Moon Child -- Escape

I may have spoken about how my Saturday nights were spent back in Ichikawa in another article, but just in case, it was usually at home. There were some options on TV at 9pm. One of those options was my regular viewing of the travelogue show "Shubbotsu! Admatic Tengoku"（出没!アド街ック天国...All The Time! Admatic Heaven） on TV Tokyo since the one hour was spent focusing on every little neighbourhood in the Tokyo area. However, there was also the Saturday movie of the week on Fuji-TV and quite a ways downward was the Saturday night drama on NTV. That drama always involved the young up-and-comers in the geinokai in some form of melodrama. I think it was NTV's way of trying to keep the teenage-and-20s crowd glued to the telly instead of losing them to a night on the town. In terms of the big cities, it was probably a losing battle.

One of those dramas on NTV back in the late 1990s was something called "FiVE" which starred doe-eyed Rie Tomosaka（ともさかりえ）as the teenage leader of a tough "Mission: Impossible"-like team of girls fighting crime unsanctioned by the usual authorities. I tried to watch through the entire series but somehow I quickly lost interest.

However, I did like the ending theme by the rock band Moon Child, "Escape". Sounding like a Shibuya unit doing their own version of a 60s spy show theme, this was the band's 5th single from May 1997. Considering the nature of the show the song fronted, it was quite the good arrangement, I thought.

Moon Child lasted from 1995 to 1999 and was composed of Osamu Sasaki（佐々木収）on vocals and guitar, Takayasu Watanabe（渡邊崇尉）on bass and Kei Kashiyama（樫山圭）on drums. Hironori Akiyama（秋山浩徳）joined the band the following year as a guitarist. Supposedly, Sasaki was a big fan of the band Moonriders（ムーンライダーズ）which led to his band's name.

With "Escape", which was written and composed by Sasaki, Moon Child became an overnight success, with the song hitting No. 1 on Oricon and ending up as the 48th-ranked song of 1997. "Escape" was also a track on the band's 2nd album, "My Little Red Book" which came out in November of that year. That album reached No. 4 on the charts. According to J-Wiki, the original members reunited in 2013 with a sold-out comeback concert in January but then there was nothing afterwards.