“And we have a few huge surprises, so we may blow people’s minds away. “X Japan is very eclectic, we kept mixing up any kind of genre which interested us,” Yoshiki says.
Big in japan band full#
And now Coachella fans can get the full X Japan festival experience, Yoshiki says, with as big of a production as the venue can allow, and all the energy and passion the band can deliver. X Japan’s fifth and most recent studio album “Dahlia” was released in 1996, but later this year a new record will arrive. If I didn’t treat myself right I’m going to be paralyzed the rest of my life so I have to be very careful.” So I would like to say, ‘All rock artists, all heavy metal artists, please change your style, because eventually you’re going to create what I faced.’ “Drummer, it can be guitarist, it can be vocalist. “I’ve learned headbanging is very bad for pretty much everything,” Yoshiki says. “I don’t think I can play the way I used to in terms of style, but I’m going to play as heavy as I can, as hard as I can.”Īnd now, a public service announcement for all you headbangers out there. “Doctors told me, ‘Probably you should not play drums anymore,’ but somehow I convinced doctors, ‘I’m going to change the style,'” Yoshiki says. After one surgery to treat a crushed disc failed to fully fix his spinal issues he had an artificial disc inserted in his neck in May 2017. Yoshiki had long been known for his wildly animated drumming but the toll of all that headbanging behind the kit took a toll. “So we decided to keep on going because of our fans. “I thought, ‘Wow!'” Yoshiki says of the response which greeted the trio of reunion shows he’d expected would be a one-time thing. With Toshi out of the cult, he and Yoshiki and the band reunited for three sold-out shows at the Tokyo Dome, which led to offers to tour the world. Ten years later, in 2007, the Internet had not only kept X Japan’s music alive, it had spread its story to new fans. So we didn’t play anything for 10 years.”
“Almost the same time, our guitar player passed away.
“At that time (Toshi) got brainwashed by a cult group and left the band,” Yoshiki says. But in 1997, after five albums, including one recorded entirely in English, the band split. “Based on hard rock, but we put those elements, which kind of came organically, that were in me, my blood.”įrom the mid-’80s into the ’90s, X Japan was huge at home, its glam rock aesthetic credited with launching a trend in Japan known as “visual kei,” or makeup style, for the hair and makeup and costumes its members wore. “I think everything kind of got mixed up, all those genres,” he says. His early loves included Kiss – Gene Simmons is a big fan of X Japan – Led Zeppelin, the Sex Pistols and David Bowie, he says, though classical albums stayed on his playlist as well. “Rock was a proper genre for me to express my sadness as well as my anger,” Yoshiki says. My father actually took his own life, so it was a shocking event for me, and I found rock at the same time. “I didn’t know I would play rock until my father passed away.
“Before I started drums I was only listening to classical music, like Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, stuff like that,” he says. That band started out as a speed metal band – you can hear the rapid-fire riffing of bands like Metallica in some of their songs – but there’s a grandeur and sweep that reaches back to Yoshiki’s childhood as a boy raised as a classical pianist. If you’ve seen X Japan, you know this is true, and if you haven’t, well, go check out a video of the band on stage, blazing through its blend of heavy metal and symphonic rock in a production that typically delivers all the lights, video and pyro effects of the biggest hard rock acts in the world. “So a little nervous, but I think we can rock Coachella.” “And there aren’t that many rock acts playing this year. “And we are one of few bands coming from outside the U.S., especially coming from Asia, from Japan, so I’m wondering how the audience is going to react,” he continues. I have not really played drums in almost a year. “I had neck surgery about one year ago, last May, so this going to be like a comeback show. “We are very excited, but also a little nervous,” says Yoshiki, 52, by phone from Tokyo where the drummer, pianist and songwriter and his band mates in X Japan are in rehearsals for their Coachella debut. To play Coachella is a dream come true, says Yoshiki, the founder and face of X Japan, never mind the obstacles that might have kept his band away from the desert festival in years past and present.
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