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. We formed the band that eventually became X Japan when were 14 or 13 years old.” “Toshi and I first met a long time ago, kindergarten, I think we were 4 years old,” he says. mainstream market, so let Yoshiki tell you a little bit about the band he formed as a teenager with his childhood friend Toshi nearly 40 years ago now.
But it’s been difficult for Japanese acts to make the jump to the U.S. X Japan has sold 30 million albums and singles, played scattered shows in the United States at venues such as Madison Square Garden and Lollapalooza, and back home sold out the 55,000 capacity Tokyo Dome a record 18 times. 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.
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