For most of Japan’s postwar era, the thing that could get a nightclub raided was not the volume, the hours or the drugs. It was the dancing. A 1948 Law Written for Dance Halls Fueiho, the Law Concerning Business Affecting Public Morals, was enacted in 1948 under the Allied occupation. Its actual target was prostitution […]

Ask a touring guitar band to name the best room they have ever played and a startling number of them, from every scene and every decade, land on the same answer: a former dancehall on Glasgow’s Gallowgate that was never designed for rock music at all. The Barrowland Ballroom was engineered in the 1930s for […]