BOØWY's LAST GIGS at Tokyo Dome, April 5, 1988

About the artist

BOØWY were a four-piece rock band: Kyosuke Himuro on vocals, Tomoyasu Hotei on guitar, Tsunematsu Matsui on bass and Makoto Takahashi on drums^[1]. Under their early name, Bōi, they played their first headlining show at Shinjuku Loft in Tokyo on May 11, 1981, to an audience of just 13 people, one of whom was Takahashi, before he joined^[2]. They made their record debut in March 1982 with the album MORAL^[2][1] and broke through in 1986 with JUST A HERO^[1].

On July 2 that year they played the Nippon Budokan for the first time, a show remembered for Himuro's greeting to the crowd, "Welcome to Live House Budokan"^[3]. The single "B・BLUE," released that September 29, reached No. 7 and became their first top-ten hit^[4]; the band's official biography credits it with setting off a band boom across Japan^[1]. The albums BEAT EMOTION and PSYCHOPATH that followed were major hits^[3], and the single "MARIONETTE" gave them their first No. 1 on the singles chart^[4].

Why this was the last show

The idea of quitting at the top came early. The members had long talked of breaking up once they reached No. 1 on the charts^[5], and drummer Makoto Takahashi has described the night they discussed it at a hotel in Nagano after a show there. Accounts date that night to December 16, 1985^[6] or December 16, 1986^[5].

On December 24, 1987, Himuro announced the end from the stage of Shibuya Public Hall in Tokyo^[1]. According to Takahashi, he never used the word "breakup"; he said the four would each go their own way^[6]. Himuro told the audience they had been doing BOØWY for six years and that, whatever anyone said, he thought they had been the coolest band in Japan^[7].

Their producer, Senji Kasuya, had insisted that the breakup stay secret until the Shibuya show and never be turned into a business. Beyond that, he had decided only that the band should thank the fans with a last show somewhere bigger than the Nippon Budokan. Then he heard about a stadium due to open the following year: Tokyo Dome. Jiro Koyasu, the band's director at Toshiba EMI, says that in the members' minds BOØWY had completely ended at Shibuya, and that LAST GIGS was, in a sense, "a reunion that came too soon"^[8].

What is known about the day

LAST GIGS was held over two nights, April 4 and 5, 1988, at the newly completed Tokyo Dome^[1], which had held its opening ceremony on March 17^[9]. The scramble for tickets overloaded the phone lines in Bunkyo, the Tokyo ward where the dome stands, and the 100,000 tickets for both nights sold out in ten minutes^[10]; a 2021 article puts the number at 96,500^[6].

After the first show, at the after-party, Hotei asked Takahashi whether "IMAGE DOWN" had been too fast. Takeo Nakanishi of the promoter Disk Garage remembers being struck that a band due to end the next day was seriously discussing its performance^[8].

According to the official track lists, the main set was the same 18 songs on both nights, from "B・BLUE" to "DREAMIN'." On April 4, a single four-song encore ended with "ON MY BEAT"^[11]. On April 5 there were two encores, and the second closed with "NO. NEW YORK," a song the band had already played in the main set^[12][13]. That made 23 performances in all^[14].

A Sony Music columnist recalls that on April 5, someone had chalked "Tonight BOØWY LAST GIGS" in big letters on the blackboard of his high school classroom^[15]. Koyasu, watching from the side of the stage, says he has never forgotten the sight of 50,000 people singing the same song at once^[8].

What the show left behind

The live album LAST GIGS came out on May 3, 1988, about a month after the shows, and became BOØWY's first release to sell more than a million copies^[10]. In 1989 it earned BOØWY the Artist of the Year award in the Japanese music category at the 3rd Japan Gold Disc Awards^[16].

Video came much later: a 12-song release in 2001, then in 2008 "LAST GIGS" COMPLETE, which added 11 songs to cover the full set list^[14]. In 2019, LAST GIGS -THE ORIGINAL- collected every song from both nights for the first time on four CDs, alongside two-CD editions of each night^[13]. Though the recordings were 31 years old, it reached No. 1 on a daily album chart^[8].

In July 1988 Himuro launched his solo career with the single "ANGEL"^[17], which went to No. 1 on the Oricon chart^[18]. Hotei made his solo debut the same year with GUITARHYTHM; on stage in 2016 he recalled setting out to leave the BOØWY format behind and make new music without copying himself^[19].

BOØWY are known as a band that has never re-formed^[8][20]. After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Himuro turned a Tokyo Dome concert planned for his own anniversary into a charity show of BOØWY songs only^[21]. Hotei then wrote on his blog that he had felt a reunion was the best way he could help, but that it had not come to be^[21]. In 2019 Matsui and Takahashi played on a Hotei album^[22], the three's first session together in 31 years^[20]. And in 2016 Himuro gave his own final Tokyo Dome concerts under the same title, LAST GIGS, closing the last night with "B・BLUE"^[17].

The music writer Keisuke Tsuchiya observed that Japanese rock bands of the 1980s switched almost overnight to the BOØWY style^[23]. Takuro of the band GLAY was 14 or 15 when he heard "B・BLUE"; stunned, he went straight out to buy the CD^[24]. The band OKAMOTO'S paid homage to the video for BOØWY's last single in its own video for "Dancing Boy"^[25].

It was 31 years before the April 5 show came out on CD exactly as it was played that night, right through to its second "NO. NEW YORK."