With its fully functioning hair design studio, innumerable bottles of wine and liquour, a barbell, and dozens of sheets of paper featuring near identical copies of the same aerosol stencil strewn over the floor and furniture, the living room of Hajime Tachibana is every bit the eccentric, bohemian artist’s workshop you might expect from the guitarist and founding member of Japanese new wave and technopop pioneers the Plastics.

Tachibana emerges wearing a self-designed t-shirt, a yellow hardhat and a serious expression. Apparently the hat is part of the stage costume for the Plastics’ current reunion, forming part of an ensemble with a construction worker’s overall stuffed with balloons. 

“It comes from designs that Rei Kawakubo from Comme des Garcons made in about 1985,” Tachibana explains. “Usually women's fashion just looks so tidy, and elegant and beautiful, but she destroyed those kinds of images, and she designed a kind of nasty, ugly fashion style, these kind of hunchbacked designs. People in Paris were kind of surprised, and actually hated it, but I'm understanding Rei Kawakubo more and more. Something like the Michelin Man is such a pretty character, but so tidy. I want to be quite different from that. More complicated, more distorted, ugly.”

Right now, each member has realized something important about life: love, friends, music, relationships. Back then, we were really so superficial, so stupid really.

— Hajime Tachibana

Not the Sex Pistols

The desire to make something new, to smash preconceptions, and to make an impact has always been at the heart of the Plastics’ concept. Starting out in the mid 1970s as a straightforward punk band, they were quickly aware of the pretensions and contradictions that involved. 

“The Sex Pistols, looked great, and their music was great, but the important thing is to understand their style and their philosophy,” he says. “But if people could understand their style and philosophy, they would never play music just like The Sex Pistols or wear clothes like them. The Plastics too. At first we were just an ordinary punk band, but we thought, ‘This is wrong. This is not London, we're not so poor.’ The social environments in London and Tokyo were so different.” 

Instead, together with band mates Toshio Nakanishi, Masahide Sakuma, Takemi Shima and singer Chica Sato, Tachibana helped to develop a new, more peculiarly Japanese take on new wave, wedding the cheap, simplistic attitude of punk to the electronic and synth-based sounds that had been pioneered by Kraftwerk.

So, so plastic

“After World War 2,” Tachibana explains, “‘modernizing’ meant ‘Westernizing’ so everyone tried to chase Europe and America, but always the real thing was outside Japan: music, design, industry, fashion, everything was outside Japan, so we had to watch these things and copy. But at some point, round about 1980, we were able to catch up.”

“Before the 80s,” he continues, “there were some artists and musicians performing outside Japan, using koto, shamisen, wearing kimonos. Plastics brought to Europe or America something more contemporary.”

Playing as the Plastics again, he says the members have changed, yet it still feels the same: “Right now,” says Tachibana, “each member has realized something important about life: love, friends, music, relationships. Back then, we were really so superficial, so stupid really. But that's why we could make music like we did. If we were so clever, if we knew real love, maybe there would have been no Plastics. It was very superficial, very... very plastic.”

Upcoming shows:

June 5, Saturday: Itadaki 2010, Nihondaira (Shizuoka) http://www.itadaki-bbb.com/
August 8, Sunday: World Happiness 2010, Shinkiba, Tokyo http://www.world-happiness.com/
August 14, Saturday: RisingSun Rock Festival in Ezo (Hokkaido) http://rsr.wess.co.jp/2010/index.html