FILMS -- T.V. Phone Age

 

The above video "Evolution of Mobile Phones" was provided by the YouTube channel Magnify and indeed the communication device in pockets that most people can't live without has come a long way from those huge bricks of the 80s and 90s up to the latest smartphones.

So, when I saw the title of this song "T.V. Phone Age", I was wondering whether this band, FILMS, was being rather prophetic during its time when the cutting-edge technology available to the masses involved the Sony Walkman and all of those VHS video recorders. I encountered this video while I was checking out some of the various Japanese synthpop bands one night a few weeks ago; during that time, I found out about the recent young duo, LAUSBUB, and their "Telefon" of 2020.

Well, FILMS is over 40 years back and they were around for a good chunk of the 1980s starting from 1980 itself. The above is the video for their first of two singles "T.V. Phone Age" which was released in that year, and yup, the footage is raw, ambitious if amateurish and somewhat anarchic; just the type of early music videos that fascinated me. It looks like a bunch of college kids who decided to form a band on the fly and took a crash course in very rudimentary choreography and avant-garde drama.

The performance of "T.V. Phone Age" and all of those bloops and bleeps don't seem all that different from the works of some of those other synthpop groups of that time that we all have access to now because of YouTube and the like. However, I also have to remember that those early days of New Wave and technopop didn't have the Internet or MTV (the latter for several months, at least) so to come across these avant-garde bands and their videos was probably not the easiest thing outside of late-night shows or other remote sources of media (maybe as an extra on a VHS tape).

The song was written and composed by vocalist Chuuji Akagi（赤城忠治）who began his career in the 1970s and dabbled in glam rock, folk and technopop. He started FILMS as a branch off another band VAT 69 in 1979, and in the beginning, FILMS was a group of nine members which included bassist and synth-bassist Nobuo Nakahara（中原信雄）, who would later join the band Portable Rock, and keyboardist Taku Iwasaki（岩崎工）. Iwasaki's name was a familiar one to me and when I checked, sure enough, he is already included in KKP because he was behind the soundtrack for the 2013 anime "Gatchaman: Crowds". The membership changed over the years with singer-songwriter Saeko Suzuki（鈴木さえ子）also having been a member as a drummer. One album, "Misprint" came out in 1980.