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.
(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.
