Tatsuro Yamashita

From Sugar Babe to Ride on Time

Tatsuro Yamashita was born on February 4, 1953 in Ikebukuro, Toshima, Tokyo, and is known in Japan as Yamatatsu. He began as a drummer and switched to guitar when forming Sugar Babe, and lacking lead technique developed rhythm cutting as his style. Sugar Babe, formed in 1972 or 1973 with Taeko Onuki and Kunio Muramatsu, released Songs (1975) on Eiichi Ohtaki's Niagara label, and Yamashita also sang backing vocals on Yumi Arai's Misslim (1974). The band disbanded in 1976. He signed to RCA and recorded Circus Town (December 1976) in the US, and Spacy (1977), Go Ahead! (1978) and the live It's a Poppin' Time, recorded at Pit Inn in Roppongi, followed. Moonglow (1979) won a Japan Record Award in 1980.

Ride on Time (1980) made him a star, with the single reaching 3 on Oricon and the album 1. His permanent rhythm section became Jun Aoyama on drums and Koki Ito on bass. He made the one-man a cappella multitrack On the Street Corner (1980) and named Curtis Mayfield, James Brown and the Beach Boys among influences. For You (January 21, 1982) led to Melodies (1983), containing "Christmas Eve", which charted for 30 consecutive years according to Guinness in 2016, Big Wave (1984), Pocket Music (1986, his first programmed digital recording), Artisan (1991), Cozy (1998, his first original album to sell a million), Sonorite (2005), Ray of Hope (2011, number one on Oricon) and Softly (2022). He has hosted Sunday Songbook on Tokyo FM since 1992, the Sunday slot since 1994, with a 1,500th broadcast in 2021, and won the Minister of Education's Art Encouragement Prize in 2015.

Wikipedia counts about 9 million albums sold and calls him the most commercially successful Japanese male solo artist in album-chart history. His production and arrangement of Mariya Takeuchi's "Plastic Love" fed the city pop revival, its unofficial video passing 100 million views. HMV Japan ranked him sixth among Japanese artists. He prefers halls such as Nakano Sunplaza to arenas, and played Budokan in 2010 for Warner Music Japan's 40th anniversary. Setlist.fm lists 269 setlists. Red Bull Music Academy ran a 2014 feature titled The Artisan: The Inimitable Genius of Tatsuro Yamashita.