Yoshie Kashiwabara/Agnes Chan -- Hello, Goodbye

After getting interested in aidoru Yoshie Kashiwabara（柏原よしえ） via her 1983 hit, "Haru Nanoni"（春なのに）, it was actually a pretty simple thing to head down to Chinatown's Wah Yueh to find some of her material. I once picked up an audio tape, but then there was this 4-record album of her best hits which was screaming my name, and although I held off for a while, I finally decided to pull the financial trigger and grab it.

So, I had this grand product to go over the oeuvre of this Osaka singer. And one of the songs in there was "Hello, Goodbye", this sprightly tune that just made me think of Yoshie-chan as this countryside girl skipping along a river. However, the lyrics are somewhat more metaphysical as she sings of being reincarnated as a cup in a café with the love of her life returning as a spoon to stir her contents. Well, I gotta admit it's pretty imaginative.

What has also enhanced my memory of this song is Kashiwabara's performance on stage. I will always remember her for that hair and the way she bounces in place when "Hello, Goodbye" begins. KA-WA-I-I-I-I! It's one of my lasting images of 80's aidoru-dom. I was surprised to read though that instead of the Miyuki Nakajima-penned "Haru Nanoni", "Hello, Goodbye" has been her most successful hit. Released in October 1981 as her 7th single, it peaked at No. 6 on Oricon and sold 380,000 records, several thousand more than "Haru Nanoni". It would finish as the 45th-ranked song of 1982.

I had another surprise in store for me when I discovered that Yoshie's magnum opus was not an original for her but a cover version of a B-side for Agnes Chan. Yup, "Hello, Goodbye", written by Makoto Kitajo（喜多條忠） and composed by Masami Koizumi（小泉まさみ）, was originally created as the flip side song for her December 1975 release of her 12th single, "Fuyu no Hi no Kaeri Michi"（冬の日の帰り道...The Road Home on a Winter Day）. The arrangement is quite similar to the one for Kashiwabara's version, but although I know that Agnes has always had that high-toned delivery, I think she kinda brought her voice a little for this one....a tad more huskiness (relatively speaking) in there.

And according to J-Wiki, Agnes was nothing but grace personified when Kashiwabara introduced her version almost 6 years later. She stated, "Thank you for bringing this song to the light of day."