Masayoshi Takanaka live in London: Jazz fusion icon meets the global city pop revival

Looking down from the balcony at Brixton Academy on Tuesday night, the sold-out floor was a sea of Hawaiian shirts with a smattering of red-suited cosplayers, their chants already bouncing off the walls well before start time. It was hard to believe the headline act was a 73-year-old Japanese jazz fusion guitarist whose biggest records came out before most of the audience was born.

That is the peculiar magic of Masayoshi Takanaka’s international career. Technically a jazz fusion artist, he has been swept up in the global city pop revival and become something of a figurehead for it, celebrated online with a devotion that sits somewhere between genuine musical obsession and internet meme. The numbers back it up: 90% of his total streaming plays now come from outside Japan. For a man whose peak commercial moment came in 1982, that is staggering. It translated directly to ticket sales, the first London night selling out within hours with a second date added to meet the demand, which sold out just as quickly.

The crowd, predominantly in their twenties and thirties, were far more raucous than the 50-60 year olds Takanaka typically plays to back home. When he walked out in his iconic red suit the room erupted, TA-KA-NA-KA chants rolling across the floor at volume levels closer to a football terrace than a concert hall. The official photographer even caught a crowd surfer mid-set, not what you expect from a genre that traditionally soundtracks condo adverts and late-night drives.

Takanaka took up his newly developed shimmery blue guitar, one of several guitars in his rotation that night, each swap feeling like a grand reveal. The setlist, pulled from five decades of work, played out across nearly two hours, where tropical bossa nova gave way to reggae-tinged funk, disco groove dissolved into Latin carnival, with a touch of prog thrown in for good measure. Most of his songs are instrumental, and yet the crowd sang back his most iconic riffs like chants.

Of course, Takanaka has the skill and stature to back up his global rise. Regarded as arguably Japan’s most virtuosic guitarist and the author of 20 studio albums across the 1970s and 80s alone, his playing draws on jazz, blues, surf rock, and Latin guitar traditions simultaneously, combining fast, precise picking with expressive string bends and slides that would make lesser players wince.

He’d not performed in the UK for 50 years, not since a young Takanaka toured here with Sadistic Mika Band as support for Roxy Music. Now he was playing to nearly 5,000 people who were entirely there for him, and the disbelief on his face during the big moments suggested he was not entirely used to it.

RELATED: Masayoshi Takanaka and ANRI to lead “SURF & BREEZE” for MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN WEEK in Tokyo

Takanaka himself was a man of few words, reserving his first direct address to the audience for a single well-placed “YEEEAAAHHHH!”. What the show lacked in between-song chat it more than made up for in oddities. A swivel stool and pedal combination had him scooting across the stage during ‘Palm Street’. Party blowers were rigged next to his vocoder for the intro of ‘Oh! Tengo Suerte’. At another, his playing got gradually quieter until a stagehand had to hold a microphone directly up to his guitar to capture the sound.

Originals like ‘Brasilian Skies’, ‘Oh! Tengo Suerte’, and ‘Ready to Fly’, among others, riled up the crowd alongside a funkified cover of Santana’s ‘Europa (Earth’s cry, heaven’s smile)’ and a rendition of Jorge Ben Jor’s ‘Taj Mahal’ that had the whole venue swinging their arms along with the chorus duo made of two members of AMAZONS, the Japanese vocal trio who have toured with Takanaka for years. Then the prog rock outlier ‘Thunderstorm’ hit in an otherwise sun-drenched set, drawn from his 1981 concept album ‘The Rainbow Goblins’. If only the goblin masks had made an appearance, but that is possibly asking too much.

The band were the backbone of the night, something Takanaka was happy to demonstrate while he took a breather on the black sofa positioned on a platform mid-stage. Bassist Akira Okazawa and drummer Masahiro Miyazaki locked down the rhythm across two hours of genre-hopping without breaking a sweat, while keyboardist Rina Kohmoto became a crowd favourite going all out on her solos. Percussionist Nobu Saito, a collaborator since the 1970s, threaded tropical rhythms through the set with his assortment of congas and hand percussion. At one point, Kaoru Inoue stepped forward with a keytar, producing one of the moments of the night as he briefly gave Takanaka a run for his money.

Before the encore, Takanaka closed the main set with ‘Kurofune’ (‘Black Ship’), the Sadistic Mika Band track from the album Takanaka recorded with the band in the UK in 1974. A fitting shout out to his UK return, the room swaying slowly in time as the night’s most reflective moment settled over the venue.

Then came the encore, the crowd now primed for the biggest pop of the night, as Takanaka returned to the stage armed with the red surfboard guitar for ‘Jumping Take Off’. Built with luthier Takeda Yutaka from a real hollowed-out surfboard, Takanaka paraded it across the stage and leaned it into the front rows, letting the chosen few touch the tip of what has become, for this generation of fans, something close to a mythical artefact. While we only got one track with the fabled axe, with a length of roughly 180cm and weighing around six kilograms, Takanaka has admitted that even his younger self could only handle two songs with it round his neck, and with the rest of the world tour ahead of him, no one was going to knock the 73-year-old for not pushing on for another track.

Though the surfboard had made its exit, the guitars were not done yet. He closed the night on his rainbow guitar with ‘You Can Never Come to This Place’, the final track from ‘The Rainbow Goblins’, a hype moment for the fans deep in the trenches of Takanaka lore.

He signed off with “I hope, rainbow and peace” and “see you all in summer” — a reference to his headline slot at London’s Crystal Palace Bowl on August 7th, where he returns as part of the City Pop Waves festival alongside Himiko Kikuchi, Junko Yagami, and Ginger Root, the latter of whom also designed the merchandise on sale in the foyer that night.

Twenty years ago, Takanaka might have been the kind of artist to play a venue half the size to a respectful audience of fellow fifty-somethings. In 2026, he is selling out multiple nights at Brixton Academy in a country he has never headlined as a solo artist, to a crowd whose parents were probably too young to have known him. Watching him thrive on that energy, his playing undimmed across five decades, was worth every minute. The city pop wave is real, and that night at Brixton Academy was the proof.

The tour now moves through the United States, with all dates sold out.

Photos by Jamie MacMillan (@jamie_macmillan_photos)