Happy Sunday night folks! Earlier in the day, a friend and I managed to catch the Spielberg flick "Ready Player One" which was actually quite a sweet and Spielbergian sci-fi story. I heard that it did come out in Japan a week before the onslaught that is "Avengers: Infinity War", so I'm wondering if viewers there may have had reason to squee a bit on seeing an icon of anime appear (and no, I'm not referring to Sailor Moon) in the final battle.
Well, a couple of nights ago, I had some reason to squee on catching the above Hideki Saijo（西城秀樹）video. I don't think a lot of you would remember, but for a couple of articles, I mentioned that I once had an ancient Canadian Tire Mastercraft tape on which I had dubbed a "Sounds of Japan" episode which I subsequently erased by stupid accident. Those two articles were on songs that had been on that tape, Kenji Sawada's（沢田研二）"I am I" and Ai & Aki's（あい&AKI）"Roppongi Atari"（六本木あたり）.
Now I have found the final song that I can remember that was on that erased tape, and that would be Saijo's "Moonlight Dancing". I remember the lyric "Dancing in the moonlight, dancing in the moonlight...", and back on Friday, I merely threw in Saijo's name and the word "moonlight" into the YouTube search engine and voila. The song was indeed the one, much to my pleasure.
"Moonlight Dancing" was actually the B-side to Saijo's 33rd single "Ore-tachi no Jidai"（俺たちの時代...Our Times） from June 1980, and it is almost 4 minutes of Saijo dancing away to what sounds like a mix of Barry Manilow disco (with some synth steel drums) and perhaps some New Wave thrown in. Talk about a transitional tune here! Love the guitar solo as well.
Yoshiko Miura（三浦徳子）provided the lyrics while Kimio Mizutani（水谷公生）came up with the rumbling music. "Ore-tachi no Jidai" peaked at No. 6 on Oricon and became the 99th-ranked song for 1980. Both sides of the single ended up on Saijo's 13th album "BIG SUNSHINE/Saijo Hideki" from August of that year.
I can finally close the door to one mystery that had lasted over 30 years.
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