PAO -- Gin Lime

 

After so many years of waiting, the second season of the hilarious anime adaptation of the original manga "Grand Blue Dreaming" will finally arrive early next month. From what I hear from those who have read the manga, it looks like viewers will happily get some more of the craziness that made "Grand Blue" one of the funniest anime of all time. 

Episode 8 was the one where Iori and the gang visited a local bar and one of their buddies who had a job mixing drinks there whipped up a gin & lime. That got to me thinking that that particular cocktail has possessed quite the profile in Japanese pop culture for decades. It seems to have become quite the popular drink for women, and I distinctly remember a Mieko Nishijima（西島三重子）song by that title from the 1970s. Maybe that mixture was seen (and tasted) as the alcoholic route to adventure and romance.

However when I threw in the English words gin lime into the YouTube search engine, I received a whole bunch of videos for the gimlet. And so at first, I had assumed that a gin and lime was the Japanese way of saying a gimlet, but actually, that wasn't exactly correct according to J-Wiki. There are two key differences apparently: 1) the gin and lime is stirred whereas the gimlet is shaken and 2) the gin lime is a short drink while the gimlet is a tall drink. So I guess that what distinguishes a gin & lime from a gimlet is a matter of aeration, container and volume and perhaps how cold it is. But you can take a look at the two videos above and below. I've never had one myself so some of you folks might be able to let me know about the taste.

Well, all that preamble ramble was for me to introduce the short-lived City Pop group PAO's song "Gin Lime" from their 1980 album "YOU". Written by Teruko Harada and PAO members Sabine Marianne Kaneko（サビーネ金子）and Yoshikazu Miura（三浦義和）and composed by Miura, it's got an interesting intro with the piano and synthesizer, and then Miura starts off the soulful crooning with one of the two female members humming away hauntingly. There is some nice sunset soul going on in "Gin Lime" with the two leads providing their own parts of the vocalization, but the harmonization when the two go at it together isn't particularly smooth; it's as if a little too much gin got mixed with the lime juice during a late-night session at the karaoke box.