L’Arc-en-Ciel in Singapore

Japanese rock band L’Arc-en-Ciel, or Laruku in short, is probably the only band I’ve followed over the years.

I first got hooked on their music when I heard their theme song for the popular anime series Rurouni Kenshin back in the late 1990s, when it was shown on TV. I was still in secondary school then, and I must have heard it through an online download, because from what I understand, it was used as a theme song only for a short run due to a drugs problem with the former drummer.

At the time, Japanese popular culture (dramas, anime and music) was all the rage in Singapore, and Laruku’s songs were regularly played on the Japanese music segments on the Chinese radio stations. It was also the time when HMV was the multi-storey anchor tenant at the Heeren Shops in Orchard Road, and Japanese artistes had a major section on the third storey devoted to their music, with many listening stations featuring the latest albums. (Today, there is only one shelf of Japanese music in HMV’s single-storey premises at Somerset 313.)

It was also the time when people still burnt CDs to listen on their discmans. For me, L’Arc-en-Ciel became an important part of my memories of my time in junior college, as a CD with 13 of their songs provided my study music for the all-important A-level examinations. (With mp3s having taken over space-constrained CDs now, such a small set of songs probably seems unimaginable)

The atmosphere was electrifying throughout the concert! A great setlist (though like all fans, I wished they played more songs), a smooth, near-perfect delivery by frontman hyde and a very obliging audience made it a night to remember.

So when I heard that they were coming to perform in Singapore during their 2012 concert tour earlier this year, I had no doubts about going for it.

It was a rather fortuitous how I learnt of their tour stop here and found the people to go with. It was at a press conference at Raffles Hotel, held by the Singapore Institute of Technology, which I attended with two fellow education reporters from Lianhe Zaobao and Channel News Asia, Shihui and Sharon. When I joined them for a chitchat after the event, they were talking about L’Arc-en-Ciel coming to Singapore. I was practically in a state of disbelief, and I remember I kept going: “Wow, they are coming to Singapore?”

Soon we were hatching plans to attend the show together. We signed up for updates from the official tour website, and on the day of early-bird online ticket sales, all of us logged on to the sales site precisely at 9am in a bid to buy the best seats possible. In the end, we got row 8 seats in the centre bloc. A little disappointed initially, but hey, we could have done worse!

(As a side note, I have to thank the girls for making me wake up early for the ticket purchase. I didn’t expect so much competition for the best seats!)

So how was the concert, held on April 28? My thoughts are well-summarised in a review I wrote for my newspaper The Straits Times. It has been kindly scanned by the L’Arc-en-Ciel Singapore Street Team, an informal fan group here, and posted on their Facebook page. (You may view the scans here (Part 1) and here (Part 2).)

The shutterbug that I am, of course I couldn’t resist sneaking in a camera to grab a few shots during the concert. I couldn’t quite get tighter shots of each of the band members even from the eighth row, as the longest focal length for my Ricoh GXR A16 lens unit is 85mm, but it didn’t really matter. I was there to experience and enjoy L’Arc-en-Ciel’s first-ever live concert in Singapore, and photography could wait for a night.

It may be many years before they return to Singapore again. But as I mentioned in my review, fans now have a night to talk about for some time to come. Till then…