Sadistic Mika Band

I’ve never been to Japan – I’m a reluctant flyer, for one thing – but the culture has long fascinated me. In the 1980s I worked for a time in the oriental department of a national museum. Every day we handled the exquisite artifacts of that distant land – the delicate carved clothing ornaments known as netsuke, the elaborately draped kimono, the beautifully glazed ceramics, the woodblock prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige that so influenced the French Impressionists when exported to Europe. For a term I attempted to learn the language but had to retreat, defeated. Instead, I taught English to a Japanese, and she in turn taught me to confront my Englishness.

These cultural exchanges (and confrontations) occur also in music. The Sadistic Mika Band were one of the few Japanese acts to penetrate British insularity in the 1970s, and I loved them as soon as I heard them.

 

At the group’s heart was a marriage, between guitarist Kazuhiko Kato and his first wife, singer Mika Fukui. After they signed to EMI Harvest, their debut album was recorded in Japan. While in London in 1972, Kato had been taken with the extravagance of Glam Rock; he liked the way an art school sensibility was infusing pop. He gave a copy of that first album to Malcolm McLaren, who in turn passed it on to Bryan Ferry. Ferry hooked the band up with Roxy Music’s producer Chris Thomas and the result was a second album, Kurofune (Black Ship), recorded in England and released in 1974.

 

They supported Roxy Music on tour in October 1975 – playing to somewhat baffled British audiences – and appeared on the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test in the same month. This is where I made their acquaintance. It’s up there now on YouTube, a rare TV appearance preserved in all its spontaneity. They kick off with an instrumental, ‘Time To Noodle’. Mika prances among the boys, snapping them with her polaroid, while they, well, noodle (most expertly). She was probably what caught my schoolboy attention: the pleasingly short dress, the pert headgear. Viewing the clip again now, 45 years after broadcast, I’m struck rather by their harmonic sophistication. As a classical musician friend commented to me, “I think this is the only pop performance I’ve ever heard that exploited the evocative power of the augmented triad.” They perform with tight rhythmic coordination and instrumental dexterity as crisp and squeaky-clean as their immaculately pressed clothes. Then Mika takes the mic for the frenetic ‘Suki, Suki, Suki’. Bob Harris, the show’s compere, seemed particularly impressed by Rey Ohara’s funky basslines at this point, but most male eyes were surely on Mika. Some wag on the studio team had altered the title card behind the band to read ‘Old Gley Whistle Test’ – no doubt the Sadistics had grown used by now to the racial stereotyping endemic to 70s Britain, but it still marks the clip as a period piece. 

 

So, of course, I had to buy Black Ship, their latest release.

 

The cover artwork by photographer Masayoshi Sukita showed the band members, two on the front, four on the back, floating, perhaps flying, as if arriving from afar, emissaries from the ‘floating kingdom’ of Nippon. The original album came with no translations. Having acquired little Japanese in the classroom, I was (and still am) at a loss with most of the lyrics. In part – side one, at least – it seemed to be a ‘concept album’ (they were a thing at the time) about the opening up of Japan to the West. The ‘Black Ship(s)’ of the title track recalled the famous reaction to that day in 1853 when Commodore Matthew Perry of the US Navy sailed into Uraga harbour with his powerfully armed ironclad steamboats, thus ending 250 years of feudal stability and international isolation. The extended opening track, ‘Sumie No Kuni E’, began with gentle pentatonic scales, as if conjuring the calm of pre-modern Japan, before developing into a furious jam, perhaps descriptive of the panic aroused by the sight of the ‘foreign devils’. The style here was Prog meets jazz-funk, a mélange of Western styles heard through Japanese ears. 

 

Even on the second track, ‘Time Machine Ni Onega’, a straight rock’n’roll number, the impression of 50s retro was somehow refracted through a non-Western sensibility to sound unmoored.  Recently, I found an online translation of the lyric. The words, I now realise, evoke temporal dislocation in rather the same way the music disrupts our expectations of genre. Mika’s frantic vocal skips from the Jurassic era, where ‘we’ll have ammonites for lunch / And walk our tyrannosaurs’, to the Golden Age of Hollywood where ‘girls clad in mink / Went crazy for Bogie’s charms’.

 

Side two was announced by the percussion battery of ‘Yoroshiku Dozo’ – now we were in Wicker Man territory – before lurching into the singalong pop chorus of ‘Dontaku’. They could do reflective ballads, too, like ‘Four Seasons’, or the concluding track, ‘Sayonara’. Altogether it was a consummate package.

 

Things fell apart for the band, at least for the classic line-up, during the recording of their third album, Hot Menu!, in 1976. Mika became romantically involved with producer Chris Thomas, whom she subsequently married after divorcing Kato. Kato himself pursued a solo career, but sadly took his own life in 2009. 

 

Maybe something was lost in translation when Western rock was transplanted to Japan. But equally something was gained. Just as British bands of the 60s pored over recordings of Chicago bluesmen and helped to reawaken Americans to their musical heritage, so the Sadistic Mika Band were part of a two-way cultural exchange that brought us Yoko Ono and Stomu Yamashta. And Black Ship was their finest hour.

(First published in RnR, May/June 2021)