Jackey Yoshikawa & His Blue Comets -- Aoi Hitomi（青い瞳）

Just found out within the last half-hour from this week's "Uta Kon"（うたコン）that drummer and leader of Group Sounds band Blue Comets, Jackey Yoshikawa had passed away on April 20th at the age of 81 in Gunma Prefecture.

For a lot of the kayo fans, the most famous song by Jackey Yoshikawa & His Blue Comets（ジャッキー吉川とブルー・コメッツ）will probably remain "Blue Chateau"（ブルーシャトウ）that was composed at The Lake Louise Hotel in Banff, Alberta, Canada by band member Tadao Inoue（井上忠夫）, later to become songwriter Daisuke Inoue（井上大輔）. However, I wanted to find another song in tribute to Yoshikawa, and noticed in the "Kayo Kyoku Plus" article for "Blue Chateau" that it was the third and final entry in the band's "Blue" series.

The first entry was "Aoi Hitomi" (Blue Eyes) which was released in March 1966 as an English-language single, their 2nd, written by Jun Hashimoto（橋本淳）with the late Inoue composing it. As to why it was given English lyrics, from what I could glean from the J-Wiki article for "Aoi Hitomi", apparently there was consternation from someone about why a Japanese song should ever be released from a Western label; the producing company was Columbia Records so the song was made to have English lyrics. If I can give my two pennies, I think that there was perhaps a feeling that if a Japanese band were to release a single in English, there would be a certain cool cachet given to them.

"Aoi Hitomi" the English version is the above video, and the plan did work since it sold over 100,000 records and was seen as the breakout song for Blue Comets. Some four months later in July, the Japanese-language version (below) was released as their 4th single, and it did even better by selling over 500,000 records and becoming a nationwide hit. I can imagine that it would have hit No. 1 if Oricon had existed back in those days.

Becoming famous as one of the foundation blocks behind the whole Group Sounds wave in the late 1960s, I gotta say that both the English and Japanese versions of "Aoi Hitomi" have that 60s "Cool, baby, cool!!" factor in there, especially with that organ. I could easily imagine Austin Powers swiveling his butt to it, and maybe it could have snuck onto the soundtrack for either a Tarentino flick or the first "Ocean's Eleven" movie from 2001 by Steven Soderbergh. "Aoi Hitomi" became such a hit that Blue Comets got their first invitation to play the Japanese version (also written by Hashimoto) on the Kohaku Utagassen that year.

My condolences to Blue Comets and Yoshikawa's family on their loss.