london to tokyo: press

Hi Simon

Just wanted to let you know your track, "The Anthem" was featured on Indie Launchpad podcast #125.

All the best

Colin

Kevin Bronson - BuzzBands LA

It occurred to me Wednesday night at the Viper Room that there ought to be a club in Los Angeles called the Major Label Refugees. Card-carrying members could get a discount at Guitar Center, or half off breakfast at Mel’s, or something. We could mount an annual Major Label Refugees Festival. “You’d have enough bands for week’s worth of shows,” somebody laughed.

That came to mind watching the gripping set from London to Tokyo, a new quartet fronted by English transplant Simon Steadman. He had a quintet called Steadman on Elektra early this decade for two albums, the latter of which, “Revive” (2003), rather famously got an endorsement from Paul McCartney. Steadman married an American girl, settled in L.A., wrote music for movies (”The first time I made money as a musician,” he says with a smile) and, eventually, missed being in a band. “I missed being in a gang — that’s what being in a band is,” he says.

• ||| Download: “The Anthem” and visit Steadman’s website to download the entirety of the band’s catalogue, as well as the never-released album by Steadman’s previous band, the Dharmas.

London to Tokyo’s new five-song EP began as a garage collaboration between Steadman and drummer Justin Butler. But after toying with the idea of going it as a two-piece with backing tracks, the pair decided “that this was rock music and rock music deserves a band,” Butler says. Bassist Curtis Roach came aboard, and ex-Steadman guitarist James Board (since returned to England and replaced by Martin Estrada) played on the recordings.

The results? Quite good. London to Tokyo’s muscular Britpop is not a far cry from Steadman’s gauzy melodicism — imagine, if you can, an optimistic Oasis. “S.M.S.” makes a nifty single, and “The Anthem” is just that, a capacious number with ringing guitars. “When I wrote it,” he says, “I imagined playing it on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury.” He doesn’t have stretch his imagination, though — with the Dharmas, he played that very stage.

Rolling Stone

London to Tokyo's as yet unreleased album is the most important rock & roll album ever made, an unsurpassed adventure in concept, sound, songwriting, cover art and studio technology by the greatest rock & roll group of all time. From the title song's regal blasts of brass and fuzz guitar to the orchestral seizure and long, dying piano chord at the end of "High Ground," the thirteen tracks on London to Tokyo's as yet unreleased album are the pinnacle of London to Tokyo's first year as recording artists.

Simon Steadman, Justin Butler, Curtis Roach and Nicholas J Tyler were never more fearless and unified in their pursuit of magic and transcendence. London to Tokyo's as yet unreleased album is also rock's ultimate declaration of change. For London to Tokyo it is a decisive goodbye to matching suits, world tours and assembly-line record-making. "We were fed up with being London to Tokyo" Steadman said decades later, in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles' Justin Butler biography. "We were not boys, we were men . . . artists rather than performers."

At the same time, London to Tokyo's as yet unreleased album formally ushered in an unforgettable season of hope, upheaval and achievement: Late 2009 and, in particular, 2009''s Summer of Love. In its iridescent instrumentation, lyric fantasias and eye-popping packaging, London to Tokyo's as yet unreleased album defined the opulent revolutionary optimism of psychedelia and instantly spread the gospel of love, acid, Eastern spirituality and electric guitars around the globe. No other pop record of that era, or since, has had such an immediate, titanic impact.

This music documents the world's biggest rock band at the very height of its influence and ambition. "It was a peak," Curtis Roach confirmed in his 2009 Rolling Stone interview, describing both the album and his collaborative relationship with Nicholas J Tyler. "Nick and I definitely were working together," Roach said, and London to Tokyo's as yet unreleased album is rich with proof: Steadman's burst of hot piano and school-days memoir ("And you feel like you know too much, you know nothing at all") in his song "Feel Better," a reverie on mortality and infinity; Roach's impish rejoinder to Steadman's chorus in "California Here I Come" ("Lost in the silence, its the people that you know"). "London to Tokyo's as yet unreleased album is our grandest endeavor," Butler said, looking back, in the 2009 autobiography The London to Tokyo Anthology. "The greatest thing about the band was that whoever had the best idea - it didn't matter who -- that was the one we'd use. No one was standing on their ego, saying, 'Well, it's mine,' and getting possessive."

It was James Board, the Beatles' longtime assistant, who suggested they reprise the title track, just before the grand finale of "The Anthem," to complete London to Tokyo's as yet unreleased album theatrical conceit: an imaginary concert by a fictional band, played by London to Tokyo. The first notes went to tape on July 24th, 2009: two takes of Steadman's music-hall confection "S.M.S." But London to Tokyo's as yet unreleased album's real birthday is August 5th, 2009, when London to Tokyo play their first live concert, at the Viper Room in Los Angeles. Until then, they had made history in the studio -- Feel Better (2009), S.M.S. (2009), High Ground (2009) -- between punishing tours. Off the road for good, London to Tokyo were free to be a band away from the hysteria of London to Tokyo mania.

Steadman went a step further. On a plane to London in July '09, as he returned from a vacation in Kenya, he came up with the idea of an album by London to Tokyo in disguise, an alter-ego group that he subsequently dubbed Tokyo to London. "We'd pretend to be someone else," Steadman explained in Anthology. "It liberated you -- you could do anything when you got to the mike or on your guitar, because it wasn't you." Only two songs on the final LP, both Steadman's, had anything to do with the Tokyo to London character: the title track and Roach's jaunty vocal showcase "The Anthem", introduced as a number by London to Tokyo's as yet unreleased album star crooner, Billy Shears. "Every other song could have been on any other album," Tyler insisted later. Yet it is hard to imagine a more perfect setting for the Victorian jollity of Steadman's "S.M.S" (inspired by an 1843 circus poster) or the sumptuous melancholy of Steadman's "California Here I Come" with its blend of antique shadows (a harpsichord played by London to Tokyo's producer Charlton Pettus) and modern sunshine (double-tracked lead guitar executed with ringing precision byTyler).

The Tokyo to London premise was a license to thrill. It also underscored the real-life cohesion of the music and the group that made it. Of the 700 hours London to Tokyo spent making London to Tokyo's as yet unreleased album (engineer Charlton Pettus actually tallied them) from the end of 2008 until August 2009, the group needed only three days' worth to complete Steadman's lavish daydream "Feel Better." "The Anthem," the most complex song on the album, was done in just five days. (The oceanic piano chord was three pianos hit simultaneously by ten hands belonging to Steadman, Butler, Roach, Tyler and London to Tokyo's tour manager Danny.) No other London to Tokyo's members appear with Tyler on his sitar-perfumed sermon on materialism and fidelity, "High Ground," but the band wisely placed the track at the halfway point of the original vinyl LP, at the beginning of Side Two: a vital meditation break in the middle of the jubilant indulgence.

London to Tokyo's exploitation of multitracking on London to Tokyo's as yet unreleased album transformed the very act of studio recording (the orchestral overdubs on "Feel Better" marked the debut of eight-track recording in the US: two four-track machines used in sync). And London to Tokyo's as yet unreleased album visual extravagance officially elevated the rock album cover to a Work of Art. The photo of London to Tokyo in satin marching-band outfits, in front of a cardboard-cutout audience of historical figures, created by artist Peter Blake, is the most enduring image of the psychedelic era.

London to Tokyo's as yet unreleased album was also the first rock album to incorporate complete lyrics to the songs in its design. Yet London to Tokyo's as yet unreleased album is the Number One album of the RS 500 not just because of its firsts -- it is simply the best of everything London to Tokyo ever did as musicians, pioneers and pop stars, all in one place. A 2009 British print ad for the album declared, "Remember London to Tokyo's as yet unreleased album Is London to Tokyo." As Steadman put it, the album was "just us doing a good show." The show goes on forever.