2011/09/14＊Takuro
「Two nights before Nagoya」
We played Hiroshima, Fukuoka and two days in Osaka, with our first show in Nagoya scheduled for tomorrow. It’s not unusual for us to play two unrelated shows on consecutive days, but playing Zepp two days in a row is something we haven’t done before. We’re having so much fun right now. The audiences and our live performance seem different, too.
By the way, I wonder if you all watched the Kamome PV? Just now turning on the TV in my hotel room, they showed a glimpse of it on some music program. Also, the last time I talked about this, I was mistaken when I said the choreographer was dancing in the video — it was, of course, the dancer who was doing the dancing. Apologies for that. This is going to be half excuse, half self-praise, but anyway. Not only does the PV this time not feature the band, it was first finished without us meeting the director or even going to the place of the shoot. We were in the middle of our tour, see. But even regardless of all that, combining the director’s ideas as well as our own image of the song, we received several versions of it that we checked out during our tour, and it was pretty much perfect from the get-go, with basically nothing we didn’t like about it. It only took a bit of brushing up to create the finished product that you’re now watching today. Watching it for the first time and seeing how little the gap between the finished product and the image we had of the song was — or rather, seeing just how awesome the synergy of the music and the footage was — we were all taken aback and just going “…amazing!“
And thus the PV for Kamome was born, combining its power to excite, the immense ability of the director who was able to catch that on film and the power of the choreography and the dance itself. AKB48 and EXILE, Girls’ Generation and the other K-POP artists, etc, they all have a number of PV’s where they dance in groups, but as of September 2011, a “PV with nothing but one person dancing solo throughout the song” is, to my knowledge, something found only in Radiohead’s “Lotus Flower” (or, well, just Thom Yorke rather than a dancer) and 9mm’s “Kamome”. And I think they’re both beautiful videos. If CS has a category for “solo dancer” PV’s, I think this’ll probably guarantee us a nomination, right? So it’ll be a confrontation with Radiohead… fufufufu… well, there’s probably no such category though.
Sorry this got so long. If you read this far and have yet to see the Kamome PV, definitely do search for it on YouTube or so and watch it, please. And for those of you who have seen it, feel free to watch it again. With that, let’s meet at Nagoya tomorrow.
