Starbow -- Heartbreak taiyou zoku (ハートブレイク太陽族)

The question remains: is this Haruomi Hosono’s worst blunder?

The problem is, nobody is quite sure. The original concept in the year 1982 was to create a futuristic trio of space age idols. They were introduced as three musketeers from space, who escaped from the unknown tenth planet of solar system and landed on earth to teach about love.

Starbow was representing an alien time and place, and that’s why even their gender was obscured. They were dressed in unisex costumes that reminded of space suits. Their hair was cut short. Because their creator and manager happened to be Haruomi Hosono (細野 晴臣) of YMO fame, it was natural that their music was influenced by New wave techno. The lyrics were not written by Hosono though, but by his former bandmate from the days of band Happy End, Takashi Matsumoto (松本 隆). Group’s singing, conducted by Hosono, was intentionally boyish, obscuring the conventions of idol pop even more.

For sure it was a gimmick. An interesting, avant-gardish gimmick. And like most gimmicks, it didn’t only fail, but failed miserably. The single Heartbreak taiyou zoku was performed in numerous tv shows, like in Ohayou Studio above. It was a Hosono piece, who could say no? The result was that audience was left in the state of total puzzlement every time. Nobody understood the idea, and we still can’t be sure did even Hosono himself know what he was thinking. After a lot of publicity only 7000 copies was sold and the peak position on Oricon chart was pitiful number 98.

Something had to be done. Hosono dumped the whole concept and quickly introduced Starbow Mark II: a Candies-clone that consisted of three Seiko Matsudas with identical girlish hairstyle. Gone were the unisex space suits. Now they wore very feminine dresses with frills and decorations. Members’ alien names Nagato, Imato and Yaeto were changed to Nami, Nagi and Meg. It didn’t help.

The first and only album STARBOW I (note the so promising “1”) became thus a strange mixture of techno pop and conventional idol pop. The best example of Starbow Mk II was their second single Tanpopo batake de tsukamaete. It had nothing to do with the radical ideas of their previous incarnation. It was brightly sung run-of-the-mill idol pop. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOlB-TFjglM

(June 25 2014: Remix version here since the original got taken down.)

Today Takashi Matsumoto doesn’t even want to remember his strange adventure with Starbow. “Instead of coming out from tenth planet, I wandered into a black hole”, he laughs.

Starbow does have a small cult following among techno circles. We can’t completely exclude the possibility that in the future also average listeners will finally understand what in the earth Hosono was trying to do, but it’s possible that it will not happen before mankind has travelled past the tenth planet. Right now we are still too spaced out to get it.