metro trip -- Driving

 

Sunday evenings at 6 pm in Ichikawa usually meant dinner time for me. Television choices varied almost as much as my cooking at that time. Fuji-TV was always "Chibi Maruko-chan"（ちびまる子ちゃん）, but there was also a program on TV Tokyo at the same time called "Drive A Go-Go!"（ドライブ A GO!GO!）.

Japanese TV will never fail to fascinate me when it comes to the breadth and depth of ideas and new angles to apply to programs based on edutainment. "Drive A Go-Go!" was a half-hour travelogue featuring tarento and other celebrities taking a drive together with one of the stars behind the wheel as the gang for that week (could number between three and five folks per episode) head for a certain area in Japan to explore and nosh. The above video is labeled as a 1998 episode and that's when "Drive A Go-Go!" began as it went through its odyssey of eighteen years. The duo above (if it doesn't get deleted) is the late singer-songwriter KAN and former aidoru Wakako Shimazaki（島崎和歌子）.

Of course, a long-running TV show like "Drive A Go-Go" will have had lots of ending themes by various bands and singers, and sure enough, somewhere in the middle of its run, the program had the duo metro trip come up with one such ending theme. I've already spoken on metro trip back in October when I introduced their tune "BABYBABY" from 2006. "Driving" hails from metro trip's 2nd and final album "Lovers" which was released in July 2007. Written and composed by one-half of the duo, Taka Aoki（青木多果）, it's a suitably breezy and funky piece for the highways and byways.