much to set Noel Gallagher off. We are sat in a backstage portacabin at London's peculiarly ragbag Clapham Calling festival, and I've just mentioned to the former Oasis songwriter that "Chasing Yesterday," the second solo album under his High Flying Birds ...

"I've tried to immerse myself in Japanese culture," says Charli XCX, international hit maker and Britain's next big pop-star-in-waiting. Of course, that's the sort of comment you might expect the 22-year-old to make on the eve of her first headline shows in the country ...

As singer of the Bay City Rollers, the tartan-clad teen-pop sensations that conquered the world in the 1970s, Les McKeown forged a special bond with Japan that endures today. "If you have that image of The Beatles coming down the steps on the plane, it ...

Gaz Coombes has grown up, but he hasn't grown old. The carefree effervescence that characterized his band Supergrass, Britpop's cheeky monkeys, has vanished, but five years into a solo career the band's erstwhile frontman refuses to settle into the traditional post-split career trajectory. "I find ...

For his fourth solo album, "American Interior," Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys went the extra mile. Or more accurately, the extra 1,800 miles. Following in the footsteps of his distant relative, 18th-century Welsh explorer John Evans, Rhys precisely retraced the long journey taken by ...

Belle and Sebastian are headed back to Japan, but are not quite as you remember them. For nearly 20 years the Glasgow indie darlings have been pigeonholed as producers of twee, lovelorn songs for corduroy-clad outcasts, but with their newly released ninth album, that ...