An Interview with Puffy

Nicholas D. Kent sends me news that he’s just posted online an interview he did with the group Puffy back in 2002. Done to provide quotes for a magazine article, it wasn’t originally planned as a published interview.

While on the subject of Puffy, I know that they’ve recently developed a following in America with their new animated series on the Cartoon Channel, which is a strange thing to be happening since they’ve pretty much disappeared from the scene here, except for the odd TV variety appearances — Yumi is a regular on a popular Sunday night show — and commercials. I think the same thing happened with T.M. Revolution (who, incidentally, was married with Yumi for a few years) with the release of some of his records in the US on Tofu Records (a subsidiary of Sony). It’s probably all related to the growing otaku culture seen in the US. As for Japan, Halcali has sort of turned into the new Puffy, especially on their recently released album, ONGAKU NO SUSUME. I was really digging their cute hip-hop stylings of their first album, BACON, but now they’re sounding almost exactly like Puffy — which is fine, I guess, but not something I’m looking for.