Cribabi (pronounced 'cry baby') is the new band with Andy Cox, ex The English Beat and Fine Young Cannibals, and Japanese underground star Yukari Fujiu. Yukari was the lead singer in an all-girl Tokyo band The Groopies before releasing two solo albums on Pony Canyon. She also wrote million-seller hits for several Japanese artists. In 2000, she came to London and worked with Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, but during a weekend in Andy's lo-fi Studio Zero, a sound gelled and Cribabi was born. In many ways Cribabi is a garage band. The vocals on their album Volume, re-mastered and enhanced for UK release April 29, 2002 on the Fidela label, were recorded in a bathroom or in Yukari's kitchen in Tokyo. It is the best of east and west, with moody tracks like "Disappear", "Gloria", "I Can't Go for That" alongside the harder edged pop of "Somebody to Love" and the ballads, "You're So Sweet" and the Burt Bacharach-inspired "Beautiful Mistake" (which has been re-mixed into a garage track by the DJ, Bad Cop). Also there's a cover of "Yesterday Once More", originally by The Carpenters, a song that is classic Japanese karaoke. When the two musicians lived thousands of miles apart, they serenaded each other with compressed WAV files over the internet. But Yukari loved England and English music too much to stay away. One of the first things she did with Andy in London was visit Waterloo Bridge because of the song "Waterloo Sunset". She has also made an intensive study of Cockney rhyming slang and English beer. After one lengthy study session/pub crawl, she asked if the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen" was the national anthem. It's good to dream.

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