Peter and Friends is the album celebrating Taeko Onuki’s 50th anniversary of her debut. It was recorded at EX Theater Roppongi in Tokyo on July 9, 2024, featuring a setlist of her songs from the 1980s and 1990s, when electronic sounds defined much of her music. Thanks to advances in technology, those sounds can now be brought to life on stage. “Rain” evokes the vivid sensation of clothes growing damp, “Happy-Go-Lucky” enlivens with its superb tempo, and now “Carnaval” dances lightly in the air. It was the opening track of the album Romantique, about which she later reflected that she had “discovered many clues to her voice and tone of music” and “found the place where she belonged.”
The album symbolized the season in her transition by adding European tastes with Ryuichi Sakamoto’s arrangements, and was supported mainly by three members of YMO. Its release date of 1980 tells that she was 27 years old at the time. After 45 years, this time, she sang the same songs with a young and talented band of Febian Reza Pane, Masato Suzuki, Manabu Sakata, Kei Fushimi, and Shohei Amimori. In the middle of the song, she introduced them to the audience. As I listened to the music while flipping through the pages of time, I wondered how time and music intertwine when music is in the air. In the same moment, the thought of 50 years almost made me sigh.
Of course, it was during the days of Sugar Babe when I heard her voice for the first time. In the mid-70s, venues like Ogikubo Loft seemed like special places, and I would visit those venues to see musicians such as Shigeru Suzuki & Huckleback and Makoto Kubota & The Sunset Gang, among others. Every day was filled with joy and new meetings. I believe some of the shows were even before the release of their debut album Songs. The fact that I kept going to venues seemingly meant that even in the time without the internet and social media, I could get what I needed to some degree – depending on how much you wanted it. Although the ways we listen to music have changed a lot since then, I think, on reflection, it’s not just because of the advanced technologies or time passing.
Back then, she always seemed to keep her eyes on the keyboard. Her face, partly hidden by long hair, carried a hint of loneliness. It was unusual for the band at the time to share lead vocals between a male singer, Tatsuro Yamashita, and her. Still, she was not as noticeable as Yamashita. Yet I remember how my heart fluttered when she sang “Itsumo Dori (As Usual)” which opens with lines such as: “I would give it up, now. Now that I don’t have a single thing to lose.” Many of the songs about women working in the city tended to fall into stereotypes, but the women in her songs carried the breath of real life – of being lost, of worrying. Her touch, like painting on canvas with a brush in a single stroke, also went well with her voice and left a fresh impression on me.
I felt I wanted to stay with her songs, at least for a while. That was the honest feeling I had. The song “Machi (A City)” from the album Grey Skies is one of those that fueled such a feeling. It also captures the heart of a young woman living in the city, leading her to whisper as she moves through the crowd every day: “Nobody knows that every time I walk past, I become a little tender.”
At the time, I couldn’t fully articulate it, but I sensed her aspirations as a singer-songwriter – what it means to represent something through song, and what a song can convey. For instance, if memory serves, one of her approaches was to sing about love while deliberately avoiding standard words like love or like. And as a young artist, she seemed aware of her responsibility and freedom to decide for herself – not according to others’ opinions – what is important and what is not, what is necessary and what is not.
In recent years, Taeko Onuki, in my mind, remains a noble and beautiful presence on stage. At the same time, I can still picture her climbing the hills of Shibuya, rushing into venues with a daypack on her slim frame, a nifty impression of someone heading alone to the next concert venue, after performing, unaccompanied, her cheerful, crisp laughter pleasantly bouncing along. I also can’t forget the shy expression she wore while holding a clock in her hand, as she affectionately shared a story about her late father: when she first started living alone, he bought her an alarm clock and would sometimes drop by unannounced.
She always says, “I don’t remember the past”, a remark which shows another side of her – someone who doesn’t cling to the past, unregretful, and dignified.
The more she builds her career, the more she is inevitably expected to take on. That’s the nature of the world she lives in. She doesn’t like it, but as time goes by, she seems to shed those burdens, growing lighter. As if to say, that is what keeps her going for so long.
Not only for her, but for everyone of the same generation engaged in pop music, perhaps, almost every aspect of it was a challenge into the unknown. On the path to pop music, nobody shows them the way – there was no other way round but to find it themselves, learning and developing step by step.
And that’s precisely why the new magic nobody had ever experienced was conjured up, and we were blessed with a chance to embrace the fruits of their efforts. That was the miracle of pop music. They never gave up on what they wanted to achieve, spared no effort, and worked as hard as they could, kept up training, nurtured their imagination, and continued to challenge themselves.
It might be around the beginning of the 1990s that many people began to admire her views on life, not only through music but also through her essays and other pursuits. She began to do more work outside of music and travel more often. Before long, she traveled to places that made you want to pull out a world map just to see where they are – Kenia and Tanzania in Africa, the Galapagos and the Amazon in South America, Antarctica, and so on. I was impressed by how her seemingly fragile body proved to be tough both physically and mentally. Each time she traveled, she had experiences that took her to places beyond our imagination. And with every encounter with nature and creatures, she must have shed unnecessary things, like the restricted ties of daily life in Japan.
In this way, her music has cultivated greater universality, profound sentiment, and beauty – almost without my noticing – by reducing itself to the essentials, simplifying, and keeping what is important secretly inside, both in the sung and the unsaid. And, of course, there is her strong presence. Before I knew it, 50 years have already passed.
When I reflect on Taeko Onuki, I can’t help but feel that it’s all about personality after all. Instead of being overwhelmed by the flood of information around us, we should appreciate simple experiences like listening to the old trees in the garden and feeling the different fragrances of the wind in each season. She has aged with the same honesty and care in life as she did with music. She's never been deceived by others, and she’s never deceived anyone. Apart from the peers she shares creative moments of making music with, she has always walked her path, feet firmly on the ground – not mingling, not forming groups, not resisting aging, not chasing trends. I am very grateful to have learned through her that the stream of time often brings us harsh, inhumane moments, but sometimes it does not forget to leave behind wonderful gifts.
