Pops All Stars -- Holiday Company

 

The impression that I have about singer-songwriter Masamichi Sugi（杉真理）is that he's probably one of those folks who really enjoys setting up parties of all sorts ranging from the Xmas ones to the traditional year-enders in Japan, and I think that affinity probably transferred over to musical collaborations looking at his J-Wiki file. Seven years ago, nikala wrote about one such get-together featuring him and his fellow Sony stars including Yoshitaka Minami（南佳孝）and Kaoru Sudo（須藤薫）under the umbrella name of Pops All Stars to do a Xmas thing called "Yellow Christmas" via the "Winter Lounge" album from November 1986. I was reminded of the song recently from talks with Rocket Brown of "Come Along Radio" and Scott of his own J-Xmas podcast.

Well, just by luck last night, my YouTube browsings took me to the video for another Pops All Stars session called "Holiday Company", this time taking place several months later through "Summer Lounge" which was released in June 1987. With a slightly different and more expanded lineup consisting of the aforementioned Sugi, Minami and Sudo, along with vocal group Hi-Fi Set（ハイ・ファイ・セット）, rock band Princess Princess（プリンセスプリンセス）, singer-songwriter Tomoko Tane（種ともこ）, violinist Toshihiro Nakanishi（中西俊博）and singer-songwriter Seishiro Kusunose（楠瀬誠志郎）, this "Avengers" band of pop singers takes on Sugi's arrangement of hints of Steely Dan here and crashing synths there and even some doo-wop for some desire of fun-in-the-sun vacationing.

The video for "Holiday Company" also has the crew hamming it up as the most congenial corporate section getting ready for that annual company trip (with all of the typical cornball entertainment activities) on a yakata bune cruising down what I think is the Sumida River in Tokyo. I'm just trying to imagine Hi-Fi Set and Princess Princess boogying down in the same video while Minami is about as relaxed as I've ever seen him.

It also appears that Sugi kept the good times going for some years with a number of multi-singer projects going into the late 1990s. Once COVID is finally over, I can imagine that a lot of corporate sections will be more than happy to get into the party mood.