ANTHEM Trivia — 22 Entries
22 sourced facts about ANTHEM.
Trivia
Japanese heavy metal in the 1980s was described with a weather metaphor — high pressure in the west, low in the east — meaning that the strongest bands were gathered around Osaka and Kyoto. Writing about that period, King Records places Anthem within it as the leading band of Tokyo, which says something about how the group was heard at the time.
Anthem formed in Tokyo in 1981. The About page on the band's own site describes a group that made its name through performances of considerable heat and violence before reaching a major label, and dates that major-label debut, the album Anthem, to 1985 — four years after the band came together.
The debut album Anthem was marketed under the slogan Power Metal Martial Law. King Records quotes the phrase on its own hard rock and heavy metal site, and in the biography further down the same page writes the album's title as Anthem - Power Metal Martial Law, so that the advertising line ended up attached to the record as if it were part of its name.
From the third album, Bound To Break, in 1987, Anthem worked with the producer Chris Tsangarides, whose credits include Gary Moore and Thin Lizzy. He went on to handle Gypsy Ways, Hunting Time and Domestic Booty as well, covering most of the band's King Records output. Thirty years later he worked on the mix of Engraved, and an interview with him appears on the video content of that album's limited first pressing.
Bound To Break appeared in March 1987, and that June Anthem played abroad for the first time. King Records' biography places those shows in Los Angeles and notes that the live album recorded there, The Show Carries On!, followed within the same year. In the United States their studio albums were handled by Restless Records.
Eizo Sakamoto left immediately after the Bound To Break tour. The band's own site says his replacement was Yukio Morikawa, a singer of considerable power, and the first album with him is Gypsy Ways of 1988. Sakamoto was called back when the band restarted in 2001 and sang with them again until 2013.
The guitar on the sixth album, No Smoke Without Fire, is played throughout by Yoya Fukuda, but Fukuda told the band he was leaving in February 1990, once recording was over. King Records' biography says that Anthem, needing someone who could step straight in, brought in Hideaki Nakama that March, from the band Harry Scurry — so the guitarist on the record and the guitarist who toured it were not the same man.
No Smoke Without Fire was the first Anthem record made outside Japan, cut in London. King Records' notes give the producer as Tony Taverner, whose credits include Nazareth, and record a guest appearance on keyboards by Don Airey, formerly of Rainbow — an early instance of a player from abroad joining an Anthem session.
After Hideaki Nakama left at the start of 1991, the guitar chair stayed empty for some time. King Records' biography records that in August that year Akio Shimizu, then twenty, came to an audition through an acquaintance of Yukio Morikawa and got the job. The newcomer found at that audition has been Anthem's guitarist for more than thirty years since.
The About page on the band's own site says that Naoto Shibata, impressed by what Akio Shimizu could do, decided he would finish one album with the new guitarist and then bring Anthem to an end. Domestic Booty, released in March 1992, was therefore conceived as the band's last record before work on it began, and Anthem played their final show in Tokyo on 10 July that year.
What brought the Anthem name back was a plan to make a record of Graham Bonnet singing Anthem songs. According to the band's own site, Naoto Shibata and Akio Shimizu recorded fresh backing tracks for Bonnet to sing over; the project appeared in 2000 as Heavy Metal Anthem and was followed by a Japanese tour. Eight years after the split, the restart began with a one-off project rather than with the band itself.
When Anthem restarted, Naoto Shibata set a condition: no reunion in the nostalgic sense, no gathering of old members for its own sake, but a band living in the present and writing new music. The band's own site says that with this in mind the first person he approached was Akio Shimizu. From Seven Hills in 2001, the four musicians assembled then worked together for eleven years without a single change.
With Nucleus, released worldwide on 29 March 2019, Anthem became the first Japanese act to sign with the German metal label Nuclear Blast. The band's own site sets out the arrangement: Nuclear Blast for Europe, Golden Robot Records for North America, Australia and New Zealand, and Ward Records for Japan and the rest of Asia. The following April they played the Keep It True festival in Germany.
Breathing Real ~40years of Anthem~, released on 5 September 2025 to close the band's fortieth-anniversary year, is a four-disc set with one disc each for the King Records, Victor, Universal and Metal Man eras. The band's own announcement describes it as a summary of those forty years made deliberately from Naoto Shibata's own point of view, and as a release that crossed label boundaries to exist at all; the booklet carries his recollections of all forty songs.
In November 2025, the band's fortieth-anniversary year, Anthem played in China. Their own announcement gives two dates: Omni Space in Beijing on 15 November and the Bandai Namco Shanghai Cultural Centre's Mirai Hall on 16 November, with tickets sold either as a VIP pass including a signing and photo session or as standard admission. It was thirty-eight years since the band's first shows abroad, in Los Angeles in 1987.
Asked at a public talk with the editor of Burrn! what had stayed with him most since the band restarted, Naoto Shibata pointed to the night Akio Shimizu, thoroughly drunk, told him he badly wanted to do Anthem again — so drunk, Shibata said, that although they were sitting side by side in a taxi he had to lean in to make out the words. He named it as one of the moments that set the restart in motion.
Anthem's twentieth-anniversary shows in 2005 came about because the critic Masanori Ito pointed out that the milestone had arrived. At the talk event described above, Naoto Shibata said he believed theirs was probably the first anniversary event staged by a professional Japanese heavy metal band. Ito had initially suggested bringing former members back for the Tokyo date alone; in the end they were taken on every date of the run.
Akio Shimizu was voted first in the guitarist category of the Heavy Metal Championship 2023, published in the April 2024 issue of Burrn!. Talking with the magazine's editor, Naoto Shibata named the result as one of the happiest things to have happened since the band restarted, and said that Shimizu's playing became noticeably more assertive afterwards.
During the pandemic, when rock concerts in Japan had become all but impossible to stage, Naoto Shibata has said he seriously considered giving up music. What he describes as unforgettable is the view from the stage at the Kotetsu Festival held at the Tokai City Arts Theatre in 2021: an audience masked, spaced apart and forbidden to shout, telling the band with their bodies alone that they had come.
The seventeenth album, Crimson & Jet Black, went through more than one round of recording before it was finished. Talking with the editor of Burrn!, Naoto Shibata said that only two songs from the first session and four from the second survived into the finished record, and that because the arrangements had changed fundamentally most of them were effectively different songs. It goes some way to explaining the six-year gap since the previous album.
For their fortieth anniversary Naoto Shibata decided against calling former members back. What he did instead was have a tribute band put together and then take it on tour with the real one — an arrangement he says he had rarely heard of. Shibata has described how the whole band was spurred on by the effort of that tribute group, The Juggler, led by Norifumi Shima of Concerto Moon.
Crimson & Jet Black reached No. 14 on the Japanese weekly album chart. It is sung entirely in English and was released in Japan and abroad on the same day.