Bradcat's J-Music Focus...ONE OK ROCK

Formed in 2005, ONE OK ROCK are starting to generate a real buzz in the Japanese pop rock scene. While initially not having any major success in the Oricon charts, they have recently started to break into the top ten. To put it into perspective, their first album released in 2007 and sold around 26,000 copies, while their fifth album released in 2010 and sold 105,000 copies.

ONE OK ROCK - Clock Strikes

ONE OK ROCK comprises of four members, Taka (vocals), Toru (guitar), Ryota (bass), and Tomoya (drums) all hailing from the Osaka region, except for Taka who was born in Tokyo and was previously a vocalist in Japanese boy band "NEWS".

The band's name, ONE OK ROCK, comes from "one o'clock", the time that the band used to practice on weekends. However, noticing that the Japanese language makes no real distinction between r's and l's, they changed "o'clock" to "o'crock" (or "o'krock"), which was then separated to become "ok rock"

While not being the biggest rock band in Japan, they have still recently announced a world tour and will be playing the UK in October (the show is unfortunately already sold out!)

Check out this great video in which ONE OK ROCK meet Western pop punk band Fall Out Boy. There are subtitles on the video (click the subtitles button on the video) if you're not confident with your Japanese linguistic skills, don't worry!

You can purchase ONE OK ROCK's latest album from iTunes for just £7.99 here

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