Kenji Sawada -- Koi wa Jamamono（恋は邪魔もの）

Knowing about singer and bon vivant Kenji Sawada（沢田研二）ever since I really got into Japanese popular music in the early 1980s, I have to admit that in all likelihood I've only scratched the surface of one of the most flamboyant kayo singers.

Luckily, commenter bon dropped by to give me some suggestions on the last article for Julie. One of his favourite by Sawada from the 1970s is "Koi wa Jamamono" (Love is a Pain). Released in March 1974 as his 9th single, this is a bouncy but perhaps-not-completely-happy number according to Kazumi Yasui's（安井かずみ）lyrics in which an arrogant young cad feels that his latest young conquest is a bit too clingy, and yet he just can't seem to get rid of her in his mind and perhaps his soul. Maybe a reckoning is coming for him finally.

The pop/rock melody is provided by Kunihiko Kase（加瀬邦彦）and performing the music behind Sawada is the Takayuki Inoue Band（井上堯之バンド）, the same group behind one of the most famous television themes in Japanese history, the theme for the cop show "Taiyo ni Hoero"（太陽にほえろ）. Katsuo Ono（大野克夫）, one of the members of that band, handled the arrangement. "Koi wa Jamamono" went all the way up to No. 4 on Oricon, and it became the 44th-ranked single for 1974.

While I was working on this article, I found out at one point that I couldn't import the videos for some reason. I was a bit worried that the YouTube masters weren't happy at me for some reason, but then when I checked Twitter, it looks everyone was finding out that the video service had gone down. Folks were kinda freaking out there. Thankfully, it was only out for about 15 minutes. Whew!😓