Pop goes East

Ayumi Hamasaki is one of Japan's most popular idols

The mayhem surrounding pop group A1's tour of the Far East highlights the region's importance to the pop industry, as BBC News Online's Alex Webb explains.

When the Beatles visited Japan for the first time in 1966, they upset some of their more conservative hosts by playing the Budokan hall, previously reserved for traditional activities like Sumo wrestling.

Now that Saitama, near Tokyo has the world's only museum to the memory of John Lennon, it is clear that Japan has seen a sea-change in attitudes to pop music.

Tokyo has its own Lennon museum

Other markets, too - including Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines - are essential stop-offs for British and American groups, some of which are better-known in the Pacific rim countries than they are at home.

London duo Shampoo are one such group. After their big 1994 UK hit Trouble, they were discovered by Japanese pop fans.

Since then they been regular visitors to the upper reaches of the Japanese charts while barely troubling them back home.

Mobbed

Also popular are Australian girl group Bardot, whose fans mobbed the HMV record shop in Singapore when the girls turned up for a signing in November 2000.

It was a similar signing appearance that ended in tragedy for A1 in the Indonesian capital Jakarta on Sunday and led to them cancelling their Asian tour.

Hysterical fans have also mobbed the Backstreet Boys in Japan, which they visited as part of their Asian tour in autumn 2000.

Their album Black And Blue sold more than one million copies in Asia, going platinum in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and India within one week of release.

Boom

Cable music television channel MTV Asia has reflected, and to some extent fuelled, this pop boom.

Most of MTV Asia's top-rotating videos this week would be familiar to British pop fans - Ricky Martin, Westlife, S Club 7 and Jennifer Lopez.

Some of these acts' songs also chart in cover versions by local artists.

Westlife's Open Your Heart was crooned in a mixture of Mandarin and English by Hong Kong's Daniel Chan under the title Love You More Day By Day.

Westlife's own records have also proved hugely popular - their last album sold 600,000 copies in Indonesia alone, making it one of the five most popular records in the country's history.

Idols

In Japan, there is a genre of pop known as "idol" music: young good looking pop stars playing Western-style pop, of whom Ayumi Hamasaki is currently one of the most succesful.

Her single Never Ever is currently riding high in the Japanese singles charts.

But look in the Japanese album charts and you will find the old school still going strong - including Aerosmith (number two) and Eric Clapton (number four).

Still on the charts too are John Lennon's old band the Beatles, thirty-five years after all that fuss over Budokan.