BON-BON BLANCO -- Namida no Hurricane （涙のハリケーン）

As I've mentioned a number of times when I've inserted an anime-related article, my friend and I have something called The Routine which is our biweekly Sunday get-together for food and anime. Consider it something akin to what happens on the sitcom "The Big Bang Theory" but with fewer people. The Routine involves brunch followed by a couple of hours of the latest anime viewings which is then followed by an hour or so listening to various anison from the past few decades.

Last Sunday, my friend played a song from a few years ago as sung by one of the myriad characters from "The Idolmaster" franchise, Miki Hoshii（星井美希） , as voiced by seiyuu Akiko Hasegawa（長谷川明子）. It was a pretty high-energy spicy number titled "Namida no Hurricane" (Hurricane of Tears) that sounded vaguely familiar, and when I made that "vaguely familiar" face, he told me that it was sung by Hideaki Tokunaga（徳永英明）. The strange thing is that I recall hearing Tokunaga singing this some years ago (April 16 2015: And yet perhaps this may have been the figment of our imagination....tried looking for any sign of Tokunaga's involvement with this song on YouTube and J-Wiki...didn't see the song covered on any of his many cover albums).

But when I dug a little bit into the history behind the song, I discovered that Tokunaga may have sung the song but it was most likely a cover version. "Namida no Hurricane" (which sounds like a title of an 80s aidoru tune by my estimation) was actually the 4th single of  the teen pop group, BON-BON BLANCO. Like the song, the name of that band sounded vaguely familiar. I figure that the group popped up on "Music Station", "CDTV" or any of the music video channels during the 2000s when they were active. Watching the official video above, they were probably part of that wave of singing and dancing girl groups that proliferated during the late 90s and into the early part of the next decade spearheaded by The Super Monkeys and SPEED. BON BON BLANCO did them one step better by handling their own percussion instruments...reminded me of the old days of Sheila E.

The song was written by keyboardist-lyricist Miwa Sasaki（佐々木美和）and bassist-composer Akihito Tokunaga（徳永暁人）for release in February 2003. It peaked at No. 19 on Oricon.

Never saw or heard of the anime until I did my research, but the original "Namida no Hurricane" was the second ending theme for "GetBackers".  The show was about a group of young folk who operated a service of finding anything and everything lost for a fee....interesting premise; I'll have to ask my anime buddy about that one.

To finish off on a weird European tangent, the general beat of "Namida no Hurricane" was reminiscent of a song from an old Boney M. album, "Rasputin".  I knew the group far better for their 1978 hit "Rivers of Babylon", a tune that seemed to take up permanent residence on the AM dial of the radio. Ah...those disco days of yore.

Not exactly a tearful hurricane...