Buck-Tick Zone

1983

In 1983, Hisashi Imai was a student at Fujioka High School in Gunma prefecture and decided that he wanted to form a band. He did not know how to play any musical instruments. His parents owned a tabako-ya (which means cigarette store but it's more like a "liquor store" or convenience store) called Imai Shohten (Imai Shop) across from the train station, where a lot of the students from his high school would hang out at after school. Buck-Tick's future members knew each other from hanging out at this store. The members recall also hanging out in Hisashi's room, where "he always had strange European music playing in the background". Often Hisashi didn't even know the students that were hanging out in his room. It didn't matter, his mother would still serve them snacks.

Yutaka Higuchi (all his friends call him U-ta) also wanted to be in a band. So, Hisashi and U-ta began to discuss Buck-Tick's beginnings. [Hisashi's mother recalls of U-ta as being "a good kid who would visit Hisashi very early in the morning". Since it is impossible to wake Hisashi up, she would send U-ta to do it. U-ta would arrive so early in the morning because of the schedule of the train he would take to go to school.] U-ta's older brother, Toll Yagami (they have the same parents but Toll uses a stage name), played the drums in a band called Spots (who later changed their name to simply SP). U-ta would hang out with Spots and the bassist had shown U-ta a few things about the bass. Thus, U-ta decided he wanted to play bass. He bought a Tokai jazz bass for 40,000 yen because it had a thin neck and that made it easy to play.

U-ta had a friend named Hidehiko Hoshino (known as Hide to his friends) who he met at the start of high school. U-ta asked Hide if he would like to be in a band. The idea excited Hide because since his brother went to college all he did after school was go home above the fish store his parents owned and read comics. He previously was intensely into soccer (football in other countries), but in high school he was no longer the best player so his love for the sport began to dwindle.

In U-ta's opinion, since Hide was tall and good looking, Hide should become the vocalist. However, Hide really had his heart set on playing guitar. Hide bought a Greco stratocaster guitar. Hisashi had decided by then that he wanted to play guitar too. His reasoning was that the vocalist is the main focus of the band and thus has the most pressure so he would rather not have to deal with that. They decided the band would have two guitarists. It was about summer when Hisashi bought a used Fletcher stratocaster guitar for 29,800 yen. He bought a cheap amp from a friend and also acquired a distortion pedal. He didn't like the way playing right-handed guitar felt so he played it left-handed. He recalls that it was hard to find guitars for left-handers.

Enter Atsushi Sakurai, a boy who had been in the same class with Hisashi for a whole year and never spoke a word to him. (Hisashi thinks they spoke perhaps 2 or 3 words during their second year in school and it wasn't until their third and final year in school that they started to talk to each other when they were forming the band. Atsushi claims that he didn't really talk to anyone at school because all of his friends were from outside the school.) Atsushi was a rebelious kid with few to no friends who would get in trouble. He liked the 1950s look and then turned towards what Japanese often refer to as "yankee". [His hair was in a "rezento" style, which means "regent" but it's the Japanese term for pompadour however it's more like a permed version of The Misfits look.] Atsushi said he would play the drums and bought a beat up used set for 30,000 yen. A friend of Hisashi's since 5th grade named Araki (Buck-Tick have never divulged his full name) completed the line up by becoming the vocalist. All of them seemed to dislike school in general and not have an interest for studying, were generally shy when it came to girls, and perhaps only had a few close friends. A band seemed like a fun thing to do. Now all they needed to do was learn how to play!

[this page was last updated on Monday, 29-Sep-2008 21:32:20 PDT]