“Think of the summers of the past, adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast…”

Many years ago, Alpine ran their “Discover the Future Of Mobile Multimedia”  World press conference. They had folks come from the USA, Australia and Europe, for each outpost of the Alpine empire sent staff and selected car audio journalists to Japan. It was the trip of a lifetime. It was fully four different public relations staffers’ careers ago (We don’t count the sad hiccup of the only HR mess up they ever made. Certain other companies have made serial mess ups, in my opinion! And Alpine’s current one is the best they ever had.)

I think it may have been the peak press experience, that and Kenwood’s trips to the Land Of  The Rising Sun. I even learned some Japanese, suitable for fat blokes..about food and it being yummy, mostly. Fat men are given respect.  We were spoiled rotten, stayed in a big posh hotel and saw Alpine’s training facility, where they were given lessons in critical listening. We saw robots that ejected CDs until the deck broke. If the robot broke, they fixed it. WHEN the CD broke, they looked to see what they could improve.

They had a room with a chamber with a car radio in it. At nearly boiling point. Sealed in, it then had the air removed and freezing cold air was sent in to replace it, to give the unit a massive thermal shock. The set up required the room beyond to be filled with stuff and it cost a telephone number in Yen!

Another room had a car in it, with a radio in the dash and a huge rig of daylight lamps that could be angled all around the car, to test the displays’ performance in bright light conditions. It was awesome. As was the inclinator down to the Pacific Ocean beach.

I awoke early through jet lag and walked down the slope as the inclinator, there for the golf resort hotel’s guests to get down to the beach, was not running. The sand profile was Pacific Storm Beach. So foreign to Europeans. Fish were skittering in the edge surf. Tiny Sand Launce, (Ammodytes hexapterus) a couple were freshly stranded by a wave and were just become stiff, proof of their recent mistake. I was on the point of biting into the thing sushi-whitebait style, having eaten a freshly-killed-still-twitching-fish to impress my hosts already. It was at a VERY expensive restaurant. I had proven open in my choices, trying jelly fish and urchin eggs so I was being tested. It really upset the vegan and it tasted well, ‘tingly’. They must have sliced it and served it, in seconds flat from the restaurant’s tank, so they were pleased I ate it. I reckon I was kinda bush tucker trialling years before the show. As also a delicacy at the temple with the bio-luminescent fungus in the path walls, was candied grasshoppers – as a take away gift. They tase nutty. I didn’t eat the Sand Launce.

Anyway, like Ronnie Corbett, as ever, I digress.. The point is, Summer and I am in Japan and jet lagged… and fat.

Corporate entertainment in Japan is carefully regulated. We were to be entertained and meet the president of Alpine, Mr. Seizo Ishiguro. It was to be for two specific hours on a floor in a big tower block. It turned out that there were other groups of people from around the world that Alpine were entertaining at that time. One of which was a major group of motorcar dealers from Germany. Anyway, I was really engaging with the Japanese cultural thing and had ventured from my room in a Yukata. I was wandering to find the genuine volcanic spa bath that the entire resort was based upon. The archipelago of Japan is volcanic after all, thus geothermal activity is strong all over the place, like in Tenerife and Iceland. Harnessed for hundreds of years, they start as a baths but most are big fabulous resorts. As I wander through the hotel, a Japanese lass appears and guides me into a room and sits me down and leaves.  It turns out that she had thought I was a fat German businessman and was there for the German motor car dealers’ dinner in that room that evening. After working that out I did find the spa bath and steam myself like a dim sum dumpling. Rather warm, I then sought the freezing plunge pool. Now you do not wear swimming trunks in Japanese spa bath. I get to the pool to discover Graham Johnson, the then top man at Alpine, already in the freezing plunge pool. For about a decade both Graham and I dined out upon the fact that we had shared a bath naked in Japan.

So there I am in this party in the tower block awaiting my moment to meet the boss man. I’m jet lagged, I have had one glass of wine And am wobbling a little bit. In order not to overbalance backwards, I take a tiny half-step with one foot. Right on to Mr. Ishiguro’s big toe. Turning around I am beyond mortified to see what I have done. It was the single most embarrassing moment of my entire career, before or since. The man’s face was a mask of profound pain. To his immense and very Nipponese credit, Mr .Ishiguro seemed to shed the pain and introduced himself. I desperately needed something intelligent to say. Anything to say after my profound apology, as that was so painfully embarrassing for us both. All I could think of, was to ask if he had heard that the Alpine brand had been in Will Smith’s songs? Luckily as I had hoped, this was too trivial a matter for anybody to have drawn to his attention. With the interest in that fact expressed, I promised to send him a copy of Homebase on CD and was able to fade away and not tread on him again. He seemed relieved. And I did follow through by sending a copy of the disc to Japan. I got a letter back on paper so fine it was gorgeous and I keep it to this day. Paper quality truly matters to the Japanese.

I love Summer time so much. In the old days it was the time of year when car radios and subwoofers would sell like crazy. They called it ‘windows down’ sales. I once wrote an article reviewing beautiful loudspeakers. The title was, “Winders Dahn!” because it was all about people being able to hear your stereo. The Morel loudspeaker company in Israel really loved it and used a quote from it in their publicity. But hilariously, translating from English to Hebrew they took the title as my name and credited me as ‘Winders Dahn’ in the quote attribution.

Enjoy the weather, I am, loving the snippets you hear as you drive along. Tragically, there are almost nil systems any more that you can hear coming. The feds have won on noise pollution and the car makers have won the mainstream. So if you are a reader and a hobby car audio fan, I love you more and more passionately now than ever, as you are clearly as bonkers as me.

Here is that line…

Take care and avoid the evening gloaming’s old BOOMPH..tinkle...

Adam Rayner.