A natural talent whose piano teacher insisted he should study composition from the age of 10, who has worked with Davids Bowie and Byrne, and who has create film soundtracks including Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, Sakamoto always wanted to be a successful musician – although successful in his terms means being able to live comfortably on the proceeds of his music alone.
When the band he formed with drummer Yukihiro Takahashi, the trailblazing Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), began to sell enormous quantities of records in the late 1970s, Sakamoto was initially pleasantly surprised: a Japanese band having hits in the UK, Europe and America was a rarity. But that surprise led to shock.
“Suddenly I was like an idol,” says the quietly spoken musician. “I couldn’t walk down the street without being mobbed and I found it really difficult to adjust to being this public figure.
“After your turn in the spotlight, you maybe become less interesting. But it was pretty horrible at the time. There were people outside my house constantly. It was like being a prisoner.”
The up-side of YMO’s success was that doors opened. Aside from Bowie and Byrne, there have been collaborations with David Sylvian, Youssou N’Dour, Iggy Pop, Robbie Robertson and William Burroughs. Sakamoto’s music has soundtracked films by Bernardo Bertolucci, Oliver Stone, Pedro Almodovar and Brian de Palma, and he has achieved his long-time ambition of staging his own opera, entitled Life.
And even at the height of the success that led to YMO being hailed, alongside Kraftwerk, as godfathers of electropop, there were positive experiences. Sakamoto remembers playing London in 1979, for instance. “It was at the start of the new wave, the transition period after punk, and there were a lot of radical, fashionable young people. I still remember clearly a fashionable new-wave couple in a club going to the dancefloor when they played one of my songs. I thought, ‘Wow! They are so fashionable and cool – but we were the ones that made them dance, so wow, we must be really cool too. That was quite gratifying at the time.”
These days being cool means something else entirely to Sakamoto, who recently recorded an underwater stream in almost freezing temperatures: “The purest sound I’ve ever heard.” But in his teens it was through basketball, not music, that he thought he would interest the girls.
“I was tall compared to the other guys in my class, so I was quite good at hitting the basket and I dumped music for a while,” he says. “This made a change from music dumping me: a couple of years before that, my piano teacher had told my parents not to bother sending me back to lessons because I’d been learning what I wanted to learn rather than what he had been trying to teach.
“But after a while I began to feel there was something missing – that basketball wasn’t enough – so I had to go and beg my old music teacher to take me back.”
Once reinstated, Sakamoto got his head down and worked on the talent that would lead to him becoming one of the most versatile musicians of our times. As if to illustrate this point, he has just released two quite different albums, Playing the Piano, on which he revisits popular compositions such as his themes from Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky, giving them a minimalist treatment, and the more experimental Out of Noise.
Soundtrack work has always come naturally, he says, because he often has compositional ideas while watching moving images, be they on television or through a window. “Sometimes ideas come into my head and I have no idea how they got there,” he says. “These are the best ideas because at other times I can spend days and days thinking about what I might play and nothing will come to me.
“When I have to create something, I can do it. That’s the beauty of working with film – you have a deadline and some direction and so you create. When I was working on Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, I wanted to create something that would sound oriental, even to Japanese people, and that’s how I came up with that theme.”
His themes stay with him. The solo piano album, he explains, works for him like a photo album, with tunes triggering memories the way pictures do. Solo piano concerts, such as the one he is due to give in Edinburgh tonight, also help him realise his ambitions of eco-friendly touring. Although he is a big fan of live internet broadcasts, for instance, he accepts they are never going to be a substitute for being in the same venue as the musicians.
As someone who has no great wish to be remembered after he’s gone, except perhaps for being able to change the atmosphere of a room with his music, he is particularly concerned about his carbon footprint. “I don’t need an entourage,” he says. “I just want to play music and make it as personal for the listener as possible.
“I used to sing, which is the most personal form of music-making, but although I tried very hard, I decided it’s not my thing. So instead of singing, I try to sing through my hands.”
Ryuichi Sakamoto plays the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, tonight.
