Former Japanese pop heart-throb and musical pioneer Ryuichi Sakamoto talks about music, the state of the planet ¡ª and why he still reluctantly lives in New York City.
What a long, strange journey it has been for Ryuichi Sakamoto. A revolutionary firebrand in the 1960s, he morphed into a ¡®70s techno-pop pioneer with the seminal band Yellow Magic Orchestra, which he co-founded with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi. YMO became one of Japan¡¯s biggest-selling bands ever -- and even posted a late-¡¯70s Top 20 hit in Britain with ¡°Firecracker.¡± The band was also a key influence on the techno and house movements that swept Western pop culture a decade later.
After a brief stint as a movie star in the early 1980s, including his role in Nagisa Oshima¡¯s 1983 standout ¡°Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence¡± -- for which he also wrote the soundtrack -- Sakamoto co-wrote (with Talking Heads¡¯ singer David Byrne and Cong Su) the 1987 Oscar-winning soundtrack for Bernardo Bertolucci¡¯s ¡°The Last Emperor¡± -- still the best known of the many soundtracks he has written -- of which 2002¡¯s ¡°Femme Fatale¡± is among his latest.
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