BLINDMAN Trivia — 10 Entries
10 sourced facts about BLINDMAN.
Trivia
The official biography traces the band's name to a slang term used in the West for close-protection work — the job of guarding people who need guarding. What makes the entry unusual is the clause that follows it. The band notes, in the same breath, that this account dates from the time of their formation and that they have no way of confirming it against anything findable online today. A band publishing its own name origin while flagging that the origin is unverified is a rare thing to find on an official page.
Every BLINDMAN lyric and every song title is in English; not one is in Japanese. Tatsuya Nakamura has explained that this is a deliberate rule, and that it goes back to a cassette a friend handed him around the age of twenty. It was billed as the biggest metal band in Korea at the time. The verses were sung in Korean and the chorus switched to English, and the seam between the two bothered him enormously — it struck him that a mix of Japanese and English probably landed on English-speaking ears in exactly the same way. He settled on English only from that point on. During the band's major-label years he was asked to write the next batch in Japanese, and refused.
On 22 December 2024 BLINDMAN played Meguro Rokumeikan under the banner LIVE 2024 – PROLOGUE TO 30TH ANNIVERSARY. Nakamura noted that he had been playing that stage since the Shōwa era, on through Heisei and into Reiwa — three imperial reigns on one small stage. What he liked about the room, he said, was that he could see the audience's faces clearly, which of course meant they could see his; there are venues, he added, where you cannot even tell who is playing the drums. And there was no point being sentimental about it: the building was old, and nothing built lasts forever.
From BLAZING CRISIS onward, Nakamura has handled recording, mixing and mastering himself. He is candid that he cannot do what a professional engineer does. What he has instead, by his own account, is two things: a clear picture of what he wants, and a soundproofed room at home. The second buys him an amount of time that would be unaffordable in a rented studio, and that time, he argues, is what makes up for the engineering skill he lacks.
Expansion is the band's eleventh album, it carries eleven tracks, and it was released on 11 November 2020 — a triple eleven. The record was not conceived that way. It began life as a mini-album gathering songs that sat slightly outside the band's usual range, and grew into a full-length as Nakamura kept adding to it. He admits without embarrassment to padding it out, and reckons a few of the songs would never have existed had he set out to make a full album from the start. His own ideal album length, incidentally, is whatever fits on a 46-minute cassette.
"Over There," the fifth track on Expansion, is the first instrumental Nakamura ever wrote. It was not for want of interest — he simply never believed he had the ability, and it took him more than two decades of the band's existence to decide he was ready. Everyone who hears it thinks of Gary Moore, and he has stopped resisting: it comes up in every interview, so he concedes it. He does not mind, because Moore looms larger for him than any other player. He recorded it knowing he could not reach that standard, but suspecting he might have something of his own to offer. Meaning was also read into its placement at number five — the end of side A, in vinyl terms. That part, he says, had genuinely not occurred to him.
OUTBURST arrived in 2023 as a mini-album rather than a full-length, and the reason was the pandemic. Expansion had come out in November 2020, and the tour that should have carried it never really happened. With so few shows played, Nakamura felt the band had not finished living with those songs, and he did not want to move straight on to another full album. A shorter release meant the tour could cover both records at once. Two older tracks he had long wanted to re-record went on it as well — and since both were up-tempo, he steered the new material away from speed. Fast songs, he adds drily, come to him less readily as he gets older.
Nakamura has no quarrel with BLINDMAN being filed under hard rock and heavy metal, or with being described as an HM/HR musician himself. He simply declines to use the words about his own work: asked what he does, he answers "rock musician" and stops there. His reasoning is that the same record will have one listener insisting it is heavy metal and another insisting it is not, and that drawing that line is not his call to make. He would rather not put a frame around it at all.
BLINDMAN made their album debut in 1998, in a Tokyo where visual kei had the momentum. Nakamura had been playing live houses in bands since he was eighteen, and by his early twenties the Japanese metal boom had already collapsed — whichever venue they played, he recalls, the room was empty, and it was genuinely hard going. He never changed course. There was nothing to do, as he tells it, but keep playing the hard rock and metal he had grown up on, doggedly and without cleverness. Toward the end of the decade the visual kei fever cooled and a sense began to build that HR/HM might come round again, which is roughly when the band's debut album landed. He suspects SABER TIGER and CONCERTO MOON were taking much the same position.
In 2024, founding keyboardist Hitoshi Endo rejoined BLINDMAN after roughly a quarter of a century away. Speaking from the stage at Meguro Rokumeikan that December, Nakamura described how it happened: once the previous keyboardist was gone, the first call he made was to Endo, asking whether he fancied doing BLINDMAN again after all this time. Endo agreed readily. Taking the microphone at the same show, Endo remarked that he had never heard of anyone rejoining a band after a gap that long, and that the more remarkable thing was that the band had survived long enough for the offer to be possible. The two sources disagree on the arithmetic: the official biography calls it a 26-year absence, while both men said 25 years from the stage that night.