Dressing in a flambouyant way was a reaction to the stiffled upbringing of the 70’s. Youth like to experiment with fashion but it’s not usually something you carry on doing once you get it out of your system.
As for the shirt, I have no recollection.
The main reason was for flexibility. The material was quite varied and by incorporating a trigger it meant I could use the actual bass drum sounds from the original recordings in most cases. For example, when I wrote the music for the track ‘Snow Borne Sorrow’ (a piece I’d originally intended for my solo album) I used different bass drum sounds for the first and second parts of the track. Perhaps most people wouldn’t pay much attention to it but it’s these little details that I find interesting and wanted to bring to the live performance. And since bass drums don’t require much in the way of subtle nuance (unlike the rest of the kit) it means that bass drum samples work pretty well for live performance. It also meant that in certain songs without drums I was able to use the same pedal to trigger musical samples such as in the track ‘Transit’.
Funny … The white shirt was (I believe) from designer Y’s and the ‘dogtooth’ trousers were made by Yoko (Masami Tsuchiya’s wife) who was also responsible for Richard, David & Masami’s outfits. During the first stages of the tour I’d grown weary of bright & shiny outfits and asked Yoko to make me something in all black, which she did, although unfortunately (and forever to my dismay) the costume wasn’t ready until we reached the end of the tour in Japan.
