The Tube -- Best Seller Summer （ベストセラー・サマー）

Ahh...the summer definitely landed in Toronto this past weekend. Although humidity in my ol' hometown will never match the ferocity of the air moisture in Tokyo, there was that feeling here that had me opening the windows and switching on the old noisy fan in my room. I was actually working up a bit of a sweat as I was sleeping last night, but thankfully, I didn't do what I had usually done on my ancient futon in Ichikawa....leave a giant J-Canuck-shaped sweat stain when I woke up in the morning. Let us leave that rather horrid image behind us, shall we?

Anyways, with the summer and the Pan Am Games in town right now, it is very much the time for another TUBE song...or perhaps to be more accurate this time, a song by The Tube as they were first named 30 years ago. My history with Nobuteru Maeda's（前田亘輝）band spiritually started with "Season In The Sun", their 3rd single in 1986, so it was a surprise to find out when I had bought a VHS tape of TUBE's music videos back in the early 90s that there were two previous singles prior to "Season In The Sun".

"Best Seller Summer" was The Tube's debut in June 1985. If I recall the original music video, I think the guys were all dressed up as if they were the Japanese equivalent of British pop band WHAM! back then. And the songwriters here weren't Tomoko Aran（亜蘭智子）and Tetsuro Oda（織田哲郎）who would be associated with many of their big early hits, but a couple of other older vets, lyricist Yoshiko Miura（三浦徳子）and composer Kisaburo Suzuki（鈴木キサブロー）...the latter is someone I usually associated with sweeping ballads with shimmering strings. And there was a slight difference with the music for "Best Seller Summer" in that I thought it seemed quite similar to the output of Checkers or Rats N' Star (formerly Chanels). 

However, Miura's lyrics seemed to have been the template for future TUBE tunes with the summery romance and lasciviousness. My eyebrows did go up a notch when I read the line "Ano ko no munamoto suberi komu"（あの娘の胸元すべり込む...I'm sliding down that girl's cleavage）! Methinks that this sort of line never really made into a Seiko Matsuda（松田聖子）song.

"Best Seller Summer" peaked at No. 13. It was also a track on The Tube's debut album, "Heart of Summer" which also came out in June 1985 and got as high as No. 29 on the album charts. Also have a peek at the B-side, "Namida no Harbour Light"（涙のハーバーライト）.