In the fickle and transient world of Japanese pop music, the long-running success story that is the Southern All Stars is truly remarkable. The Southern All Stars’ roots lie in Chigasaki, a city in the Shonan seaside resort area southwest of Tokyo. It was there that in the mid-‘70s that a group of high-school friends put the band together under the leadership of Keisuke Kuwata, one of the most charismatic figures on the Japanese scene. Kuwata and future SAS bassist Kazuyuki Sekiguchi met while members of Aoyama University’s folk song club in 1974 and over the next two years the band gradually took shape with the addition of drummer Hiroshi Matsuda, percussionst Hideyuki Nozawa, and keyboardist Yuko Hara, who was later to become Kuwata’s wife. In 1976, after jamming together for a while, the band felt confident enough to play their first public gig at a local festival. There was only one problem: the band didn’t have a name. A friend of Kuwata’s came up with what turned out to be the inspired name of Southern All Stars after listening to Neil Young’s “Southern Man” and then a cut by the Fania All Stars on the radio. The gig was a success, and in 1978 SAS released their first major-label single, “Katte ni Sinbad”. In 1979 SAS released the ballad “Itoshi no Eri”, one of their biggest all-time hits, which Ray Charles later recorded as “Ellie My Love.” From the start, the band was dominated by the explosively prolific tale...
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In the fickle and transient world of Japanese pop music, the long-running success story that is the Southern All Stars is truly remarkable. The Southern All Stars’ roots lie in Chigasaki, a city in the Shonan seaside resort area southwest of Tokyo. It was there that in the mid-‘70s that a group of high-school friends put the band together under the leadership of Keisuke Kuwata, one of the most charismatic figures on the Japanese scene. Kuwata and future SAS bassist Kazuyuki Sekiguchi met while members of Aoyama University’s folk song club in 1974 and over the next two years the band gradually took shape with the addition of drummer Hiroshi Matsuda, percussionst Hideyuki Nozawa, and keyboardist Yuko Hara, who was later to become Kuwata’s wife. In 1976, after jamming together for a while, the band felt confident enough to play their first public gig at a local festival. There was only one problem: the band didn’t have a name. A friend of Kuwata’s came up with what turned out to be the inspired name of Southern All Stars after listening to Neil Young’s “Southern Man” and then a cut by the Fania All Stars on the radio. The gig was a success, and in 1978 SAS released their first major-label single, “Katte ni Sinbad”. In 1979 SAS released the ballad “Itoshi no Eri”, one of their biggest all-time hits, which Ray Charles later recorded as “Ellie My Love.” From the start, the band was dominated by the explosively prolific talent of songwriter/front man Kuwata, whose idiosyncratic, “foreign”-sounding vocal style is well-suited to the band’s unashamedly retro, hook-laden brand of rock ‘n’ roll. All the members of SAS have embarked on solo or side projects over the years, most notably Kuwata, both as a solo act (check out his excellent 1994 solo album,
Kodoku no Taiyo) and as leader of the Kuwata Band. But SAS remains a going concern, continuing to pump out hits in their third decade as a band.
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