Kan Mikami

Kan Mikami's career is like a cautionary tale in the transience of fame. During the folk boom of the 1970s he was a star, but as the decade drew to a close, 'all the people around me gradually disappeared, like the tide going out.' Only when he fell in with the crew at seminal psychedelia label PSF in the early '90s did things begin to look up for Mikami, though his audience has remained pegged at the level you'd expect for an underground cult figure. An evening in the company of this gruff-voiced singer can be an intense experience: 'folk' seems an inadequate description for something that more closely resembles blues at its rawest and most primal.