I have no doubt that if I’d been born ten years earlier my favourite genre would have been freakbeat. So I would have loved The Golden Cups.

Punk before punk, freakbeat is R&B taken to a rundown garage and filled with fuzzed up guitars, driving beats and  psychedelic swirls.

You can dig into it on anthology albums like Nuggets, Pebbles and Rubble that were compiled a decade and more later by crate diggers like Lenny Kaye of the Patti Smith Group.

Almost none of it made the charts but there was a band of kids with big dreams thrashing away in every American and English small town in the mid-Sixties. And also, apparently, in Japan.

The Golden Cups came from Yokohama and most of their tunes were cover versions, often sung in Japanese, but This Bad Girl – named after the bar where they began playing – is all their own work.

Released in 1968, it’s also sung in English by Kenneth Ito, who was of mixed American-Japanese parentage.

Released in 1968, with a great video to match, it was sung in English with Kenneth Ito – of mixed American-Japanese parentage – and that’s Masayoshi Kabe, later of the legendary Foodbrain, on the killer bass.

They released their debut – simply titled Album – the same year, featuring freak-out cover versions of Got My Mojo Working, Hey Joe and Cream’s I’m So Glad. It was followed by Album 2 and three more in 1969, Album 3 – Blues Message, Recital and Super Live Session.

Starting out playing bluesy garage rock with a loose jazzy influence, they became gradually more proggy and psychedelic as they, ahem, progressed.

Bass player Kabe and guitarist Shinki Chen went on to join Foodbrain, famed for their cult 1970 album Social Gathering, and another Japanese band called Speed, Glue & Shinki.