Preview: Japan Blues & Soul Carnival 2010

Add a taste of rock and reggae to your blues

Since starting in 1986 as Japan Blues Carnival, this annual event has brought the likes of Buddy Guy, B.B.King, Bo Diddley and Peter Green to these shores to play on the same bill as Japanese performers.

Renamed Japan Blues/ Soul Carnival in 2006, the event now casts its net slightly wider. This year's lineup also includes guitarist Bernard Allison, son of renowned blues guitarist Luther Allison. Allison junior's rockier version of the blues contrasts with the reggae-inflected blues of Corey Harris, also making his debut at the event. Completing the roster are local acts blues.the-butcher-590213 (sic), Sheena and Rokkets, and Roller Coaster and Friends.

Colin Liddell
Japan Times
21st May, 2010

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!