The walls are painted Apple green. Photographs of George Harrison wearing a fedora and Ringo Starr doing a sound-check adorn the walls, along with the more familiar images of the Beatles in their Sgt Pepper uniforms and a cover shot of the group from Time magazine. On the small but well-equipped stage John Lennon cracks a joke before launching into a spirited version of Come Together. “Here come old flat-top,” he growls in his Liverpudlian twang. “He come grooving up slowly.”

The man at the table in front of us – in his grey city suit and tie – starts to get really excited. He begins to double-clap to the beat and looks round the rest of his table for approval. Nearer the stage two women stand up and start to gyrate to the music. This excites the man in the suit even more and he laughs and points at them while trying to maintain his clapping technique.

We’re in Abbey Road – but an Abbey Road that’s 6,000 miles from its London counterpart. This Abbey Road is in Roppongi in downtown Tokyo, where the resident band, the Parrots, have been entertaining punters with their note-perfect renditions of Beatles songs since 1995. During that time they’ve impressed many Western visitors, including a group of young lads from the UK called Arctic Monkeys. Now, as a return favour for being entertained in Tokyo, the Monkeys have invited the Parrots to support them at their headline gigs in Manchester during the summer. Instead of an average club audience of a hundred or so, the group will be appearing in front of tens of thousands of young fans for whom the Beatles aren’t even a distant memory. But it’s a prospect that doesn’t appear to faze John, Paul, George or Ringo.

John Lennon is actually Mamoru Yoshii, a Lennon soundalike who even manages to look like the star would have done, had he put on a few more pounds and grown to resemble Yoko Ono. He joins us at our table. Despite being able to sing every Lennon vocal of the Beatles years word-perfect, his English conversation is limited and he needs an interpreter to speak to us.

Yes, he’s happy. Yes, he loves the Beatles – and no, he doesn’t know much about other British bands apart from Arctic Monkeys and Oasis. He’s also got a vocabulary of 200 Beatles songs, ready to catch out any punter who asks for, say, Savoy Truffle from the White Album, or I Me Minefrom Let It Be. He’s not worried about appearing with Arctic Monkeys, having already played in the UK six times. But then, tribute bands are a tradition in Japan.

The roots probably lie with the rock explosion that followed the Fab Four’s visit to Japan in 1966. Known now as the Group Sounds era and lovingly excavated in three CDs from the UK’s Big Beat records, it had homegrown bands such as the Rangers, the Cougars and the top dogs of the time, the Spiders, reinterpreting beat music for the Japanese. Some songs, such as Long Tall Sally by the Out Cast, were interesting for the wrong reasons, while the Spiders’ Sad Sunset was good enough to gain a UK release.

Fast-forward a few decades, and Japan is still in the grip of Western rock, although now it’s replication rather than reinterpretation. There are said to be hundreds of tribute bands in the country, without counting the 500 or so Elvis impersonators.

Tokyo boasts seven other Beatles tribute bands apart from the Parrots, and last year’s promotional video for the Oasis track Acquiesce featured a lookalike Japanese tribute band playing the number at the Electric Ballroom in Camden. Then there’s Slanted and Enchanted, who cover the work of the American Nineties indie band Pavement, Kiss, who do the same for Prince, and Their Satanic Majesties Request who do their worst with the Rolling Stones’ psychedelic period. You can probably see there’s a trend emerging here. Footloose cover Kenny Loggins, and Take a Chance on Me do . . . You get the idea.

The Freddie Mercury lookalike Freddie Hatae fronts Gueen while Dynasty claim to be “the most popular and realistic-looking Kiss copy band in Japan”. “We’re Dressed to Kill-era addicts,” they say on a tribute bands website.

Back at Abbey Road, Yoshii and the rest of the gang – Takeshi Noguchi (Paul), Akihiro Matsuyan (George) and Fumiya Matsuyama (Ringo) are into Get Back, followed by Revolution. Our double-clapping fan has disappeared, but already there’s another eager crowd. Yoshii says their most requested number is All My Loving. Arctic Monkey fans should get ready to sing along.

— The Parrots join Arctic Monkeys on July 28 and 29 at Lancaster Cricket Ground. www.arcticmonkeys.com

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