What was the initial aim of the band?
A lot of people we knew were dying from drug ODs and so on. There were a lot of great musicians in the sixties and seventies who died from drugs, or went insane before they could become famous. We wanted to make an anti-drugs statement, so we chose American and British drugs slang for all the titles. The concept was to save the junkies.
Were you all involved in the drugs scene too?
Not at all. I had happened to meet and play with Haino when I was very young, before I could get into that scene. Haino is totally anti-drug and anti-alcohol. Narita was the same. None of the members of High Rise drink or use drugs. We were one of the few clean bands in the scene. That was why we dared to come up with the concept.
Is the High Rise energy an imitation of a drug high then?
That was just our concept for the first album. The energy arises from deconstruction and reconstruction. We gradually moved towards that.
What kind of music were you all listening to?
Psychedelic and improvised music. Narita had been going to see people like Kaoru Abe
[23] while he was still in high school. We were all listening to free jazz and psychedelic.
How would you describe your position in the Japanese music scene at that time?
We didn't have a position. And the way PSF promoted us at the start was to a very limited audience. Everything was word of mouth, limited pressings, and they turned down all offers of foreign licensing. That was their idea, not ours. Though they're totally different now from how they were in the eighties.
How were you accepted by the fans?
I think everyone was totally shocked by what we were doing, and no one really got it. But we got a reaction, and we counted that as a success. We wanted to shock everyone with a wall of sound. I believe that when you hear an electric guitar you need to get that sense of shock from it. That's why we came up with that sound. PSF and the pressing plant put a lot of work into getting that sound - at first we were told that we couldn't press something that sounded like that, that the sound would drop out. So we just pushed all the levels as far as they would go. When the first album appeared we got a lot of offers from all over the place.
Did you get any coverage in the music press?
None. None. Everything was done by word of mouth. The word spread to Alchemy in Osaka too. So the year after it came out, we got the offers to do the Alchemy compilation
[24] and
Dead Tech. We didn't do any promotion at all, but the word spread and we got a lot of offers to play live and to record.
Now there seems to be a bit of enmity between the Tokyo and Osaka scenes. What was it like then?
There wasn't really any enmity. Information flowed both ways. There was a bit of rivalry between Alchemy and PSF though. Alchemy had been going a little longer, but in spite of the rivalry they were shocked when they heard High Rise, and they asked us to be on the compilation. There were a lot more offers, but PSF turned down all the labels it had a grudge against. Trans Records and so on. They turned down all the punk and new wave labels - they must have thought that Alchemy had some promise though. [laughs]
Were you playing a lot of gigs?
For some reason we played with Hijokaidan. Musicians seemed to like us but the audiences didn't. We were only playing live three or four times a year. We were very stoic and never tried to attract more people. We would only play when someone invited us. I suppose that if we had pushed more we could have played every month. Back when I was in Kosokuya and Rotting Telepathys and Red, I was doing a lot more gigs, maybe fifty times a year. I played out a hell of a lot.
You played with Michio Kadotani in Rotting Telepathys, didn't you?
Rotting Telepathys was me and Kadotani - everyone else was a guest. We'd invite someone different every time we played. I played guitar - it was the two of us on guitars. We'd do these wall-of-noise performances at the Kido Airaku Hall
[25] and so on. We'd both be playing chords and he would be screaming out these agit-prop type vocals. It was pretty cool. When we'd play proper gigs we'd invite people to do bass and drums. There were a few times when we played at Goodman that we invited Tori Kudoh and Kaneko - it would be the four of us on guitar. [Laughs] Today that lineup would be a supergroup. There's one of those tracks on the PSF CD. I'd played out a lot back then and was tired of it all, so when I formed High Rise I decided not to book stuff myself. And there are a lot of idiots involved in the live house scene.
The rest of the interview you can find follwing the link on the first post.