Seiko Matsuda -- Marrakech （マラケッシュ）

When it came to jaunts down to Wah Yueh, I was picking up old-style LPs by the Japanese singers, but once in a while, I would also purchase audiotapes if the original LP wasn't available. One example was Seiko Matsuda's（松田聖子）15th album from May 1988, "Citron", which incidentally was produced by Canada's David Foster.

The one song that I remember from "Citron" is "Marrakech". Basically speaking, my Seiko era is pretty much restricted to the early 80s before she got hitched for the first time. There have been exceptions when I listened to "Strawberry Time" but basically 1985 was the dividing line for me. Still "Marrakech" stood out since it had Seiko-chan starting to move away from her aidoru roots to something more US dance-poppy, thanks to those frenetic synthesizers. I'm not sure if there had been an official music video with "Marrakech" but the studio probably would have put up the big money to send the singing star to the actual city in Morocco to pose as some ingenue running away from some bad guys.

From around this time in the late 1980s, aidoru music was becoming a bit more exotic, and "Marrakech" was definitely a different horse when compared to Seiko's aidoru favourites from the early half of the decade. But it was indeed Takashi Matsumoto（松本隆）, her old supplier of lyrics, who came up with same for this particular song while Steve Kipner and Paul Bliss came up with the music. Her 25th single hit No. 1 on the charts as did "Citron". By the end of the year, the single was ranked No. 47.