I've just mentioned to Elvis Costello the publicity stunt he pulled on his first trip to Japan in 1978.
"Ah, our attempt to get ourselves in the papers," Costello recalls over the phone from his Vancouver home. It had seemed like such a fiendishly provocative idea: dress like Japanese schoolboys in Nehru jackets and brass buttons ("we thought we looked like the Beatles at Shea Stadium"), hire a truck, drive it through Tokyo's ritzy Ginza district playing as loud as amplification would allow, and throw your records at the growing crowds. What could go wrong?
"Nobody took any notice," he laughs. "It just goes to show what would make the papers in England wouldn't make a ripple in Japan. Too unprecedented I guess! We thought we'd be hauled away and it would be a fantastic scandal and that's how we'd make our name. But it didn't work out that way."