Yellow Magic Orchestra/Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra -- Simoon

Looking back to the very first album of the Yellow Magic Orchestra from 1978, I realized that the band was trying a number of different musical styles. Along with the two computer game songs that bracket the album, there was "Firecracker" and "Tong Poo" which was going for that Asian motif while "Cosmic Surfin'"was a techno tribute to The Ventures.

Then there was the third song, "Simoon". I read a number of the comments for this song on YouTube, and they remark that it sounded like something played at a 40s/50s tropical nightclub with lots of cocktails. I heartily agree. It was YMO filtering a score from an old Hollywood movie set in Africa. And yet, the actual origins behind "Simoon" came from much farther away. Let's say "Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away".

According to the liner notes for the song in the album, "YMO GO HOME"(1999), composer Haruomi Hosono（細野晴臣）and lyricist Chris Mosdell were inspired by the Tatooine desert featured in the original "Star Wars" where poor ol' C-3PO and R2-D2 had to trudge through before getting snatched up by the Jawas. "Simoon", according to those same notes, apparently means "heat wave".  Yep, I wouldn't mind having one of those tropical cocktails with the umbrellas right now.

In 2001, there was an NHK satellite broadcast called "The Yellow Magic Show" which included a more organic performance of "Simoon" by The Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra with YMO drummer Yukihiro Takahashi（高橋幸宏）. This rendition brings the tropical flavour even more to the fore. The mysterious lyrics, originally crooned through the vocoder by Shunichi "Tyrone" Hashimoto（橋本俊一） (according to k2ymo3 the uploader of the top video), are now revealed on this video. But in the case that the video is taken down, here they are right under the paragraph:

Hot starlight
Where a blue moon dreams
On the sheik and she
Steal a night kiss
Baby's a belly dance
Mirage romancer in Casablanca
Frankincence in the
Tressles of her hair
They ride the night
On his white mare
Her perfume drifts
On the Arabian air
From the heart of the harem
He carries her off
Down to palm-breeze oasis
Behind a sand dune croons
She with her Eastern promise
And secrets in the sand
Oh, she's only a desert song

(from the liner notes of "YMO GO HOME")

Ah, if only Luke, Obi-Wan and Han had stayed at the Mos Eisley cantina a little bit longer, the band may have played this classic.