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Devo no Tokyo
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For a decade now, Tokyo’s Hiroyuki Hayashi and his pals in Polysics (named after an early Korg synth) have been generating their brand of “technicolour gogo punk,” an energetic and often aggressive update on the style and sound of his heroes, Devo. Boosted by a signing to MySpace Music and tours with Kaiser Chiefs and Graham Coxon of Blur, Polysics have expanded their global fanbase exponentially, and the future looks so bright, they gotta wear funny-looking rectangualar shades. The Mirror reached Hayashi via the latest in computer technology. Mirror: In high school, you discovered Devo, and this band changed your life. What did you find so inspiring about them? Hiroyuki Hayashi: Before I discovered Devo, I had been bored with the conventional images of rock and punk, as they all looked so stereotyped to me. I could not really find it interesting that everyone plays similarly designed music in a similarly designed outfit. However, Devo was completely different! This fivesome with so-called “techno cuts”—a hairstyle with one’s sideburns cut off, which was often preferred by techno musicians back then—didn’t look macho. They were in matching yellow jumpsuits, moving constantly all around the stage just like broken robots, drenched in sweat—but they still kept looking cool and performing “Uncontrollable Urge.” The moment I saw this footage, I though, “It IS the real punk!” Even though they were a band performing with instruments, I could feel a sense of techno from their style. Their music was something that I had never experienced before, and for the first time, I could feel real impulse, which is arising from deep inside the human. That was very evocative. Then I thought, “I really want to form a band like Devo,” and that is how Polysics started. M: You use your own imaginary language for much of your lyrics. Does it have a structure, a system, or is it just random and intuitive? HH: This “space language” is absolutely an intuitive one which I utter just as it comes out from my body while listening to rhythms, without specific rules or grammar. M: Because of language and geography, it is not always easy for good Japanese music to break out into the world—but your friends at MySpace, for instance, are helping change that. Can you suggest some interesting Japanese music that the whole world should know about? HH: Zazen Boys, the Telephones, Vola & the Oriental Machine, Soil & “PIMP” Sessions, Fujifablic, Aburadako—these are the Japanese bands that I’m confident to recommend. I want you, all rock fans in the world, to definitely listen to their music! M: The genius of Devo lay in how they, and also Kraftwerk in Germany, predicted the future of pop music, and did this with humour. In a sense, Devo were science fiction writers as well as musicians. But today, we live in the future they predicted—so who is predicting the future today? Is it Polysics? HH: Well, it may probably be Polysics, though we have always been trying to create music with “a message to the future,” but it is not cool if I reveal the answer here. We want each of you to find the answer by yourself, listening to the previous and future releases of Polysics. WITH JAGUAR LOVE AND BLACK GOLD |
