Alice/Woody-Woo -- Ima wa Mou Dare mo （今はもう誰も）

The first of folk group Alice's （アリス）big hits was "Ima wa Mou Dare mo" (Nobody Now) which came out in September 1975 as the group's 7th single. In any retrospective on Alice, this would be a must-show, and personally, this is my favourite song by Shinji Tanimura（谷村新司）, Takao Horiuchi（堀内孝雄） and Toru Yazawa（矢沢透）. I used to hear it whenever a music show did a piece on the folk music that was popular during the 1970s, and the song had that appealing galloping beat.

(I'm sorry but the music163 link is inaccessible.)

The above music 163 link is for the group's recorded version which peaked at No. 11. All this time until recently, I'd thought that "Ima wa Mou Dare mo" had been another Tanimura/Horiuchi collaboration, but in fact, Alice's rendition of the folk song was a cover of the original version by another earlier folk group by the name of Woody-Woo（ウッディ・ウー）. Led by vocalist Toshiro Satake（佐竹俊郎）, Woody-Woo only released 3 singles of which "Ima wa Mou Dare mo" was their debut, released in July 1969. It only got as high as No. 66 on the still-new Oricon rankings, but with the success of Alice's version several years later, the Woody-Woo version which was written and composed by Satake was given a second lease on life through a re-release. The original version can be found at the YouTube link below. Now as for the unusual name of this band, apparently the members derived it into a compound from the name of American folk singer of the 30s, Woody Guthrie and the "woo woo" sound that supposedly a lot of young people like to yell out.