A great many people outside Japan have watched Takayoshi Ohmura play guitar without knowing who he was. He was one of the musicians in white behind BABYMETAL. He had a career before that, and it started early.
Osaka
Ohmura was born in Osaka Prefecture on 26 December 1983. After high school he entered the Osaka campus of the music school MI JAPAN in 2002, where his teachers included Mikio Fujioka and Kelly SIMONZ.
Two years later, in August 2004, he released a solo album, Nowhere to Go. He was twenty. The guest list was not a student’s guest list: Richie Kotzen, Mark Boals and Doogie White all appear on it. More solo records followed, among them Power of Reality (2005), Emotions in Motion (2007), Devils in the Dark (2012) and Angels in the Dark (2020).
The Band Work
In 2008 he joined Marty Friedman’s touring band. In December 2011 he became a full member of the rock band C4. And in 2013 he joined the Kami Band, the backing group for BABYMETAL.
That last job put him on the same stage as his old teacher. Mikio Fujioka was also one of the Kami Band’s guitarists, and the two shared the twin-guitar role until Fujioka’s death in January 2018. Teacher and student, in matching robes, in front of festival crowds abroad.
The Tools and the Teaching
Ohmura plays ESP guitars built to his own specification, the SNAPPER Ohmura Custom models. He also teaches at the school he came out of, MI JAPAN’s Osaka campus.
With the bassist BOH, another Kami Band regular, he organises an event series called 大暴乱 (Daibouran), which has also been streamed online.
Why It Matters
The Kami Band made a point that was easy to miss in the noise around BABYMETAL: the musicians were first-rate players with their own records. Ohmura is the clearest example. He was a guitar hero at twenty, and he took the backing job anyway.
Start with Nowhere to Go, then Angels in the Dark.
