Junichi Inagaki -- Bachelor Girl/Ai wa Ude no Naka de（バチェラー・ガール・愛は腕の中で）

About a year has passed since the last article for Junichi Inagaki（稲垣潤一）and I would like to give one of the princes of City Pop/J-AOR another go before the year is out.

His 9th single from July 1985 is "Bachelor Girl", a brassy example of pop for Inagaki...yep, I wouldn't say that it's quite City Pop or AOR here for the Sendai-born singer. For a song about the impending end of a romance, the melody comes across as proud as a strutting peacock. Perhaps it's more of the triumph for the woman who's leaving the duo while the man can only stare as she slowly disappears beyond the horizon. And maybe that's because the composer is none other than the late Eiichi Ohtaki（大滝詠一）who I've seen as someone who can come up with the big and brassy. His songwriting partner is Takashi Matsumoto（松本隆）, his old bandmate from Happy End（はっぴーえんど）.

As a detour, although I couldn't find the actual recording by Ohtaki himself, I did track down this wonderful cover of the songwriter's version by a fellow named Sammy Koiwa, and I think the arrangement is reminiscent of an Ohtaki tune. It feels like the synthesizers did the work here but the impression is that proud 60s Spector-ish sound that I've often put alongside his melodies. His version was released as a B-side for his 11th single "Fjord no Shojo"（フィヨルドの少女...Girl of the Fjords） which came out in November 1985 and managed to reach as high as No. 31 on the charts.

Meanwhile, getting back to Inagaki's single, the B-side for "Bachelor Girl" is "Ai wa Ude no Naka de" (Love In Our Arms) which is about as opposite as Inagaki can get from the A-side. Whereas "Bachelor Girl" is booming and melancholy, "Ai wa Ude no Naka de" is cozy and rosy as the crooner sings about reminding his lady love about the night they met...just before Labour Day at Harry's. I'll have to pick Yasushi Akimoto's（秋元康）brains on how he came up with that particular lyric.

The melody by Tetsuji Hayashi（林哲司）is pure City Pop including that exhalation of breath in the intro which may as well represent that bottle of Evian being poured (fluffy pink cardigan sold separately). In fact, I can posit that the melody reminds me in a glancing way of Al Jarreau's "Moonlighting", whose TV show starring Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis, I believe, premiered in that same year of 1985. In any case, with this Inagaki single, you've got the perfect yin-yang of bitter/sweet.