Cakeknife vocalist Cake Sullivan’s life at the conservatoire was a tragic opera. Anxiety, agoraphobia, artistic sabotage, these things combined to prevent her from hitting the high notes. So she split.

Her real higher education came at the pub. Somewhere amidst the jangle rock and the dole-wave and the murmured howl of the tortured troubadour, she dove headlong into the sounds she remembered from her infancy. She became the go-to singer of the all-in folk mayhem of the Celtic hootenanny. But she knew that she needed to keep one foot in the future.

Fate, in the form of a red-bearded trumpeter of child-like demeanour, brought her in contact with Peter Joseph Head, a tortured troubadour on a tangent playing upbeat songs about the merits of naivety. Impossibly, the two clicked. To consummate the match, they embarked on a rambling tour of Japan. With the bullet train as their stallion, they criss-crossed the country by the most illogical of routes and left the nationals dumbfounded both by their artistry and their navigational ineptitude, from the green mountains of Hokkaido to the belching geysers of Shikoku.