Sharam Q/Coconuts Musume -- Zurui Onna （ズルイ女）

The first time I saw lead singer Tsunku of the Osaka band Sharam-Q（シャ乱Ｑ) in the mid-1990s, he answered the question "What would a vampire from Shinjuku 2-chome look like?"...ahhh, life was indeed complete. And it was for this song I got to first know the band. I always remember the riffin' horn section for "Zurui Onna" (Cunning Woman) which kinda reminded me what a Big Band might sound like at the end of the century.

"Zurui Onna" was the band's 7th single and its most successful song to date. Written and composed by Tsunku (aka Mitsuo Terada) for release in May 1995, it peaked at No. 2 on Oricon and became the 19th-ranked single of the year with 1.3 million copies sold, and apparently it is the 84th top-selling single in Oricon history. Not surprisingly, Sharam-Q was the top batter for the White team at the Kohaku Utagassen in 1995.

Sharam-Q was first brought together all the way back in 1988 when five Kinki University students pooled their talents. They were the aforementioned Tsunku（つんく）along with Hatake (はたけ...guitar), Makoto (まこと...drums), Taisei (たいせい...keyboards) and Shu (しゅう...bass). All of them came from 3 other bands, and they decided to form the new band's name from an amalgam of those other bands' names: Shutters（シャッターズ）, Ram（乱） and QP. The first new name was to have been Sharam-P, but so that they wouldn't be linked with a popular female comedic duo at the time, Okyan-P, the band decided to go with the Q.

For the next few years, they would enjoy life as an amateur band before releasing their first official single in 1992. Then in 1994, they started getting noticed from their 4th single, "Jokyo Monogatari"（上・京・物・語） and getting even bigger raves with "Single Bed" later that year. And of course, Tsunku would later become the Svengali who gave birth to Morning Musume and The Hello Project.

One of those groups, the Hawaii-based Coconuts Musume（ココナッツ娘。） would do an English-language cover version of "Zurui Onna" as the coupling song for their 1999 2nd single "Dance & Chance". The single itself got as high as No. 86. Formed in 1998, the starting lineup was Ayaka Kimura, Mika Todd, Danielle Delaunay, Chelsea Ching and April Barbaran.