Takanori Nishikawa has looked back at the band he came close to forming with L’Arc-en-Ciel leader and bassist tetsuya, at a point when neither L’Arc-en-Ciel nor T.M.Revolution existed.
Speaking on the September 2nd edition of ABC TV’s Kore yodan nandesu kedo…, the singer described the run-up to Luis-Mary’s 1991 major-label debut, when record companies were circling the Osaka visual kei band and he was weighing up whether to debut with them or form another group.
Nishikawa, who fronted the visual kei post-punk band under the name HAINE, said he had set himself a deadline of making his debut by the age of 20. “I’d decided on my own that I had to debut by 20, so I asked which record company could debut me right now,” he said. “One of them could, and that’s where I debuted”.
He was less certain about the band itself. “I was torn about whether to debut with that band, because I also wanted to form a different one”, he said.
A guitarist from another band then approached Nishikawa about starting a new group with him on vocals. “He said he’d already found a good bassist”, Nishikawa recalled. “The person I was introduced to was tetsuya”.
Host Kenji Yamauchi of comedy duo Kamaitachi interrupted to check the timeline: “Before L’Arc?”. Nishikawa confirmed it, and remembered going to find tetsuya at his part-time job. “I think it was under the elevated tracks in front of EST in Osaka. He was working at a shop around there, so I went to see him”.
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Nothing came of the meeting. “In the end it never really progressed, my debut was decided, and I ended up debuting with everything still vague”, Nishikawa said, before imagining how it must have looked from the other side: “So Tetchan probably thought, ‘We were going to form a band and he betrayed me'”.
L’Arc-en-Ciel’s official history dates their formation around tetsuya in Osaka to February 1991, with a first live show at Namba Rockets that May. Luis-Mary’s major-label debut album ‘DAMAGE’ followed on July 21st through Nippon Crown.
Luis-Mary disbanded in 1993, the same year L’Arc-en-Ciel took ‘DUNE’ to number one on the Oricon indies chart. Nishikawa went on to debut as T.M.Revolution with ‘Dokusai -monopolize-‘ on Antinos Records in May 1996.
Nishikawa and tetsuya crossed paths repeatedly on television afterwards, though neither brought up their earlier connection. “I thought he wouldn’t remember”, Nishikawa said, adding that tetsuya had assumed exactly the same thing about him. Word eventually reached him through a mutual acquaintance that tetsuya did remember. “I thought, ‘Really?’ And then we met and talked about how it had been back then”.
Yamauchi ran with the hypothetical: “If you’d formed that band, hyde wouldn’t have been in it, would he? As vocalist”. Co-host Ryuichi Hamaie extended the joke, suggesting hyde might have ended up wearing the ‘HOT LIMIT’ outfit instead.
The two did eventually share a stage. At JACK IN THE BOX 2008 at Nippon Budokan on December 27th, Nishikawa and tetsuya, who was still using the name tetsu at the time, sang as twin vocalists in SESSION F alongside MIYAVI and LUNA SEA’s INORAN on guitars, former La’cryma Christi bassist SHUSE, and Kishidan drummer Yukinojoe Shiratori. They performed T.M.Revolution’s ‘WHITE BREATH’ and L’Arc-en-Ciel’s ‘READY STEADY GO’, the second of which they had sung together at karaoke during a joint birthday party, according to Natalie’s report from the show.
