JAPANESE GENTLEMEN, STAND UP PLEASE [391]

The Japanese supergroup Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), formed by Haruomi Hosono, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi, remains the biggest musical discovery I have made while writing here, quickly becoming a favourite band of mine once I discovered how of one of their songs, “Behind the Mask”, became a hit for Eric Clapton, by way of Michael Jackson [link].

 

With the passing of Takahashi on 11th January, and of Sakamoto on 28th March, I am continuing to learn that YMO is only the collective pinnacle for three accomplished musicians with long and varied careers, with each of their discographies their own rabbit hole waiting for me to dive in, and supporting the conclusion I have already made about YMO: they are as important to the history of electronic pop music as Kraftwerk, and that history cannot be properly understood without them.

 

YMO was Hosono’s initial idea of an instrumental disco band that could reach beyond Japan. Both Takahashi and Sakamoto worked with Hosono previously, and Takahashi already had some success in the UK as drummer for the Sadistic Mika Band, which had supported Roxy Music on tour, and had the ignominy of performing on TV under a banner reading “The Old Gley Whistle Test”. The self-titled album that released in 1978 was intended to be a one-off project, aiming to explore ideas of Asian-ness and Orientalism through both original compositions and interpretations of American easy-listening tunes, but a reworking of Martin Denny’s exotica tune “Firecracker” reached number 17 in the UK singles chart and number 60 on the Billboard Hot 100, later being sampled from Afrika Bambaataa and De La Soul to Mariah Carey and Jennifer Lopez. Suddenly, YMO became a proper band.

 

The follow-up album, 1979’s “Solid State Survivor”, contains “Behind the Mask” along with “Technopolis”, often credited with initiating the techno genre, and “Rydeen”, pushing their equipment to emulate animal sounds, but Western audiences initially found highlights from this album mixed into 1980’s “X∞Multiplies”, appearing alongside ska instrumentals and new wave songs in the space originally taken by comedy sketches. This culminated not only in a comedy cover of Archie Bell and the Drells’ “Tighten Up”, but in YMO’s performance of it on the US TV institution “Soul Train”. This all changes again with 1981’s “BGM”, short for “background music”, with a rockier edge, but also a more crystallised sound, with final track “Loom” featuring a simulation of dripping water as if in a cave, and a single glissando that lasts for a full two minutes.

 

YMO was a band that encompassed everything, not unlike the “city pop” genre that built in Japan from the ate 1970s, characterised as urban music for urbanites that took influences from funk, soul, jazz, Latin and middle-of-the-road pop. The recording of their performances also encompassed a great shift from analogue to digital recording; from buzzing subtractive synthesisers to glassy FM synths; the introduction of new equipment from the likes of Roland and Yamaha, YMO being the first band to use Roland’s famous TR-808 drum machine both recorded and live; and from performing live in smaller venues to huge stadiums – “After Service”, their last live album before breaking up in 1983, sounds like it was recorded in front of an audience of teenage girls, but their popularity in Japan was akin to The Beatles at the time. The band reformed for a further album in 1992, and for many further live performances, each sounding different from the last both through musical ability and changing technology.

 

If listening to YMO for the first time, start with “Firecracker” or “Behind the Mask”, and don’t stop. 

I'M RUNNING THROUGH THE WILD LANDS [272]

 

As I have previously talked about here, here, and here, I cannot leave the house without my Sony Walkman, and I still buy Compact Discs. I may still listen to music online, but if I find myself coming back to the same songs, either by MP3 or on YouTube, it is time to buy them on CD so I can hear them with better sound quality, preserving that in FLAC format on my Walkman without losing a single note – well, it makes sense to me anyway.

I have a number of CDs I need to transfer, and once that’s done, I can spend the rest of the day listening to them:



Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO): “Yellow Magic Orchestra” / “Solid State Survivor” / “X∞Multiplies” / “BGM” / “Technodelic” / “Naughty Boys”

After uncovering the story behind the song “Behind the Mask” [link], I continued listening to Yellow Magic Orchestra, and I have come to the conclusion that YMO may possibly be one of the greatest bands ever, and that the history of electronic pop music in the Western world cannot be properly understood without them. Their original self-titled album may have been intended as a one-off critique of Western interpretations of Eastern culture, but what they did to Martin Denny’s exotica piece “Firecracker” appears to have kick-started the use of sampling in hip-hop, while their second album, 1979’s “Solid State Survivor,” is a progenitor of both techno and the cyberpunk genre. When the iconic Roland TR-808 drum machine was released in 1980, YMO used it first. Since coming across the band, I have been overcome by the sheer infectiousness of their use of electronic sounds, their driving bass, the tight rhythm, and relentless pace, and their humour: one song starts with what sounds like a rubber duck being squeezed, before the rhythm and a pub piano comes in, and it just happens to be called “Absolute Ego Dance” as well. Of course, I have bought their first six studio albums, because it was inevitable.



Adam Lambert: “Velvet”

I was a fan of Adam Lambert before I heard him sing, but I prefer him singing his own songs than those of Queen. That said, UK radio never plays his songs, as far as I know, so I have only ever heard him on CD, and his latest album made this more difficult. “Velvet,” harking back to funk, rock and glam, was first released as an EP in September 2019, subtitled “Side A,” so I thought I would wait until “Side B,” or a whole album, came along. Six months later, it arrived, but so did Covid-19, and I forgot about it until August 2020. In short, the funkier sound on “Velvet,” and the more forthright lyrics, is what Lambert has needed: his voice now has the more mature, fully realised sound, and songs that no longer have to allude to anything.



The Edge of the 80s

This is another of those cheap £5 CD compilations that you find in a supermarket (which I previously talked about here) that turns out to have very good mastering, while also being another chance for me to mop up any new-wave and pop tunes I might be missing from my Walkman, like “I Know What Boys Like” by The Waitresses, “Mexican Radio” by Wall of Voodoo, and “Icing on the Cake” by Stephen “Tin Tin” Duffy – I’m not likely to have come across these songs unless I already knew of them, so the ability to surprise ifs worth the cost of admission.



You Are Awful... (Showbiz Comedy Titbits of the 60s and 70s)

The only second-hand CD I have bought recently, I sought it initially for two songs seemingly only found here: “Freezin’ Cold in 89 Twoso” by Mike Reid (discussed when I talked about the “CheapShow” podcast [link]), and “Boiled Beef and Carrots” by Lenny Henry. Comedy songs are miscategorised as novelty songs these days, a fault that can be laid at the feet of Hilda Baker & Arthur Mullard’s version of “You’re the One That I Want,” but then there are songs that defy categorisation altogether, like “Dance with Me,” by the ITN newsreader Reginald Bosanquet.



All Time Greats: Quincy Jones / Bill Haley & His Comets

Universal Music have released a number of albums compiling 1950s and 60s artists like Ella Fitzgerald, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Tommy Steele and Billy Fury, under the “His Master’s Voice” label. If I come across any of these, I will look for them, especially if they were as cheap as I found these collections - £5 for Quincy Jones, and only £3 for Bill Haley, perhaps a symptom of fewer people buying CDs, the comparative ease of releasing pressed pieces of plastic, and a need to keep making money from your back catalogue through a continuous process of remastering and rereleasing. The Bill Haley collection was worth buying for historical interest – they helped popularise rock and roll, but they were surpassed by Elvis Presley, Little Richard and many more – while Quincy Jones’s work as an arranger and producer is wide-ranging and does not disappoint, so the chance to hear more of his big-band recordings could not be missed. Jones was also the producer that alerted Michael Jackson to YMO’s “Behind the Mask,” which is where we came in.

WHO DO YOU LOVE? IS IT ME BABE? IS IT HIM NOW? [259]

With my tastes in music saturated with synthesisers, Eric Clapton rarely makes my playlist, but I always make an exception for “Behind the Mask,” released in 1987. It is a rare Clapton song where the main drive is the synth chords and powerful drums, his own guitar playing used for extra flourish here, but the production is tight, and the call-and-response chorus, with the backing singers seemingly the ones in charge, is immensely effective.

I had never questioned where “Behind the Mask” came from, letting it stand by itself, but having stumbled across its origin, I am not only far more informed, I have a new favourite version of it too.

Two weeks ago, the YouTube algorithm suggested I listen to “Rydeen,” by the Japanese electronic group Yellow Magic Orchestra, itself sounding like a splinter group of the Electric Light Orchestra. I was already listening to music from a different Japanese group, the jazz fusion band Casiopea –in particular the tracks “Space Road,” “Midnight Rendezvous” and “Swallow,” all from their 1979 debut album, practically inspiring computer game music for the following decade – but “Rydeen” came up after its use in a different video I had watched. Yellow Magic Orchestra were influenced by Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder, but their use of synthesisers, sequencers and drum machines as a mainstream pop group at this still-early stage predated the development of synth pop and techno music in the 1980s.

Their eponymous first album, from 1978, sold well in the United States, but their second, 1979’s “Solid State Survivor,” on which “Rydeen” is found, sold two million copies worldwide. In Japan, “YMO” were as popular as when Beatlemania hit the US in the 1960s, even though they initially started as a joke band satirising Western ideas of “exotic,” “Oriental” Japanese music – a sarcastic cover of Martin Denny’s “Firecracker” ironically became a major hit in its own right, reaching number 60 in the US Billboard singles chart, and number 17 in the UK chart, before sampled by everyone from Afrika Bambaataa and 808 State to De La Soul and Jennifer Lopez (for the song “I’m Real”).

Naturally, I ordered a copy of “Solid State Survivor,” and have been obsessed with “Technopolis” and “Absolute Ego Dance,” but noticed it also had a track titled “Behind the Mask.” It could be a different song – Fleetwood Mac released a song and album named “Behind the Mask” in 1990 – but when I heard it begin, it sounded like a simpler, electronic version, with only one side of the chorus sung, using a vocoder. Like the version of The Beatles’ “Day Tripper” on the album, until I realised the dates didn’t match up.

The basic structure and melody of “Behind the Mask” was written in 1978 by YMO member Ryuichi Sakamoto for a TV commercial, advertising Seiko watches. (I was unable to find the original ad for myself, as searching “1978 Japan Seiko watch commercial” only brings up a separate ad starring Kate Bush, the watches intercut with her dancing and singing of “Them Heavy People”.) This was developed into a full song after YMO was formed, with the British lyricist Chris Mosdell adding verses inspired by Japanese Noh masks, and by the W.B. Yeats poem “The Mask”. Mosdell has talked about the lyrics representing a society that is very impersonal and controlled, with the immobile mask presenting a cold, unemotional state, but Japanese Noh theatre itself relies on codified gesture and expression, the traditional masks presenting different moods depending on how they are tilted.

(I must mention at this point that the Ryuichi Sakamoto I mentioned above is the same one that, as an actor, appeared alongside David Bowie and Tom Conti in the film “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” in addition to writing its score – he also wrote the music for “The Revenant” and “The Last Emperor,” for which he won an Academy Award.)

The YMO version of “Behind the Mask” was released as a single in the UK in 1980, and was included on the US and European version of “×∞Multiplies,” released there as the second YMO album instead of “Solid State Survivor.” Record producer Quincy Jones heard it, and shared it with the singer whose next album he was producing. In an alternate world, “Behind the Mask” would have been a song on Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” the biggest-selling album of all time, and one of the most culturally-significant albums ever made, but a failure to agree over royalties, prompted by the extra lyrics and melody written by Jackson meant it was not included.

The Jackson lyrics turn what was a meditation on emotion – “Is it me, is it you / Behind this mask, I ask / Is it me, is it you / Who wears another face” – into a storyline about someone spurned by a duplicitous lover, hiding behind a mask, with lines like, “sit behind the mask where you control your world,” and “camouflage the truth, indulge your fantasy.” The second verse of Mosdell’s lyrics are adapted into a chorus that makes clear how the meaning has been changed:

Mosdell version: “There is nothing in your eyes / That marks where you cried / All is blank, all is blind / Dead inside, the inner mind”

Jackson version: “There is nothing in your eyes, that's the way you cry, girl / All is grand, all is bright, you're just studying my mind”

It is clear that the disagreement over the Jackson version was purely contractual: Ryuichi Sakamoto released his own version in 1987, with Jackson’s lyrics sung by Bernard Fowler, in an arrangement ironically rockier sounding than Eric Clapton’s version. Jackson had recorded his lyrics, remaining unreleased until 2010’s posthumous album “Michael,” where a new arrangement of the music, mixing in YMO’s original version, was overlaid with the original 1982 track.

The nearest we have to what the original Jackson version could have sounded like is found on the 1984 album “Pulse” by Greg Phillinganes, a musician that has performed with Stevie Wonder, Laura Brannigan, Bruno Mars, George Benson, Kenny Loggins, and Michael Jackson and The Jacksons, working with them on every album from 1978 onwards, the highlight of which was creating every keyboard part on the song “Thriller,” from the opening chords, the base lines, and the pipe organ accompanying Vincent Price. Phillinganes affects a couple of Jackson’s signature sounds, but his playing skills is reflected in what is still an entirely electronic score, singing against a vocoder in the chorus.

Greg Phillinganes also plays keyboards on Eric Clapton’s version of “Behind the Mask,” having introduced the song to him, although you can hear more “real” sounds – the vocoder has been replaced with backing singers, one of which is the song’s producer Phil Collins, whose tight drumming is essentially replicating a programmed machine. As mentioned, this version remains led by synthesisers, whereas the Ryuichi Sakamoto / Bernard Fowler version relegates them to playing background chords behind a fuzzy guitar lead. Sakamoto would make a further version with Yellow Magic Orchestra, again using Jackson’s lyrics, this time sung by a UK electro-pop group, and released on a 1993 EP titled “YMO Versus The Human League”. This time around, it sounds like a standard UK dance song from 1993, and even though YMO were involved, there is nothing in the recording to distinguish it from a Human League song of the time, especially when you compare it to their later hit “Tell Me When”.

Of the seven versions of “Behind the Mask” I have now heard, picking a favourite involves splitting it two ways: the original Yellow Magic Orchestra version from “Solid State Survivor,” is the best of all, and Greg Phillinganes’ version is the best that uses Michael Jackson’s additional lyrics, because it is closer musically to the YMO original. Even better, Yellow Magic Orchestra has emerged as a favourite band with me, although their version of Archie Bell & The Drells’ “Tighten Up,” retitled “Tighten Up (Japanese Gentlemen Stand Up Please!)” is a bit of an acquired taste.