December 1980. America’s premier black music show, Soul Train, is being filmed in Hollywood. The crowd is dancing to the soul hits of the day — Stevie Wonder’s Master Blaster, Kool and the Gang’s Celebration, Donna Summer’s The Wanderer — and singing along with the ballad Ooh Baby by Tower of Power crooner Lenny Williams.
Then veteran host Don Cornelius introduces three rather nerdy Japanese men called YMO — or Yellow Magic Orchestra. “It was the turn of the crazy Japanese guys,” laughs Haruomi “Harry” Hosono, YMO’s bassist. “We performed our song Computer Games, and everyone went mad.”
“They were breakdancing and bodypopping,” says the band’s drummer and lead singer, Yukihiro Takahashi. “We’d never seen anything like it.”
“It was quite intimidating,” says keyboardist Ryuichi Sakamoto. “Everyone else on the show was black. The audience was black. The crew and the presenters were black. There were no white or Asian faces there. Suddenly, it was the oriental guys who were being asked to make the dance music, which defied every stereotype!”
Between 1978 and 1984, they went on to confound stereotypes. Hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa, who sampled their music, was only half-joking when he said that Yellow Magic Orchestra invented hip-hop. Their singles Firecracker and Tighten Up were both big R ’n’ B hits in the US, while Computer Games became a top 20 UK hit, earning them the adoration of synth pop acts such as Ultravox, John Foxx, Gary Numan and Duran Duran. Over the next three decades, their influence cropped up in odd areas: producer Todd Rundgren had a YMO album on the wall of his studio for inspiration; Eric Clapton’s unlikely cover version of YMO’s Behind the Mask was a huge international hit; while the arcade-game bleeps and Asian scales in their music went on to influence 21st-century electronica acts such as Dizzee Rascal and Kieran Hebden, who weren’t even born when YMO was formed. Meanwhile, in Japan, they were bigger than the Beatles.
“We were very big,” sighs Sakamoto, “that’s why I hated it. We were always followed by paparazzi.”
“Yes, and teenage girls,” says Hosono. “They would literally chase us down the street and rip our clothes to shreds.”
“I quite enjoyed that,” says Takahashi.
In Europe, however, the audience response was often rather more cerebral.
“In Italy, the audience would start arguing during our concert,” says Hosono. “You had these very serious-looking men with beards and long hair, having a symposium about our music while we were playing.”
“They looked like Greek or Roman philosophers,” says Sakamoto. “It was so funny.”
It’s a few days before their historic reunion show at London’s Royal Festival Hall — their first UK date since 1980 — where they have been asked to play by Meltdown curators Massive Attack. The three YMO members — grey-haired and astonishingly dapper — are sitting in the bar of their London hotel, and all of them seem to conform to stereotype: Hosono (61) is the amusingly grumpy, de facto band leader; Takahashi (56) is the rakish design student, wearing an immaculately tailored mod suit and a pork-pie hat; while Sakamoto (56) is the handsome, floppy-fringed intellectual, wearing sharp, modernist, designer threads.
They have long been heralded as godfathers of techno, part of a pioneering wave of musicians who brought synthesizer technology into the charts. However these weren’t untutored, one-fingered soloists, but experienced musicians. In the early 1970s, Hosono led an exotica band called Happy End, which explored country and western and Hawaiian music; Takahashi played in a glam rock outfit called the Sadistic Mika Band, who’d toured the UK with Roxy Music (and even appeared on TV), while Sakamoto was a classically trained session musician.
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