Chapter III: 1996-1997: Early LAREINE

LAREINE was a Japanese visual-kei rock band that existed from November 1994 to February 17, 2007.
On these pages, you will find a full biography of LAREINE and the related bands.

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Chapter III: 1996-1997: Early LAREINE

After MACHI joined LALIENE, the band quickly renamed to LAREINE, and SHOKI changed his name to KAMIJO, which is actually his real name. With this new lineup and name, they did a bunch of smaller concerts in an event live series called “Pain of Love Story”, which had one live in december 1995, and many in january, february and march.

On the 26th of March, 1996, LAREINE held an important concert. Many say that they changed their name to LAREINE, and SHOKI to KAMIJO on this exact day. The reason why I believe it is earlier is because I own a very rare flyer from january 1996 which already refers to the band and frontman using their changed names.

Back to march the 26th, here they distributed a small 8cm single to everybody present containing one of their signature songs, 再会の花 (Saikai no hana) for free to anybody in the audience. Two colours exist, pink and black.

From april to july, they performed just a few concerts, and were probably busy recording their third demo tape, more about it later.

 

 

Note: The names “Laliene”/”LALIENE” and “LAREINE” are both French. Western languages use more letters than the Japanese language, for example, “L” and “R” are different in Western languages are the same in Japanese. This means that both “Laliene” and “LAREINE” are pronounced “Rarenu”, or “ラレーヌ” in Japanese. So for the Japanese, changing “Laliene” to “LAREINE” is not a big change.