DF Concerts has launched a new event at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which will tie in with the T in the Park branding. T on the Fringe, sponsored by Tennent’s Lager, is set to take place at the Corn Exchange and Liquid Rooms venues throughout August. Artists appearing include Pulp, which will play its only Scottish date this year; David Gray; Toploader; Doves; Ian Brown; Idlewild; Semisonic; and Grandaddy.

Promoter Stuart Clumpas said: “Both venues are excellent and in particular, the opening of the Corn Exchange has been a major factor, giving us a core live venue on which to hang the festival. … It has given us an opportunity to be adventurous and present an eclectic range of shows. We’re also delighted to have Tennent’ s on board who we’ve worked with at T in the Park. Like us, they are hopeful that this event will go on to be as much a part of the Scottish music landscape as is T in the Park.”

Switzerland

With three weeks to go till the Gurten Festival and 10,000 tickets per day sold, promoter Philippe Cornu is looking forward to another successful year. After scaling down the festival in 1999, the event made a profit and organiser Appalooza reinvested in the site with improved facilities and walkways.

The emphasis is as much on the comfort and joy of the festival experience as about the entertainment on offer. In fact, this year, Appalooza introduced the idea of a “comfort crew,” whose role will be to keep the walkways clear and allow plenty of space for punters to circulate around the site. A chill-out zone is also a new addition, where DJ Jose Badia from Café del Mar in Ibiza will play some relaxing tunes.

Appalooza’s Philippe Cornu told POLLSTAR: “The dance generation has discovered the festival experience and now our audience ranges from 16 to 26. We have more international acts this year, but we are sticking to the 15,000-a-day capacity.”

The main headliners include Iggy Pop, All Saints, Maceo Parker, Moby, Guano Apes, Moloko, Asian Dub Foundation, Reprazent, and Laurent Garnier.

Germany

Die Toten Hosen, one of the most experienced German live acts, had to cancel all scheduled live shows until autumn after the lead singer suffered a serious injury. Singer Campino jumped during the band’s set at Rock Am Ring, landing badly. Campino is known for his daredevil performances, and he ignored the pain and completed the Rock am Ring show unaware that he had torn a crucial ligament in his right leg.

The band played the Pink Pop Festival the day after its appearance at Rock Am Ring. However, doctors later confirmed a bad diagnosis for the singer and prescribed some strict convalescing for a couple of months.

It is a real pity for the band as it was booked by agency KKT to play the Midtfyns Festival, Gurten, Sziget, Rock Am See and the Bizarre Festival. The second part of its ongoing Unsterblich (meaning “immortal”) Tour was postponed.

Another infamous German rock act, Die Aerzte, has confirmed a club show at Popkomm 2000. The band used to be arch punk rivals of the Toten Hosen, but now they share the same agent – Kiki Ressler of KKT. Die Aerzte will play August 19 in the Alter Wartesaal in Cologne as part of the Popkomm convention. The capacity is limited to 800 persons and the demand for tickets will almost exceed the number available. The band is planning a two-and-half-hour set and this show is sure to be a big draw at Popkomm.

Japan

The most eagerly awaited pop tour of the year kicked off last weekend at the Yoyogi Gymnasium in Tokyo (site of the swimming events of the 1964 Olympics) when Hikaru Utada took the stage for the first show of her Bohemian Summer tour. The 17-year-old singer has become one of the biggest pop artists in Japanese history since emerging in December 1998.

Her debut album, First Love, completely sold out its first pressing even before its official release date March 10, 1999, eventually racking up sales that made her the highest paid domestic entertainer last year.

Though she has appeared sporadically on TV and at individual concerts (most notably as the opening act for Monica and TLC at a pair of Budokan shows last year), Bohemian Summer is her first-ever extended tour. It will cover nine cities and 18 shows, and all 130,000 tickets sold out within hours of going on sale. Last week, three August concerts were added at the Chiba Marine Stadium, home of the Lotte Marines baseball team, which is located 30 minutes east of Tokyo by train.

Utada sings in Japanese but is completely fluent in English, having grown up in New York City. She listened mainly to rock as a child, and after moving to Japan with her parents when she was around 10, she slowly drifted to R&B and began writing songs in English.

In her teens, she released several singles under the name Cubic U in the U.S. and Europe. An offshoot of the Japanese label Toshiba-EMI released an album of this material in January of 1998, but it wasn’t until Utada switched to Japanese and released her debut single, “Automatic,” in December 1999 that her star caught fire. Within days of its release, “Automatic” was breaking radio air play records all over Japan.

At the moment, Japan is flush with young female soul singers, many of whom sport braids and dreads, and darken their skin to provide the urban contemporary verisimilitude that their voices can’t. Most of these singers are indistinguishable from one another as they try to adapt current American R&B/hip-hop styles to Japanese vernacular. Utada, who is a product of, and an influence on this trend, looks more like a normal middle-class Japanese teen-ager, but she has a remarkable facility for soul singing in the Mariah Carey mold (albeit more restrained).

Remarkably, she has managed to adapt this style to the Japanese language, which, because of its crisply defined syllables, doesn’t provide the kind of flow that R&B demands. Utada, who was accepted at Columbia University last April, intends to revive her stalled English language singing career for the overseas market under the name Cubic U sometime in the near future.

Two weeks ago, Utada received some unwanted but by no means harmful publicity when the media learned her parents were seeking a divorce (for the third time; they’ve remarried each other twice). Her mother, Keiko Fuji, was a popular folk singer in the 70s, and her father, who is also a musician, manages his daughter’s career.