Yosuke Tagawa -- Lui-Lui

Long ago in an inner city apartment far far away, I vaguely remember hearing "Louie Louie" by The Kingsmen probably through an episode of "American Bandstand" or as one of the sample songs played on those K-Tel record commercials.

Well, here is "Lui-Lui" by Yosuke Tagawa（太川陽介）, and yes, the only reason I referred to "Louie Louie" is simply because the titles looked similar. They're not even pronounced anywhere near the same. Anyways, I had never heard of this song and for that matter, I had never heard of Tagawa although my parents apparently recognized his older self on sight when they saw him on NHK's "Asaichi"（あさイチ）morning show yesterday. Although he is an actor and a tarento now, he did have a fairly long career as a singer ranging from 1976 to 1985 with the first number of years in aidoru mode.

Seeing old video of him performing this particular song had me interested in finding out more about him. It isn't everyday that I see a 70s male aidoru that wasn't part of the Shin-Gosanke（新御三家）triumvirate of Hiromi Go, Hideki Saijo and Goro Noguchi（郷ひろみ・西城秀樹・野口五郎）. "Lui-Lui" was Tagawa's 3rd single from July 1977 and it turned out to be his biggest hit, winning a Newcomer's Prize at the Japan Record Awards and getting nominated for a similar prize at the Japan Kayo Awards the same year, although the song didn't actually get all that far up the Oricon charts, placing at No. 38 on the weeklies and selling about 63,000 records.

Still, "Lui-Lui" has got plenty of sunny bounce in Shunichi Tokura's（都倉俊一）music (and Tokura helped create a lot of Pink Lady's hits in the same decade) and there's all that cute choreography which could have made the song a hit during the year-end parties if people could play the karaoke version on those 8-track tapes. Shinichi Ishihara（石原信一）came up with the lyrics, including the delivery of the title itself accompanied with that hand gesture resembling a capital L.