THE BIRTHDAY EVE

The Birthday Eve is the first Loudness album, released by Nippon Columbia on 25 November 1981. Guitarist Akira Takasaki and drummer Munetaka Higuchi put the band together after Lazy dissolved, recruiting vocalist Minoru Niihara and bassist Masayoshi Yamashita; all four came from Osaka and all four were in their early twenties. The record opens with "Loudness", an instrumental named after the band itself, which stayed in the live set for decades afterwards. Tracks like "Rock Shock (More And More)" and "High Try" set out the position the group would hold to: a Japanese band playing hard rock in English, without apology or compromise. The debut concert that followed, at the Asakusa International Theatre, sold out to an audience of 2,700, and the band built quickly from there. This is the starting point of a career now past forty years, and a document of where Japanese hard rock stood in 1981.