Sadistic Mika Band Man Dies

[Mulboyne]

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It is being reported that songwriter and music producer Kazuhiko Kato has been found dead in a suspected suicide. Kato is probably best known overseas for his work with the Sadistic Mika Band. That's him above wearing the garish blue shirt and playing guitar on a performance of "Time Machine", one of the band's best known songs, with Kaela Kimura on vocals.

[Ganma]

RIP
Sad newa.Great band from back in the day. I've got 2 of their albums Black Ships and Hot Menu(which I had on vinyl). Very original stuff, unlike the current J-pop scene.

[Samurai_Jerk]

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It is being reported that songwriter and music producer Kazuhiko Kato has been found dead in a suspected suicide.

Looks like it's no longer suspected:

Sadistic Mika Band founder Kato hangs himself

[Mulboyne]

I've just been reading about Kato's wife, Kazumi Yasui, who died in 1994 at the age of 55. She sounds like some woman. As a lyricist, she has some 4,000 songs to her name and was awarded so many trophies and prizes that friends say she threw most of them away because they were cluttering up her home. At a time when overseas vacations were unusual, she set out to travel the world in her late twenties. According to her Wikipedia entry, she lived a high old life, marrying an industrialist in Rome in 1967 and then divorcing him the following year in New York. She then based herself in Paris for a couple of years before heading back to Japan in 1971. Her house in Japan had a swimming pool and she hosted scores of fashionable visitors. Affter crashing her Ferrari while drunk, she's reported to have said "No problem, I'll just buy another one". She married Kato in 1977 and some of the obituaries for him suggest he never really got over her death.