Ladybeard is an Australian singer who is active as an idol in Japan. Initially starting his career as a pro wrestler and stuntman, Ladybeard’s idol career began when he joined the Japanese idol group Ladybaby in 2015 before moving to another idol group Deadlift Lolita in 2017. Currently, he’s an active member of Babybeard, an idol group he created around the pandemic year.
As a part of the Chibicon Jakarta event, KAORI Nusantara’s team has been given the opportunity to meet Ladybeard himself and discuss his career from his start to this day. From a stuntman and a pro-wrestler to an idol, Ladybeard shared how he first created the persona, the challenges that come with it, and other interesting stories that occurred during his career.
Due to the length, the interview is presented as two parts. This first part will focus on how Ladybeard started his career, how he transitioned to singing, and the mentality he brought to make his persona work. The Interview was conducted by Dean, our Greater Jakarta Area contributor, and edited for clarity and conciseness with the focus on the questions. Check it out!
Dean (D): Good evening, Ladybeard. Thanks for having us. My name is Dean from KAORI Nusantara…
Ladybeard (L): HEY HEY HEY! KAORI readers! My name’s Ladybeard. I’m sitting here in Jakarta, Indonesia, with Dean! How are you, my friend?
D: Very good! Thanks for your enthusiastic answer. Your response tells me I’m going to enjoy this…
L: Hell yeah, bro! Thanks! We’re going to have a good time.
D: First of all, you’re a professional wrestler. What’s the story behind choosing Ladybeard as your in-ring name, and eventually your stage name?
L: Yeah, I actually started with the Cantonese name first. I started working as a wrestler in Hong Kong, and I made the decision that I was gonna wear a dress in the ring. From there, I made my Cantonese ring name “Wu Sou Lui” (鬍鬚女). “Wu Sou” means “beard”, and then “Lui” means “girl”. But “Wu Sou” can also be interpreted as anything of the masculine, so that’s why those two things went together.
But then as I started doing more work outside Hong Kong and in languages that weren’t Cantonese… (laughs). So, I had to have an English version of the name and came up with Ladybeard.
D: That suits your character very well
L: Hell yeah! I’m a giant bearded man wearing pigtails and a skirt. Can you make this whole thing make sense? You can’t? You have to! Back to you, Dean!
D: Okay (laugh). Since you’re a professional wrestler, do you have a favourite wrestler whom you like? Is there someone that you’d want to wrestle with someday? Maybe someone in the indie circuit or even in a major company such as WWE, AEW, or NJPW?
L: Yeah, but one of the interesting things is… all of the wrestlers whom I kind of looked up to or admired when I was young are all old now. Maybe they’ve retired or some of them have passed away or whatnot. So, a lot of them I go, “Well, I’ll never wrestle him I suppose.” Out of the ones still going, do you remember X-Pac[1]? I love X-Pac.
D: X-Pac from DX!
L: Exactly. He was very inspirational for me because out of all the wrestlers in WWE in the Attitude Era[2], he was the one doing all the jumping spinning kicks and whatnot. I was from a Taekwondo background. So, that resonated with me very strongly. X-Pac would be wonderful to work with. He’s still going, I think? But he’s a bit old now. The same goes for Rob Van Dam [3], again with the kicks and everything. Tell you what, RVD man. That is a large and athletic man. When I lived in Hong Kong, everyone thought I was him. The Hong Kong guys thought I was RVD. They’d follow me and go, “Hey, that’s RVD.”
D: (laughs) Okay, thank you. So, in your (social media) bio, you say that you sing, you dance, you destroy…
L: I do those three things, yeah.
D: What is it exactly that you want to destroy?
L: Hearts. Breaking hearts. And expectations, of course! Those are the things I destroy, everything else can be left intact! That’s why I bring in the cute, you see? So that every heart in a twelve-mile radius can break upon observation of Ladybeard! That’s the key to kawaii-ness. Not just heart-breaking, heart-destroying! That’s how we do it. And expectations of course, you can’t leave expectations undestroyed, can you? When people have high expectations and they’re just, not met; that’s a sad day.
D: You’ve had professional experience as a stuntman with the renowned Jackie Chan Stunt Team?
L: You know what, I did not work with the Jackie Chan Stunt Team. My stunt trainer was on the Jackie Chan Stunt Team. When he came back to Australia—because he was ozzie—he made his own team. So yeah, I wasn’t on the Jackie team at all, I just trained under a guy who had been under the Jackie Chan team.
D: Oh, thanks for correcting. Was there an unforgettable lesson or experience you had when training with them?
L: The Hong Kong Stuntman Association’s motto is “Risk Life, Save Money.” So that’s the first thing you learn! (laughs). Your safety is not gonna be highly regarded in this occupation. Prepare yourself for that. But we learned a lot on that team. How do I say this? It’s the first time I’ve been in an environment where just no one cared (about) how you’re doing. What’s important is getting the result, getting the shot on camera. If you can’t achieve that, everyone will be upset.
But I think that’s kind of good, right? Because it kind of, you know, toughened me up and prepared me for “the real world”. Trust me, once you leave your home country and then do something as extreme as Ladybeard? You have to deliver.
When I first got to Japan, I remember someone heard about me, and they said, “Oh wow. Big white dude doing heavy metal, pro-wrestling, J-Pop. That’s either gonna be amazing, or terrible.”
We’re gonna make sure it’s amazing, right? That stunt experience kind of taught me that. Like, you know, 99% isn’t good enough, you gotta be amazing all the time.
D: Really appreciate your work.
L: Thank you. Hopefully, I’m being somewhat amazing. I’m not just disappointing people. That’s where my ‘expectation destroying’ comes in you see, I do my best, I do my best—if I haven’t destroyed your expectations yet, sorry. I’m sorry microphone! (screams into the microphone) I’m sorry!
D: (Laughing) Let’s talk a bit about your singer side. As a wrestler and singer, those are on completely different sides of the entertainment spectrum. How do you balance those two things out?
L: That’s a good question. So for wrestling you gotta do all the wrestling stuff. I must train in the gym, become tough, and take a lot of impact. But then of course, for my adorably cute singing, dancing, and… SCREAMING (growls) performance, I have to be adorable. That is the opposite thing from being all strong and tough and what we gotta do in the ring, right? Yeah, it is an interesting dynamic.
The answer to your question is: how do you handle doing both? I just do. You do both and you do all the things that are required for both, and you have to take both very seriously. Because most people I think would do one very seriously, and then do the other half-assed, you know what I mean? It’s not.
So, it’s tough, right? Generally speaking, being big and strong and whatnot does not really go particularly well with being all adorable and cute. These are contradictory things. But doing them both at the same time, that’s what makes Ladybeard. This is why no one else is doing this, and this is why it’s been interesting and people want to see it.
D: Because with both, people are curious, “How can you sing so well?”, and “How can you also wrestle so well?”
L: Very kind words. I think I’m not very good at singing or wrestling, no, I’m just bumbling through this nightmare. Trying to get through! Hoping, hope I don’t upset anyone too much! That’s all I’m doing.
D: (Laughs) Okay. As one of the people who popularized kawaiicore, how did you come up with the idea of (performing) this music subgenre?
L: Well, when I started doing this I wasn’t thinking of making a new music subgenre. I’m going to say something controversial here: After I started, that was when BABYMETAL debuted. Of course, they did a much better job of, you know, popularizing the genre on a far larger scale than I did! Clearly! But when I started it, I was just trying to make my show impactful, joyous, and funny.
When I started, I was in Hong Kong and singing metal covers of Cantonese pop songs. The most enjoyable part about this is that you have a song in your head you’re used to hearing every day. It’s part of the zeitgeist, part of culture. Then you hear that same song, but you hear it sung as a metal song, and that totally subverts it. To me at least, there’s a lot of joy in that.
My favourite songs have always been metal covers of pop songs. So that’s what I was trying to do with the project. From just starting to try it and thinking about how I could create the most emotional impact with this. So, I chose to make the cute and sweet parts as cute and sweet as possible, the heavy parts as heavy as possible, make that gap between the two as big as possible and then swing as dramatically as you can from one to the other. So that’s how that began.
So, I started out by singing Cantopop girl groups’ songs and so forth. When we got to the sweet cutesy cute chorus part, I’d sing that as sweet as I could, but then during the verses I’d be screaming those as hard as I could. That’s how that came to be. It was all just about getting the result, really. Getting the maximum emotional impact and maximum emotional result from the audience.
I’ll say something topical about this. I think a lot of performers forget that they’re working for the audience. Your job is to give the audience an experience. I think a lot of performers and whatnot get kind of selfish about that. “But this is what I want to do! What I want!”. That’s fine, if you’re doing it as a hobby and doing it purely for the sake of artistic expression. But if you want to have an audience, and especially if you want to get paid to do it, then the audience’s needs are more important than your own.
D: Wise words.
L: Thanks, man. I’m sorry, I’m going on a lot. When I started wrestling training, this is one of the things they told us, they said: “Know what your job, your role on the show is.” Like, know what your job is, right?
In a wrestling show, let’s say you’ve twelve matches. The main event is the last match where we have super high drama. That’s when the belt is in jeopardy of being changing hands. That’s where we have our biggest stars, our most high-impact moment. So that has a specific role, yeah? Then the semi-main is basically a warm-up for the main event, right? Now the opening match…, the opening match has a specific job. It needs to be fast, needs to be punchy, and it needs to engage the audience. We were always told, “Know what the promoter needs from you.” So know your spot on the card and then fill that spot.
However, a lot of wrestlers will go “But I want to do some giant dragon suplex triple swanton[4] off the top!”. Yeah, but doesn’t make sense for you to do that, because that’s not your spot on the card, right? So for me, because I’m a bearded man in a bikini, it doesn’t make sense for me to do these giant moves. My job is to go in and be cute and funny, and kind of be comedy relief between a series of serious matches, if you know what I mean?
So, know your role on the card. That’s what we’re taught at the start of wrestling training. And you see wrestlers who do well, they respect that. And you see (that) in the WWE a lot. Things like (Royal) Rumbles [5] …, you know, the comedy wrestler who would always come into the Rumble. He’ll enter and everyone’s like, “Yay! Some comedy relief!” and then he’ll end up getting eliminated pretty quickly a lot of the time. A lot of the time, they’ll do the gimmick when he comes in one side of the ring, steps over the rope, and then just gets taken and thrown out the other side. But you know, that’s his job. His job is not to go in there and wrestle for thirty minutes. His job is to make everyone go “Ahahahaha!” so now they can get…, so the show does this and it’s dynamic and it keeps the audience engaged. So, know your job and do your job.
D: Wow. Thank you. That’s like, real behind-the-scenes of the wrestling world.
L: Yeah! Hey listen, Ladybeard is saying how it is here on KAORI. You’re getting the scoop right here, friends! You’re not gonna get the inside information anywhere else. It’s all happening right here, on KAORI. Let’s keep going.
In the next part of the interview, Ladybeard talks about his latest project Babybeard, his podcast, and the most bizarre match he had ever remembered as a pro wrestler. Please stay tuned for part 2!
Updated: The second part of the interview is already published here. Check it out!
Notes:
[1] X-Pac: American professional wrestler active during the 90s. Retired in 2019. Was part of the group DX (D-Generation X).
[2] Attitude Era: The era of professional wrestling within the WWE that lasted from 1997-2002.
[3] Rob Van Dam: Nicknamed RVD by fans, he is a professional wrestler who is currently working for the wrestling promotion All Elite Wrestling (AEW).
[4] Swanton Bomb: A wrestling move where a wrestler leaps off the turnbuckle and flips before landing on the opponent.
[5] Royal Rumble: Wrestling event produced by WWE in the form of a battle royale where competitors enter the ring one by one, and the last man standing wins.
The Indonesian Anime Times | Interview by Dean A. | Text by Caesar E.S and Dany M. | Photo by Andira I. and Tanto D. | The interview is edited for clarity & conciseness with a focus on interview questions
