Forbidden Colours by Sakamoto Ryuichi and David Sylvian
I was very saddened to learn Sakamoto Ryuichi has stage 4 cancer, which means he’s in dire straits. He had had throat cancer some years back, I thought he had been cured, but it seems he had been diagnosed with rectal cancer last year, and that now the cancer has spread to his lungs.
Sakamoto has been one of the Big Five musicians for me (the other ones being Bowie, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and Miles Davis) ever since I heard the theme song for the 1982 film Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, directed by the legendary Oshima Nagisa, for which Sakamoto wrote the musical score and in which he starred opposite David Bowie. In the film Sakamoto plays the commander of a Japanese POW camp on Java, who falls in love with British prisoner of war David Bowie.
That theme song, Forbidden Colours, with lyrics sung bij David Sylvian, of the band Japan, is still one of the most impressive pieces of music I ever heard. I bought that soundtrack on CD and began to discover Sakamoto’s incredible music, from his sweeping scores for films like The Last Emperor (in which he again played a Japanese fascist, which he declined to do ever since) to his avant-gardist pop, mixing medieval music and Japanese and South East Asian folklore with new wave, rock and disco like it was nothing. Sakamoto writes a catchy melody as easily as he composes an experimental, avant-gardist soundscape.
His last studio album is Coda, my favorite album of the year 2017, deeply touching and nostalgic, about death impending and the fleeting nature of everything. But he hasn’t sat still since, writing an playing music to console people during the corona lockdowns, to support Ukraine and for many other good causes. He is a prolific activist for peace and against nuclear weapons and energy. One of the good guys. He stars in the documentary Coda about his life and work these past years.
I couldn’t find a video of Forbidden Colours with better quality; this will have to do. The sound is fine. The song has lost nothing of its power in the past forty years. Maybe someone will hear it now for the first time an become as enchanted with Sakamoto’s sounds as I became when I first heard this. (PB)
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