Survivor of the world’s unluckiest band

Decades after death claimed multiple members of Tokyo rock titans X Japan, their leader Yoshiki plays on

By Helen BROWN

Ihave written a lot of dark lyrics, many about suicide,” says Yoshiki Hayashi. “It’s because I had – I have, maybe, still – this death wish. Death is always right next to me.” He sighs, sending a ripple through his cream silk shirt, then breaks into a shy giggle: “But I am trying to survive, right? When people like my music, it’s as if they are saying to me: it’s OK for you to keep breathing this world.”

Now 57, but looking closer to 30, Yoshiki (as he’s known to his fans) is Japan’s longest serving rock star – and a knot of contradictions. A former classical piano prodigy, he made his name battering drums in the 30million-album-selling punk band X Japan. Despite being a self-confessed “rebel against everything”, in 1999 he composed the official anthem to mark the 10th anniversary of Emperor Akihito’s enthronement. And, although he may seem like a delicate soul, he fears his relentless quest for global fame contributed to his group’s bassist and lead guitarist both taking their own lives and sent the lead singer fleeing into the arms of a religious cult – a sequence of events that led to X Japan being dubbed “the world’s unluckiest band”. (Yuji “Terry” Izumisawa, the band’s guitarist from 1982-85, also died in a car accident in 2002).

I’ve been granted a rare audience with Yoshiki in the vast penthouse suite of a Kensington hotel, chosen for its view of the Royal Albert Hall, where he’s performing next week. Before we take our seats, he offers a handshake and smiles like a wary preschooler peeping out from behind his mother’s legs. When a lock of hair slips over one eye, he waits for a stylist to emerge from his entourage and tease it back into position without scuffing his make-up. Then, painfully aware that despite his many collaborations with Western musicians (both St Vincent and Ellie Goulding will join him on stage at the Albert Hall) most of this newspaper’s British readers won’t have heard of him, he begins at the beginning.

“My father was a professional tap dancer, who played a little jazz piano,” he says, in a soft, high voice. His mother played the shamisen, the traditional Japanese plucked, three-stringed instrument. Together with Yoshiki and his younger brother, they lived above the family kimono shop in Tateyama, five hours’ drive northwest of Tokyo.

“My parents bought me a piano when I was four years old. Usually little kids don’t like to practise. But I did.” His eyes widen. “From the beginning I felt: this is it. Until I was 10, I thought I would be a classical musician, a composer.” But young Yoshiki also suffered from childhood asthma so severe he often spent “half the school year in hospital, trapped”. Confined to his bed, he read Beethoven’s biography and “learnt the art of writing musical scores without an instrument in the room”.

His life changed direction when, aged 11, he arrived home from school to an appalling discovery. “My father had taken his own life,” he tells me. “And I still don’t know why he did that. I was so sad and at the same time so angry.” His androgynous face crumples a little. When I tell him that a suicide in my own family caused me decades of guilt he nods urgently.

“Right. Guilt. Same here. I was asking: Was I a bad son? Why did he have to leave me so young? I didn’t turn my anger to him, but towards myself, towards everything.” It was at that point that Yoshiki discovered rock music. “I asked my mother for a drum kit and she bought one, even though it was bad for business because they could hear me, through the floor, downstairs in the kimono shop. I banged on those drums as hard as I could to get the anger out. I really needed a music that felt like breaking things.”

Love Gun, by Kiss (1977), was the first album Yoshiki bought: when the American band performed in Tokyo, his mother took him to see their show. “It was fire, blood, light, smoke… crazy,” he recalls. “I fell in love with their whole style.”

By the age of 14 he had his own band. “At that time, Japan was very conservative. But I was already thinking: this is a career. When my teachers asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I wrote: ‘A rock star’.” He laughs. “They were very upset. They told me to be serious. I said: ‘I am serious’.”

In his late teens, Yoshiki and the band moved to Tokyo where they started playing the club scene. “We were wearing a bunch of make-up and playing superheavy music peo

Sonata is still one of the most beautiful songs a human being has made” – alongside his anime hit Red Swan and the theme he composed for the 2007 horror film Saw IV. Then a mischievous look creeps across his face and he admits to an urge to “do something crazy there, too!” I warn him that setting drum kits alight in historic buildings is frowned upon in the UK and he laughs one last time. “I won’t do that!” he assures me, clutching my elbow. “Although if the sprinkler system comes on I would have my endless rain, at last, wouldn’t I?”

Yoshiki will perform at the Royal Albert Hall, London SW7 (royalalberthall.com) on Friday

Nearly a hundred years ago, in January 1924, the first Labour government took office. It would, predicted Winston Churchill, prove “a serious national misfortune such as has usually befallen great States only on the morrow of defeat in war”. From Labour’s earliest years, the wellto-do had feared that, should the socialists gain power, their property and – if the Russian Revolution were any guide – even their womenfolk would not be safe.

These fears were always misplaced. Admittedly, as Peter Clark shows in The Men of 1924 (ÌÌÌÌÌ), the advent of Labour to power marked a striking social transformation. The previous Conservative government had contained six Etonians and five Harrovians; all but four were Oxbridge graduates. In contrast, most Labour Cabinet members had left education by the age of 15, five at 12 and the prime minister’s deputy when he was 10. For the first time perhaps in any British government, there was not a single Old Etonian.

Yet this social revolution was not accompanied by a political one. Labour was a party of outsiders desperate to become insiders: it wanted to become part of the establishment, not destroy it. The party had been formed in 1900, as Peter Clark points out, primarily to secure parliamentary representation for the working class; and, as one journalist was told in the 1920s by a party member, “the British working man is about as revolutionary as a Christmas pudding”. The main influences on early Labour MPs were the Bible, Charles Dickens, William Morris and John Ruskin’s critique of economics, Unto this Last, not anything by Marx or Engels. The well-to-do could continue to sleep quietly in their beds.

The first two Labour governments, lacking a majority in the Commons, were too weak to do any harm – the second being blown away by the slump in 1931, though it had been striving to rescue capitalism, not to overthrow it.

Labour has achieved substantial majorities on only five occasions in the 123 years of its existence. Three occurred under Tony Blair’s leadership, in 1997, 2001 and 2005. In consequence, Blair has never been forgiven by his party for overthrowing one of its most cherished traditions – losing elections. The other two large majorities were under Harold Wilson in 1966 and Clement Attlee in 1945.

Possibly Labour is again on the verge of another landslide. So there is much to be learnt from its past. There are just two books on the first short-lived 1924 government. One was written 66 years ago in 1957 by an American academic, Richard Lyman, the other in 2006 by two British Labour historians, John Shepherd and Keith Laybourn. Clark does not seek to replicate their work. Indeed, there is only one chapter of just 30 pages on that government itself. The bulk of The Men of 1924 comprises potted sketches – entertaining but based mainly on well-known secondary sources – of those who composed it.

The first Labour government came about by accident. In 1923, the Conservative prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, in office for just six months, had come to believe that unemployment could only be cured by abandoning free trade. He sought an electoral mandate from the voters, but the result in that December’s election was a hung parliament, in which Labour and the Liberals enjoyed a majority. Labour as the larger of the two freetrade parties took office, more or less by default.

Labour was determined to show that it could govern without the aid of a “capitalist” party. So it disdained an alliance with the Liberals that could have kept a government of the Left in power for five years, even though Labour’s programme was markedly less radical than that of the pre-war Liberals under Asquith and Lloyd George. Inevitably, after just 10 months in office, Labour was defeated by a censure motion once the two “capitalist” parties got together. Another election was held, and the Conservatives were returned by a landslide.

The Liberals, however, were ruined. Allowing Labour to govern sealed their fate – a warning for Ed Davey, perhaps. In 1923, Liberal electoral victories in seaside and cathedral towns such as Bath, Chichester, Salisbury and Torquay were caused by what one commentator labelled “Tory tabbies” voting to preserve the free-trade status quo, not to install a socialist government. In the 1924 election, those seats returned to the Conservatives. Liberal representation duly fell from 159 seats to 40. The two-party system, which would rule Britain with but a few hiccups for the next century, was now in place.

The shelves groan with books on the 1945 government, Labour’s most creative period in office. The best is by Kenneth Morgan, written nearly 40 years ago. Does Richard Toye, a professor at Exeter University, have anything to add? He is an assiduous researcher, who has buried himself in the archives.

But such new material as he has unearthed in Age of Hope (ÌÌÌÌ does little more than confirm what is already known. Toye seeks to put the 1945 victory in historical perspective, but doesn’t really justify his grandiose subtitle – Labour, 1945 and the Birth of Modern Britain – since he provides little new information nor any particularly novel perspective. Nevertheless, Age of Hope is readable and reliable, and rivals Martin Pugh’s Speak for Britain! as the best general history of the Labour Party.

Like so many, Toye idealises the 1945 government, giving Attlee, for so long under-estimated, but now perhaps over-estimated, high marks. But he does not ask himself whether an economy based on nationalisation, state planning, high marginal tax rates, subsidies and high tariffs with a health service financed almost entirely by taxation was the right way forward for a country that had a sclerotic industrial structure and was sliding rapidly down from great power status.

It was during these years, in fact, that Labour discovered not only that it couldn’t bring about the New Jerusalem, but also that it lacked the intellectual tools to manage a private-enterprise economy successfully. Keir Starmer has said that Labour must learn the lessons of 1945. Perhaps the most important lesson is that it should not try to do things that way again.

Vernon Bogdanor is Professor of Government at King’s College, London. His books include The Strange Survival of Liberal Britain