Yuko Ohtaki -- Koi no Warming Up （恋のウォーミング アップ）

It's a good day always when I stumble across a winner on YouTube. Browsing is good!

I had never heard of Yuko Ohtaki（大滝裕子）before last night but when I listened to her "Koi no Warming Up" (Warming Up To Love), I felt like this would be a fine Sunday afternoon City Pop song to play on the stereo. It went well with the warm weather outside today and my memories of music decades ago.

This was Ohtaki's 4th of 5 singles that first came out in October 1980. Along with the smooth music by Kazuo Shiina（椎名和夫）, Yoshiko Miura（三浦徳子）provided the lyrics of striding confidently into the autumn while shelving away that tiny (but perhaps meaningful) memory of the summer. I would have thought that this would have made for a nice commercial song for a car or some cosmetics, but actually it was used for a Yakult yogurt drink. Mind you, Yakult has always been known for providing good health and pep. And that is indeed Ohtaki in the ad above.

Ohtaki, who was born in 1963, was only 17 years old when she recorded this really quite slick single. She had first gotten the bug to go into the singing business when she admired the accomplished vocals of Hiromi Iwasaki（岩崎宏美）and Junko Ohashi（大橋純子）as a kid. In fact, in 1978, she won the singing segment of the Miss Seventeen Contest for "Seventeen" magazine by singing Iwasaki's "Hatachi Mae"（二十才前）as a junior high school senior. She then officially debuted in July 1979 with "A Boy". Along with those 5 singles, she released one album in March 1980 "Million Kisses".

In the mid-1980s, she banded with Kumi Saito（斉藤久美）and Tomoko Yoshikawa（吉川智子）to form the chorus group AMAZONS, and together they found even more success by participating in concert tours involving singers such as Toshinobu Kubota（久保田利伸）and Yumi Matsutoya（松任谷由実）, and in 1987, they made their major debut with the single "GLORIOUS GLAMOUROUS". So far, they have released 12 singles and 9 albums. Ohtaki herself has also helped people in vocal training.