How did you start making your own music?

When I was a child, I was lucky to have access to a stereo speaker system where I could listen to music since the time I was in elementary school. I was just fascinated with it. I wouldn’t leave the front of the stereo. Eventually, I wasn’t satisfied listening to just Japanese pop music, so I started listening to the Far East Network – FEN – the American military radio station, and listening to foreign music. I started playing in amateur bands in middle school and high school.

What foreign music did you listen to growing up?

Our household had a lot of classical records. With FEN, my house didn’t actually get the station. So I would go to one of my friend’s home and listen to the music through a thin paper wall. [laughs] I was so excited and fascinated by what I would hear. Even if I didn’t know what those records were, necessarily.

When I was in amateur bands, we would mostly copy other songs, like the 5th Dimension. So I wasn’t creating original work quite yet. Two or three years befor Sugar Babe started, I was in a folk band. I was 18 or 19, and that was the first “real” group I was in. The songs I tried writing for this folk band ended up being too complex, so they weren’t used. There was a boom in folk music at the time, and the company Warner Pioneer [Warner Music Japan] brought me in to talk to a producer, to be part of it. But the producer told me my songs and lyrics weren’t fit for this folk band, so he told me I should quit the group. [laughs]

Back then, I didn’t know that many people. I couldn’t really relate to the people in the folk scene, because they didn’t know the music I liked. I wanted to make something different. The producer at Warner said he could introduce me to people who were more in tune with what I was into, and that was when I started meeting more people. I ended up doing a session with a bunch of people I met from all this, and that group ended up becoming Sugar Babe.

Sugar Babe was around for about three years. What were the most important lessons you learned from that experience?

Both Tatsuro Yamashita and I had this ideal of the quality of music we wanted to make, and it was really high. But we couldn’t really reach that vision at the time. [laughs] That was a big feeling I remember. I didn’t even think it would last as long as it did, and at times it even felt more like an amateur band. But when we did live shows, a fair amount of people showed up. But that was about it. I had no job, I had no money… It was a pretty tough time. Those were struggling years.

Critiques from journalists about Sugar Babe were also really harsh. We were kind of hurt by that reaction. In the early ’70s, there weren’t bands like us – it was mostly hard rock and blues rock. We were a pop band, and there was nothing like that.

We once played a festival featuring a bunch of different groups – not just rock bands, but a wide variety of styles. When Sugar Babe played, the audience started throwing trash and bottles at us; they were screaming out that we sounded like a bunch of cicadas. Rock artists wouldn’t use major 7th chords, for example. But we would, and the audience reacted like: “This is weak, go home!” But if you went overseas at the time, lots of groups were doing this. Do you know the Fifth Avenue Band? I loved them. They were the ideal image of what we wanted to do with Sugar Babe. But in Japan, that sound wasn’t appreciated.

Sounds like it, if they were throwing things at you.

To be fair, they were drunk. [laughs]

So you have this challenging period with Sugar Babe, and then you pivot to a solo career with your debut album Grey Skies in 1976. What was it like going out on your own after being in a band?

Around the time we were starting to think about releasing a second album as Sugar Babe, as we started writing songs, Yamashita and I realized we had different tastes in music. So we decided that it might be better for us to go out and do our own music. Back then, there weren’t many people who wanted to do the sounds I wanted to do. Luckily, there were a few senpai bands, groups that had been around a little longer like Happy End and Tin Pan Alley. They helped me to reach my goal.