Sometime between the frenetic Pink Lady and the delicate Wink, there was BaBe! This duo, consisting of Tomoko Kondo（近藤智子） and Yukari Nikaido（二階堂ゆかり）, had a short career life of 3 years. But during that time, I used to see them on the ranking shows such as "The Best 10", mainly to perform this dynamic song.
"I don't know loneliness!"
I've always remembered that opening lyric and then the two girls launching their angular choreography. Eurobeat was really big during the late 80s, and BaBe's debut single was a cover of Michael Fortunati's "Give Me Up"....a prime example of the genre. "I Don't Know" was their 2nd single, released in May 1987, and it was composed by Hideya Nakazaki（中崎英也）and written by Yukinojo Mori（森雪之丞）in the same Eurobeat vein. The song is also available on their first album, "Bravo"released in June of that year. It made it as far as No. 5 on the Oricon weeklies.
It was fun to hear and watch the girls since back in those days, my life in the discos was often surrounded by Eurobeat supplied by Stock, Aitken & Waterman via Bananarama and Samantha Fox. For BaBe, the end came in 1990 when Nikaido ended up settling down with a husband and a kid.
「I Don't Know!」 is probably my favorite song by Babe, and so I was wondering if you had written about it, and it turns out that you did years before I started visiting this blog. Ah, I really wonder how Babe would have transitioned to the 90's had they continued. Would their style have adapted or evolved or would they have embraced new genres?
ReplyDeleteMy speculation wouldn't be the worth the paper I would write it upon, but seeing that they were embracing Eurobeat, it could have been possible that BaBe could have taken on other dance genres from the 90s onwards if they'd continued.
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