Tin Pan Alley -- Pocket Ippai no Himitsu（ポケットいっぱいの秘密）

Seeing Agnes Chan（アグネス・チャン）performing Takashi Matsumoto's（松本隆）debut song as a lyricist, "Pocket Ippai no Himitsu" (A Pocketful of Secrets) once more on Tuesday's "Uta Kon"（うたコン）and then hearing the original again on YouTube actually helped me to find out that Matsumoto's former bandmates in Happy End（はっぴいえんど）, Haruomi Hosono（細野晴臣）and guitarist Shigeru Suzuki（鈴木茂）through their initial run in the mid-1970s as part of Tin Pan Alley（ティン・パン・アレー）came up with a cover version of Chan's 6th single. Incidentally, Yusuke Hoguchi（穂口雄右）took care of the music.

This is a good opportunity for me. nikala wrote the first and, up to now only, article on the unique Tin Pan Alley back in September 2014. When I first heard about Hosono, it was through Yellow Magic Orchestra as one of the three technopop masters, so I was quite surprised to know that he had been part of the rock/New Music/City Pop group Happy End in the early 1970s and then a member of Caramel Mama（キャラメル・ママ）which got renamed Tin Pan Alley. I had wondered what kind of music a band with those names would create. Well, from what I've heard in nikala's article and through YouTube, it seems as if Hosono, Suzuki, keyboardists Masataka Matsutoya（松任谷正隆）and the late Hiroshi Sato（佐藤博）and drummer Tatsuo Hayashi（林立夫）enjoyed playing this blend of Martin Denny exotica and urban sounds. I can only speculate since I was in Japan for only several weeks in the 1970s as a kid, but perhaps Tin Pan Alley's freewheeling music was the type that would be played in the more intimate nightclubs and not on the NHK stage. It was quite the revelation to find out about the pre-YMO Hosono.

As I said, Tin Pan Alley came up with their own cover of "Pocket Ippai no Himitsu", a cute story of a girl swearing a boy to secrecy after she whispered sweet nothings into his ear only for the fellow to wake up and know what she had said. It came on the band's 1977 "Tin Pan Alley 2" and has that playfully funky beat (not so exotica) compared to Chan's countryside arrangement. Not 100% sure but I think that is indeed singer-songwriter MANNA as the vocalist here. She herself did a cover of a Tin Pan Alley tune, "Yellow Magic Carnival".