Taka Hirose

Infobox musical artist
Name = Taka Hirose

---

Img_capt = On stage at the Cardiff CIA, 1 December 2005
Background = non_vocal_instrumentalist
Birth_name = Takashi Hirose
Alias = Taka
Born = birth date and age|1967|06|28
Mizuho, Gifu, Japan
Origin =
Instrument = Bass guitar
Genre = Rock
Pop
Soft rock
Occupation = musician
Years_active = 1995-present
Label = Echo, EMI
Associated_acts = Feeder
URL = http://www.feederweb.com
Notable_instruments =

Taka Hirose (born Takashi Hirose, 28 July 1967, Mizuho, Gifu, Japan) is the Japanese bassist for the successful Welsh rock band, Feeder.

Biography

Taka began playing bass at the age of 14 in secondary school and played in several jazz and metal bands during his school years. After leaving school, he moved to Tokyo and worked for guitar manufacturing specialists ESP as well as working at night in a downtown bar.

In 1992 Taka planned to move to London to work as a graphic designer, but was unable to come up with the money for the flight by himself, and earned it by playing for Tokyo yakuza bosses in exchange for money. After moving to London, Taka planned to continue his musical activities, and answered an ad in the local "Loot" magazine from Grant Nicholas and Jon Lee, who were searching for a bassist in their new band, which would later become Feeder. A few days later, Hirose met Lee at Camden Station and they went back to Nicholas' house where the band was officially formed.

As Feeder began to take off, Hirose began to consider quitting. He had only planned for his music to be a sideline, and was unwilling to give up his newspaper office job to do it professionally. Following persuasion from Nicholas and Lee, and supported by his wife, Hirose packed in the job and Feeder set off to try and break the music business. After winning critical acclaim for their debut release "Swim" and their first full length album " Polythene", the band made their chart breakthrough with Top Ten follow-up "Yesterday Went Too Soon". In January 2002, after Feeder had spent the previous year enjoying the success of their fourth and at the time most popular album "Echo Park", which spawned hit singles "Buck Rogers" and "Seven Days in the Sun", Lee took his own life at his house in Miami. In shock and unsure whether Feeder would continue, Hirose returned to Japan to spend time with the family and friends he had left behind.

After much deliberation, Hirose and Nicholas decided to continue, and set to work later that year on their fourth full-length album "Comfort in Sound", with Mark Richardson recruited as their new drummer. The album's change in direction towards a more melancholy sound, largely due to the sadness caused by Lee's death, earned Feeder new fans and more success, and this was continued with the follow-up release "Pushing The Senses". Grant has however once mentioned in an interview, that he was always planning on changing the bands sound to a more mellow one for a future album.

Recently, the band released a singles album titled "The Singles" to high critical and commercial acclaim, it became a Platinum seller in just under three months.

Taka originally built his own bass for recording purposes, after working at Tokyo guitar makers ESP. He discovered an old Japanese Jazz bass copy which had an unusual black binding on a solid maple neck, so set about replacing the rest of it using an Ash bodied Jazz bass from Neil's on Denmark Street. All that was left to do was stick it to the neck, spray it back and chop the horns off.

To make it look more like a Jazzmaster he affixed a Badass bridge and a Seymour Duncan Quarter Pounder Precision, Jazz Bass pickups finishing it off with Combat Tone circuits.

With Combat (the Tokyo guitar workshop) he also had them make several other basses of his own design. One he describes as "a Spector meets Prince's guitar", another a Rickenbacker meets Prince's guitar and the final, his signature, is a copied body from a Gretsch semi acoustic bass guitar coupled with a solid ash body which was then sprayed with sparkling gold paint.

Trivia

*Hirose is accomplished at judo, which he has practised from an early age.

*He once hit Keanu Reeves in the face with an orange, as the crowd were booing him when playing in his band Dogstar at the Glastonbury Festival in 1999.

*"The Shining" is one of Taka's favourite films, and he has a photo of Jack Nicholson taken from the film attached to one of his guitars (the infamous "Here's Johnny!" shot after he breaks down the door with the hatchet).

*While in London in the 1990s, Hirose worked in the Chunichi Shimbun London bureau.

*He is a huge video game fan, and has helped make several games, including assisting in the production of Gran Turismo 3, on which Feeder featured on the soundtrack.

*He once broke Jon Lee's fingers by trapping him in a van door.

*He accidentally knocked out a tooth of his guitar technician, Andrew Mountain (aka "Punky"), with the headstock of his bass.

*Despite being able to write and produce music, he is yet to contribute other than instrumentally and vocally to a Feeder song. He however has his own side-project called Funkybottom, and created two instrumentals that were used as accompanying music for the studio videos for "Silent Cry", Feeder's forthcoming new album. He also remixed "Miss You" from the album for a video of his own.

*He is married, has three children, and owns three cats.

*In July 2008 during the T4 On The Beach festival, Taka was asked to smash a bass for a promo shoot. However, the bass bounced back up and hit him in the face, leading to Taka needing stictches.

External links

* [http://www.feederweb.com Official Feeder website]