Friends -- NIGHT TOWN

 

Perhaps things have improved a bit since the early days and nights of my time in the Tokyo area when the transit system in one of the world's largest metropoles shut down just shy of midnight. Yes, as crazy as it might sound, Tokyo wasn't and isn't a 24-hour city...well, it could be, provided that one didn't mind staying up at an all-night café (regular/Internet/manga) or got a taxi that charged a whole lot more overnight. At least now it seems as if Tokyo Metro and the JR are at least closing down at around the sinful time of 1 am, and that is for the very latest trains. My student told me that during the pandemic, things were shutting down even earlier to get folks to not carouse all that much in the big city. So, the moral of the story is...always check your schedules if you want to paint the town red in Tokyo.

But for those who are OK with a relatively early evening, try "NIGHT TOWN" by the pop band Friends（フレンズ）. I wrote about this Tokyo-based group right in the middle of the pandemic with a 2016 song titled "Yoru ni Dance"（夜にダンス）that probably had a lot of KKP viewers swooning back then about being able to have a night out on the town. Well, several months later, the fun continued with a November 2017 mini-album "Petit Town"（プチタウン）that got up to No. 33 on Oricon.

I don't know whether a lot of Friends' discography revolves around nocturnal activities in the big city. However, "NIGHT TOWN", which was written by band members singer-songwriter and vocalist Emi Okamoto（おかもとえみ）and keyboardist/rapper Hirose Hirose（ひろせひろせ）, has taken the baton from "Yoru ni Dance" with another copacetic melodic trip through the trendier areas of Tokyo in both the song and the music video. Would like to know exactly where everyone was tripping the light fantastic.

The current official membership of Friends is around four to five including Okamoto but Hirose took a leave of absence at the end of 2020 and then announced his official departure from the band in April 2021.