Kenichi Asai has so much history with Fuji Rock, it would only have been surprising had his newest band, Kenichi Asai and Bad Teacher Kill Club, failed to play this year. Asai is most famous as the frontman of the hugely popular rock band Blankey Jet City, which, after a 10 year run in the 1990s, played its final show ever at Fuji Rock 2000, announcing from the stage that they were breaking up to pursue different projects. All of Asai’s projects have been back: the dream pop band Sherbets and two subsequent bands more oriented to rock, Jude and Pontiacs.

Asai has gone from 50s rock and rockabilly to J-rock mainstream and back, but he has always has been particularly drawn to Anglophone 70s rock. Bad Teacher Kill Club admits these influences, but it is also more than just music in translation. At moments, I was thinking they were Japan’s Black Keys, but then they would deliver a groovy spy-rock bass line with a disco guitar riff, or else go back to something more conventional. Asai, now 49, was still eager to please the crowd, but he has also become a professional showman. With a designer floral print shirt and a well coiffed mop hairdo, he flung guitar picks into the crowd after every song with an air of been-there-done-that bravado. The White Stage was full of fans there to see it, however, showing that whatever turn he takes musically, he will still have plenty of fans.