Kaoru and Toshiya talk about their documentary DVD and shows in Australia

On the 23rd of April you released your 4th documentary DVD “TOUR13 GHOUL”, which covered the three months of your tour last autumn, as well as your US tour. What did you guys think watching it?

Kaoru: I thought we talked well (laughs) I think you can get very close to everyone and see a side of Dir en grey that hasn’t really been visible before. Seeing what kind of things we did, what things happened to us, and how we felt. Of course, it’s also because it contains interviews, but I think you can understand those kinds of things easily and that it’s an interesting DVD.

Toshiya: We don’t usually show our feelings while we’re on tour, so it’s a chance to catch a glimpse of that side of Dir en grey.



Soon after the DVD begins, Toshiya is heard saying, “We’ve come here because we don’t want to end like this, right?”, as if summarizing the theme contained in the DVD.

Toshiya: But I think everyone else probably thinks so too. What I said was vague but, personally, on tours, etc., I don’t really talk with others. So, it’s a bad way of putting it but, I think the interviews were a breather for me (laughs).



Kaoru: It made me realize again how we are always having various things happen to us (laughs). Big incidents only happen sometimes (the shooting incident that occurred while Dir en grey were at immigration at Los Angeles airport) but whenever we go to places like the US, something is bound to happen to our bus.



Speaking about this tour, your bus broke down and you couldn’t move so you had to postpone a concert.



Kaoru: It was the first time it was so bad, but it made me think “What is this?? Does this happen to everyone?”



It doesn’t normally happen repeatedly to the same band, does it? In your domestic tour, which comprises the first half of the DVD, you had two different types of set lists. One had standard concert songs, and the other was full of long songs. It was a novel plan, showing two extremes. The latter concerts in particular were worth doing, right?



Kaoru: They really were extreme shows… Putting it simply, we just wanted to try it. But if we hadn’t done it in this way, then we wouldn’t have been able to do it. For example, if we’d made all of the shows push forward with this dark feeling, and we didn’t warn the fans ahead of time, I’d worry if the people who came to show would be okay. But when we actually tried it, it refreshed us, and now when I think about it, I feel like it was necessary for us to have the feeling of having done this album to completion before we faced towards something new.



Did the crowd have a larger reaction than you thought to the shows with all long songs?



Kaoru: Yes. I thought they might be calmer… At the first show, at Yokohama, we were probing each other, but in the final shows, like at Shinkiba, it wasn’t like that at all.

Toshiya: In that way I think they were experimental concerts. But how we felt didn’t change in particular. We didn’t try to make it really different. There was a lot more to feel in the flow of the whole show itself, rather than just in each song.

What was there to feel specifically?

Toshiya: Rather than something to be enjoyed, the performances were more about drawing you in. So, that kind of thing. Like there’s no kishotenketsu (the four-part organization of Chinese and Japanese narratives) (laughs) I thought we wouldn’t know how it would turn out until we tried.

Kaoru: I knew that whatever feeling it had the fans would enjoy it. Of course, I think there would have been people who wanted to hear songs with a better rhythm, or songs with more atmosphere, but I just hope they thought they had seen a valuable concert.

Do you feel that your shows on the American leg of the tour were different yet again?

Kaoru: No, it’s a weird way to put it but, when we go to North America, it’s like we’re pulled back into the feeling of North America. For example, even if we wanted our concerts to be exactly the same in North America as they are here, there’d be many parts that would be impossible. For instance, we can’t take a lot of instruments with us. We only tour there once a year but when we play maniac songs (I think he’s referring to songs that the hard-core fans love) everyone is like silent… So we try to include as many songs people know as possible, but I feel like that will again connect to the next time we play there.



Toshiya: Even though it was also called “GHOUL”, I think the concept of the American leg of the tour felt different. Conversely, I also feel like it didn’t change; it couldn’t change, in many ways. Overseas tours are about making do with our restrictions.



Kaoru: However, this time we used videos, which we had never before done in North America, so I think the feeling was in fact a little different from previous tours.



Toshiya: Our performances were really visual. The same song changes depending on how it is performed. However, we don’t watch the videos while we’re performing, so it’s not different for us when we play.



Speaking of playing overseas, in February you played for the first time in Australia, on a festival tour.



Toshiya: Putting it simply, it was great. (Laughs) We traveled by plane on the tour, and the ocean was really beautiful from the plane. I also got to hold a koala. (Laughs)



Kaoru: It was interesting. But at festivals we only get to play for 40 minutes, so our performances went by in the blink of an eye, and we also couldn’t rehearse. Our dressing room was like a container, so we couldn’t relax either. When we weren’t performing we were just hanging around, watching performances, drinking beer. (Laughs) But Australia was really expensive. It cost around 4,000 to 5,000 yen just to eat out normally in town. I’m not sure if we went there to make money, or to spend it (laughs) Also, there were so many China Towns there, so we mostly ate Chinese food. It felt like we were in China rather than Australia. (laughs) Although we did try wallaby meat.

