Flipper's Guitar -- Goodbye, our Pastels Badges

I've always treated the genre Shibuya-kei as a 90s concoction but apparently it's been around since the late 1980s...perhaps the very tail end. I realize that Pizzicato Five launched in the mid-1980s but their sound was quite different back then.

Flipper's Guitar also got their start around 1987. Perhaps their music in the beginning was categorized as more indie rock...or indie pop, in my opinion...but I still can't help but see Keigo Oyamada and Kenji Ozawa（小山田圭吾・小沢健二）as Shibuya-kei guys. And even with "Goodbye, our Pastels Badges", which was a track on their first album "three cheers for our side ~ Umi e Iku tsumori janakatta"（海へ行くつもりじゃなかった...We Didn't Mean to Head for the Ocean）from August 1989, there is that breezy European vacation feeling.

I've been accustomed to seeing Flipper's Guitar show up in their videos outside of Japan...perhaps, Paris. But for this one, they are singing and traipsing around in a Japanese subway system. Still, the video seems to be bathed in sun and the feeling is one of a nice Sunday walk. I guess if I were to further divide the genre further, there would be the P5 side of Friday night Shibuya-kei and then the Sunday afternoon Shibuya-kei of Flipper's Guitar.

Ozawa handled lyrics while Oyamada took care of the music. "Goodbye, our Pastels Badges" is sung totally in English, and I'll be honest when I say that I didn't realize this at first. Not sure what the lyrics are all about but I can say now that there is a Japanese song that actually shouts out to a character from "Star Trek". But did he really have a fringe cut?