Feeling somewhat humbled by the lack of novelty in my last Thrifty Music installment, I was very pleased to have made a major score on my last 80-cent LP purchase: the album Crache Ton Venin, by French punk/hard rockers Telephone. I’d certainly never heard these guys before, and I was pleasantly surprised by the sheer rockin’ excellence of this disc.

But then my guilt got to me. See, I’ve been meaning to introduce you folks to another non-Anglophone rocker for months now, and I keep putting it off. But no longer! In the interest of clearing the decks for a Telephone post yet to come, today is the day I finally share my enthusiasm for Japanese procker Tamio Okuda.

I was introduced to Okuda second-hand, by reputation, back when I was going through a bit of a Jellyfish phase a number of years ago. While searching for the whereabouts of main Jellyfisher Andy Sturmer, I kept reading that he had teamed up with some Japanese pop star, writing music for the guy. I found this curious; most J-pop I knew was awful, treacly stuff — though it had been many, many years since I really followed it much.

This was back in the early days of the InterWeb, and these tantalizing name-drops were all I had — until I took a trip to Japan to visit my brother in 2001. Armed only with a name, I took my pidgin Japanese to the local wrecka stow and asked the clerk if he had any Tamio on the shelves. He looked at me in the same way an American clerk might stare down a Japanese tourist who asked if please there might be any Rolling Stones for purchase in your fine music disc shop please — i.e., like I was mildly retarded. He then guided me back to the T.O. section and let me go hog wild. I bought everything I could get my hands on, knowing there was no way to get this stuff back home.

When I got back to the hotel, I popped open my discman and plopped Tamio’s album 30 in it, cueing up the one song I knew Sturmer had co-written: “Coffee”. It satisfied all my deepest, darkest prock urges, delivering a song that sounded like Badfinger, Wings, XTC, and all the best Jeff Lynne hook-craft one could wish for. There was a part of me that felt somewhat ashamed by the music’s total lack of novelty, but the excellence of songcraft was undeniable, and, well, you get the idea.

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