HOSONO’S JOURNEYS ON THE MUSICAL SAUCER 3
Volume 3 of our Journey’s on the Musical Saucer series with Haruomi Hosono which featured writings on Hosono’s returns to places once encountered during his rich musical career and travels.
A Journey to India: Hosono and Yokoo, “Cochin Moon.”
1978 was an important year for Haruomi Hosono. The evolution of his exotic sound, already evident on the 1975 release “Tropical Dandy” and “Bon Voyage Co.” of the following year, reached its peak with the release of Harry Hosono and Yellow Magic Band’s hit album “Paraiso” in April, 1978. In February of that year, the idea of Yellow Magic Orchestra was conceived by Hosono and fellow musicians Yukihiro Takahashi and Ryuichi Sakamoto, and the group’s debut album came out in November. The catalyst for the metamorphosis from “band” to “orchestra” was an almost accidental trip to India with writer Tadanori Yokoo.
“It must have been sometime after “Paraiso” was recorded,” says Hosono. “I stopped by Yokoo’s studio in Seijo. One month later, there we were in India.” Hosono was not without reservations about the trip. “Actually, I didn’t want to go. I felt that if I went to the real place, it would lose some of its exoticism. At the same time, though, it sparked my sense of creativity. Exoticism is fine for a while, but you can’t really hang on to it forever.”
“We arrived in Delhi, that was our first big shock. It was so crowded. There were peopld squatting on the ground where we were walking, and we kept stumbling over them. We were still really exhausted the next day when we went to a place called Agula, about three hours inland, in a car without air conditioning.”
Thanks to the efforts made by the Indian Tourist Bureau the group got royal treatment. “The one problem was that it was so hot. We put ice in our juice, and everything else we drank. That night I think we al ordered whiskey on the rocks. Maybe Yokoo and I weren’t really strong drinkers, but after we parted in the lobby and went back to our rooms, I got hit with the worst diarrhea and vomiting. I was sick every few minutes. I spend the night alone in agony, and in the morning I had to take an 8:00 AM flight to Bombay. I was in the toilet the whole three hours of the flight, and the one-hour taxi ride to the hotel was terrible. In the nearly sixty years that I’ve been alive, that was probably the worst thing I’ve endured.”
“In Bombay, we met a famous Indian movie actress and went to see the Taj Mahal. At night, however, Yokoo and I both felt bad and couldn’t sleep, so we stayed up talking about a lot of things.” It was a dinner in Madras that brought Hosono back from the brink of death. “The Consulate General of Madras invited us to his house for dinner. He said, ‘My wife made Japanese food, so come eat and cheer up!’ We sat at his wife’s table, and they served us grilled salmon and okayu (rice porridge). She talked about psychic phenomena, like the fact that she could cure illnesses herself, and that when she wore a watch, it would go out of order, and that she often saw red balls about 40 or 50 centimeters in diameter flying around her garden. She said, ‘You’ll be cured after you eat.’ We both noticed that we really did feel better!”
After returning home Hosono was asked by Yokoo to create an album with India as its theme. “I had to think of everything from scratch by myself, and at first I didn’t know what to do at all. Then suddenly I started hearing about computer music, and I was able to go see a demonstration by Hideki Matsutake. As I listened, I thought, ‘Here’s something interesting that I can do and ‘Cochin Moon’ was the result.” Incidentally, Hideki Matsutake himself became the honorary fourth member of Yellow Magic Orchestra as a computer programmer, one of the first of his kind. “If I had never experience India with Yokoo, YMO would never have been born!”
This article originally appeared in Paper Sky Number 9 (Naples Family: Italy’s Living Room City).
Originally, Hosono is from Minato, Tokyo.
