ROCK AND READ 35: Tatsuro, Aprile 2011

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-----Prima Parte----

14th Anniversary

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Born August 21. Blood Type A. Vocalist of MUCC, which formed in 1997. [The rest is ticket info.]

As the final live for their tour “Chemical Parade,” which followed the release of the album “Karma,” and as a special live to reflect on the band’s history, MUCC will hold a two-day live at the Budokan for the first time in May.
In relation to this live, this interview was taken place to comprehensively go over “Karma” and the past 14 years, but the earthquake happened in the middle of of the photo shoot on the day of the interview (refer to p. 224).
This interview session became an event that Tatsuro and the other staff will never forget……..

*This interview took place on March 18 after the earthquake.

Everyone is still very much a kid. I’m sure I’ll still be giving someone a kancho [1] with both hands even when I’m 40 years old.

–Today is March 18. Just one week after the earthquake.
It has already been a week? I don’t get nervous at all with a small aftershock. Maybe I’ve become numb.

–That afternoon, we were in a studio five stories up in a building built on reclaimed land doing a photo shoot, and as a result [of the quake], we waited on doing the interview but…… Tatsuro-san, you were quite calm despite the violent shaking.
Not really. It was the first time I ever took cover under a table, during make-up. I thought, “This is bad!”

–You may have felt panicked, but I thought, this person isn’t one to show it on his face.
I may be like that. Yeah. I am aware of that. I may be thinking, “Wah!” but I am calm. When we were leaving the studio, the soles of the shoes my stylist prepared were pretty slippery so I was thinking, “These slip. Conversely, these shoes are more dangerous!” as we were evacuating. I was scared and I thought I was scared, but I just didn’t panic. Rather, I’m more afraid of ghosts.

–As in you find things of the unknown more frightening?
Yeah. When it comes to a huge earthquake…… there’s no meaning in resisting. When you can think of it like that, you can remain pretty calm. But, at the time when it was shaking, you couldn’t tell what was going to happen. On the way home, there was more information…… On top of that, it seems we were driving through the roads with the most traffic, so it took me 9 hours to get home, even though it’s in the same city.

–Your parent’s home is in Ibaraki-ken. You must have been worried?
I was worried, of course, and I did call, but I couldn’t get a hold of them. But what I thought was amazing was that even if I couldn’t call, if I had access to wi-fi, I could access Twitter. In my case, my older brother also uses it, and he wrote, “The whole family, including my parents, are safe” so I think that helped me from not panicking. YUKKE might’ve panicked, thinking about his personality. Like with airplanes, he’s afraid to fly because he’s afraid it’ll crash, but I ride them thinking, “if it crashes, it crashes and there’s nothing you can do about.” In other words, I give up easily (laughs).

–There must be good cases and bad cases for being like that.
Yeah. This personality is a double-edged sword (laughs).

–Even after the earthquake there have been numerous aftershocks and there are many problems arising, so it seems difficult to say that we will be able to go back to our everyday lives. Are you one to be able to keep calm, despite this situation?
Yeah. I give up easily and I can think “what happens, happens.” Things that can be resolved will be resolved somehow. I won’t get my hopes up high but I won’t be in deep despair. Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m throwing everything away. I certainly will work hard, but I think that “how you become is the result of hard work” is also, in the end, part of “what happens, happens.” Maybe I can remain calm because I can think of it that way.

–You may be someone others can lean on at times like these.
No, I don’t know about that. In the end, I didn’t have a clue what I should take with me when we were evacuating that time. And, you know how I was dressed kinda weird. I only had a third of my hair pulled back, and I had make up on. So I thought, for starters, I need to take makeup remover wipes with me (laughs).

–Depending on the situation, you may have had to evacuate dressed like that.
Yes. Even so, I had my hair & make-up artist’s brush and spray inside my bag that I prepared thinking, “I must take these with me” (laughs). It’s like, “Hey, there are more important things to take with you!”

–Regarding the makeup for the photo shoot, it seems different from both the past and present. What were your thoughts behind it?
Were you surprised? You know how we’re doing two lives at the Budokan in May? I wanted to show the two extremes in association with that. To me personally, the formal look and the kimono and makeup look are both in association with the MUCC from the past and not the current MUCC. And while I leaned toward how we were in the past, I also mixed in the nuance of “how I would arrange it now.” I wasn’t planning on doing that kind of stuff with the makeup in the beginning. I thought I should just have black around my eyes like we did in the past, but then I thought it would be boring to just wear the same makeup that I thought was Visual-kei makeup back then even if the concept was the past. So then I thought, it might be better to take a more modern approach where you can’t really tell which genre it fits in. I thought not being able to see any sense of genre would be better than having the makeup be only Visual-kei.

–And, were you able to achieve the visual you were going for?
Yeah, probably (laughs). Lately, I like the feeling of not being able to sense genre. So I wore a kimono over regular clothes and wore non-sensical makeup. Like, you know there is definitely something wrong, but you can’t tell what exactly is wrong. Like a one-person mismatcher. If I just wore Japanese-style clothing, it’d just become cosplay, and that’s not what I was going for.

–To not just do what you did in the past, but to do it in a way that you would now. That must be connected to the second day at the Budokan, where you will be doing a history live?
Yeah. We don’t intend to completely recreate our past selves. On our 10th anniversary, we did a live called “HISTORY OF MUCK” with a concept for each old album, and I remembered that today before coming here. I think we did a live with songs from “Antique” and “Aishuu” at O-WEST. That was from the simple reasoning that we had played those songs many times at O-WEST back then. But after we finished the live, I regretted it, “Why did we do it at that stage?”, and I suddenly remembered that this morning.

–Where was this regret coming from?
The people who had the opportunity to see our lives back then were a very small crowd. Yet there were others who wanted to see it but couldn’t, so I thought why didn’t we choose a bigger place.

–So, [you're saying] it wasn’t necessary to associate the specific stage with the past?
Yeah yeah yeah. Even though we’re playing our old songs again, only a limited number of people could see it. Afterward I regretted it, “Why’d we do it that way?” I thought, it’s important to do it at a big place, especially when you’re going to do something like that. Also, we just recreated the past that time, and I kind of felt bad for our fans. I think we did something wasteful. This time, we don’t intend on simply recreating the past, and we’re doing it at the Budokan, so everyone who wants to see it should be able to.

–So the regret from back then isn’t linked to the concept of this time’s history live at the Budokan?
Yeah. Because I just remembered it this morning (laughs). I thought, “Ahh, come to think of it, something like that happened,” before leaving my house. There are a lot of cases where things come together for me after the fact. This must be an outcome of what happens, happens and things will only happen as it should.

–That things will come together even if you don’t intend them to?
Yeah. Because our band name MUCC was chosen in the moment. We weren’t even thinking about how it’d link to “69″ or “Rock,” and we had no idea it’d lead to “MUCC day” (laughs). In the end, it ended up being a pretty good band name. We realized that after the fact.

[1] kancho = an action where you fold hands with your index fingers sticking out and shove your index fingers up someone’s butt

Fonte : [Apr. 2011] ROCK AND READ 035: Tatsuro (MUCC) (1/6)