🎸 X JAPAN just dropped previously unseen footage from a 1989 open-air show in Tokyo — two songs, "Kurenai" and "X." To a casual listener it's a cool old clip. To fans, it's closer to a holy grail. Here's why.

Why fans call this one legendary

For decades, a piece of audio from this exact concert has been treasured. When the band — billed then simply as "X" — released the "Kurenai" single in September 1989, it included a live recording from this June 10 show at Tokyo's Hibiya Open-Air Concert Hall: the celebrated "+YOUR VOICE" version, the one where the whole crowd sings the song back at the band. That live take has been beloved ever since — and fans later voted "Kurenai" the No. 1 track on a fan-selected best-of album. What almost nobody had in clean quality was the video. Now they do.

It also captures a band that no longer exists. On bass is TAIJI and on guitar hide — both gone now, hide in 1998, TAIJI in 2011. (The band lost a third member, bassist HEATH, in 2023.) The five young musicians tearing through "Kurenai" here had the entire improbable story — and all the loss — still ahead of them.

And it's the moment of ignition. The show was filmed less than two months after the major-label album BLUE BLOOD landed in April 1989, before their first Budokan, long before the Tokyo Dome era. This is the band raw, ferocious and on the absolute rise, in a small outdoor venue with the crowd headbanging in unison. It's exactly the footage people point to when they argue early X shows were the band at their best.

So, who are X JAPAN?

Do we really need to do this? Press play and you'll get it. This is X JAPAN. The history is on Wikipedia if you want it. Fine, the elevator version for the uninitiated: they pioneered visual kei (the mega-hair, full-makeup genre whose DNA is all over anime), sold out Tokyo's 55,000-seat Dome a record 18 times, headlined Madison Square Garden, played Wembley Arena and Coachella, and moved more than 30 million records. That's the footnote. Now watch.

Why it's surfacing now

More archival videos are coming, restored song by song on the band's official channel. Material that used to live only on degraded VHS tapes and an old single is finally a click away, in good quality, for anyone on earth.

So — do you know X JAPAN where you live? And is there a band from your country whose lost live tape fans would lose their minds over if it suddenly turned up? Tell us.

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