>From films to soundtracks to piano recitals, Ryuichi Sakamoto has fingers in all sorts of pies – and every one of them seems to taste delicious. Except Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, writes Michael Quinn
Pop star, actor, classical musician, opera composer, world music pioneer, techno innovator, Academy Award winner and, yes, mustn’t forget, fashion model (for designer Antonio Miro, Barney’s New York and The Gap, since you ask): will the real Ryuichi Sakamoto please stand up?
The prince of New York chic, the king of Tokyo cool, the reincarnation of Christ, Mohammed and Buddha rolled into one (if his more devoted fans are to be believed), Sakamoto is back to launch two new albums and kick-start a six-country concert tour – nothing by halves, seems to be the Sakamoto motto.
Ask him a question and he thinks about it before answering. Unnervingly so. And when he does speak, it’s with a deeply serious demeanour. You want to tell him to be more confident. To be more forthright. Instead you ask how he copes with a workload that has produced 13 soundtracks in fewer years (many now reworked in full symphonic splendour for Cinemage, the first of the new albums), a first full-length opera in 1999, a music-theatre collaboration with maverick director Robert Wilson, and a starring role alongside Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe in Abel Ferrara’s latest film, New Rose Hotel. Not to mention Back to the Basic, a first album of solo piano pieces that he wrote, performed and produced in less than a month.
“I go to bed late, I get up early, I work very hard and I seldom say no.”
If he wasn’t so obviously sincere about his recipe for success, you could take a swing at the guy for being so glib. Or for taking the piss. For all Sakamoto’s fierce politeness and well-drilled Japanese diffidence, there’s clearly a part of him that refuses to take himself as seriously as he takes his work.
Now aged 48, Sakamoto has embraced virtually every art form and contrived to bring them into contact with each other in ways that retain the capacity to surprise even if they no longer seem so far ahead of their time as they once did.
>From a comfortable middle-class Tokyo background – his book-editor father gave Yukio Mishima his first break and later worked with the 1994 Nobel Prize-winner Kenzaburo e – Sakamoto says he grew up instinctively refusing boundaries of any sort. At school he rebelled against the obligatory monthly exams and refused to wear the uniform. “I was the only kid who did that, but that was all right – it felt natural to me to be different. I was always conscious of being different from other people.”
Different and diverse. He began composing in his teens, writing music that gained approving attention from the Japanese media. But when international success arrived in the late 1970s, it came in another guise altogether. The Yellow Magic Orchestra fused pop music, computer technology and Sakamoto’s quiet radicalism to seminal effect, taking infant electro- pop to the edge of what a future generation would call techno.
The band’s cult status remains, and many devotees argue that Sakamoto has done nothing quite so striking or seminal since. True, nothing else has quite allowed him to pay homage to so many of his own predictably diverse musical interests at the same time – everything from Bach to Balinese gamelan and from Boulez to bossa nova – but it hasn’t been for the want of trying. Even the briefest of glances at a back catalogue that boasts well over 100 Sakamoto-credited albums tells you that. Davids Bowie, Sylvian and Byrne are as unlikely bedfellows as Iggy Pop, Youssou N’Dour, Caetano Veloso and novelists William Burroughs and William Gibson, yet they have all collaborated with the poly- pretty-much-everything composer.
But it has been film that has allowed Sakamoto to be the composer he is, even if it has obliged him to perform in ways he retrospectively wishes he hadn’t. “I can’t watch myself in Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence. I was so bad.” Worse than co-star Bowie? “Mr Bowie is an artist of a different calibre and with different abilities. It is not for me to criticise when my own efforts seemed so excruciating.”
It was the sheer scale and visual audacity of the movie screen that proved to be a fruitful provocation to a composer with a penchant for Mahler’s long-breathed adagios and whose favourite work is Wagner’s Parsifal – “All those sustained, flowing harmonies,” he says in wistful admiration.
Yet even Cinemascope is too cramped for Sakamoto. Hence Cinemage, a blissful, harmony-drenched reworking of themes from Little Buddha, Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, The Sheltering Sky and the Oscar-winning The Last Emperor. “Film is a wonderful medium to work for. It’s exact, makes precise emotional demands of you and communicates in time, just like music. But you’re always at the service of someone’s imagination. And it can be excessive. Films that have too much music are very rarely good.”
With Cinemage Sakamoto strove to strip away whatever excesses he found in his own soundtracks. The result is music that is leaner and more athletic, able to clear the largest emotional hurdles with gymnastic ease, simultaneously washing over you in warm melodic waves. If anything, it makes the music seem more articulate and accomplished than before.
“Music shouldn’t draw attention to itself on the cinema screen. If you notice it, you’ve done something wrong, perhaps even written bad music. The impulse behind Cinemage was to see if my music could stand up on its own.” Which is why the album was recorded live, even though Sakamoto prefers the cloistered intimacies of the studio. Perhaps it’s the academic aspect of the studio that appeals. Or the lack of exposure.
Whatever the appeal, the studio is clearly a creative place for Sakamoto. He wrote, performed and produced Back to the Basic in his New York basement studio in less than a month. “As usual I didn’t have much time and so I toyed with the idea of making a free improvisational jazz-influenced album, but I felt that would be cheating. So I focused instead on writing music that would use the full extent of the piano’s many possibilities.”
Hence the underwater recording on some tracks and the sound of steel drums among the ebony and ivory. “My conscience,” he says, “always tells me to try different things, so I do.”
It is already a huge critical and commercial hit in Japan – a million-selling single from the album last year made Sakamoto the oldest artist ever to have a number one in the country. “I like performing on stage, getting lost in the music. But being famous, that’s different, that was an accident.”
Cinemage and Back to the Basic are available on Sony Classical