Ok, so last night, thinking that my daily listening to The Rainbow Goblins – sometimes multiple times – might be starting to wear thin, or lose it’s charm – I discovered (thanks to YouTube’s algorithm-bots) Takanaka’s unbelievably wonderful live 1981 Budokan performance of the entire album.
Prior to discovering Takanaka and his sublime music I would never have imagined watching a Japanese guy in a yellow plastic outfit, with rainbow hair and a rainbow axe, and a band dressed dressed in giant paper/maché goblin heads, would or could make me so happy. Who knew?
So now it’s time to knuckle down to some extra-curricular work – I’m stony broke, and a teacher in my summer hols (normally I’d be able to coast through the summer. Not this year!) – earn me some doh-re-mi, and (once the wolf is safely chased from the door!) start exploring his wider catalogue.
I know I want Seychelles (1976), his self titled ‘77 recording, and An Insatiable High (1977). Whilst I’m on the topic of the latter album, I wonder, did Jack Stratton of Vulfpeck cop his sporty look from Takanaka? Or is that just an example of what art historian Norman Rosenthal once called ‘morphological resonance’?*
Vulfpeck have an incredibly strong aesthetic, from their own font, to the little neo-classical and yet hyper-modern logo/jingle combo that starts their videos, to the sounds and visuals. And yet despite this, Takanaka’s sporty look – or rather the starkly sublime design brilliance of Insatiable High’s cover imagery – manages to be effortlessly and very Japanesely, ‘supelior’! Banzai!!!
* Trust an art critic to coin such a wordy phrase. Why use ‘they just so happen to look the same’, or ‘coincidence’, when you can invent your own snappy polysyllabic term!?