75 f A Body Of Work


Haruomi Hosono has been a Japanese equivalent to Bob Dylan, Ry Cooder, Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel, to mention a few that he doesn’t sound the remotest bit like. Paul Fisher meets a legend.


S


uperlatives almost don’t do jus- tice when talking about Haruo- mi ‘Harry’ Hosono, and the exalted place he occupies in the history of Japanese music. If you


haven’t heard of him, please allow me to indulge myself in that most lazy trait of western journalists: comparing him to someone you would have heard of. Or in Hosono’s case, several people.


The grandson of the only Japanese passenger and survivor aboard the Titanic, Haruomi Hosono was born in Tokyo in 1947. Imagine him as a Bob Dylan type of figure towards the end of the 1960s, piv- otal in creating a folk scene based around the coffee shops of Tokyo. In 1970, he formed the band Happy End, today consid- ered among Japan’s most influential groups ever, with their blend of folk, rock, and psych. They were perhaps the first indigenous artists to successfully integrate the Japanese language into an essentially western rock music idiom, and created a string of classic songs.


On TV in 1975


Then try and picture him metamor- phosing into Ry Cooder by the mid-1970s, combining the music of New Orleans, Hawaii, Okinawa, the Caribbean and else- where into music called ‘tropical’ and ‘exotica’, over ten years before the term ‘world music’ was coined. Now envisage Hosono and two other musicians on his later albums of this period, transforming into Japan’s answer to Kraftwerk, in the shape of Yellow Magic Orchestra. YMO became Japan’s most popular band over several years, their effect in Japan some- times likened to that of the Beatles; they are still perhaps Japan’s biggest ever musi- cal export, and credited as influencing worldwide electronic genres to this day.


During the 1980s and much of the 1990s, Hosono at times mutated into Brian Eno, with a spate of ambient albums, on occasion exploring traditional music and combining it with electronic sounds. Since the millennium he’s produced music proba- bly even more relevant to these pages, mix- ing various styles and music from America


and around the world with local Japanese and Asian roots music into something with a distinct, trademark Hosono sound.


To add even more incredulity to this scenario, during much of his career he’s also been the Burt Bacharach of Japan, penning hundreds of songs for Japanese pop stars, is akin to Peter Gabriel or David Byrne in creating at least three record labels, not to mention being a prolific ses- sion musician, producer, mixer, arranger and a part of numerous other projects, broadly defined as belonging to the ‘Hosono family’.


Now, with a serendipitous conver- gence of fate, some of Hosono’s best solo works from the 1970s and ‘80s will get their first overseas release courtesy of the US label Light In The Attic. Not only that, but in June, Hosono and his band per- formed at the Barbican in London, and then a couple of days later in Brighton. I managed to sit down with him outside a pub behind the venue in Brighton before the show.


Hosono in 2018


Photo: Courtesy of the Masashi Kuwamoto Archives


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136  |  Page 137  |  Page 138  |  Page 139  |  Page 140  |  Page 141  |  Page 142  |  Page 143  |  Page 144  |  Page 145  |  Page 146  |  Page 147  |  Page 148