Megumi Kawashima -- The Sunshine Boys（ザ・サンシャイン・ボーイズ）

 

When I first heard the name of this song "The Sunshine Boys", my mind warped back in time to that 1975 Hollywood comedy with the same title starring Walter Matthau and George Burns as a bickering comedy act. 

Methinks that Megumi Kawashima's（川島恵）2nd single "The Sunshine Boys" from May 1982 was probably not inspired by the movie unless lyricist Yu Aku（阿久悠）and composer Katsuo Ono（大野克夫）were big fans of the movie. The song doesn't have any hint of conflict in there; instead it's one of the more cheerier 80s aidoru numbers that I've heard recently with plenty of summer sun in the arrangement by Motoki Funayama（船山基紀）. I also think that some of the nature of "The Sunshine Boys" also comes from that sense of West Coast AOR in there.

Kawashima may have been one of the dozens or hundreds of aidoru that came and went in the 1980s but I think her voice rather stands out in a clear-as-a-bell way. A native of Aichi Prefecture born in 1965, she appeared on a local talent TV show and that was where her desire to become a singer was first sparked and once she graduated from junior high school, she made her way to Tokyo. From early 1981, she became a member of The Sundays, the supporting group of teens on the long-running NHK music show "Let's Go Young" (I'm assuming that is indeed the spelling for the group instead of The Sundaes since the program was broadcast on Sunday), and then in February 1982, she made her debut as an aidoru with "Mister Fushigi"（ミスター不思議...Mister Strange）.

Releasing 6 singles and 1 album "Sunshine Girl", most of which were released between 1982 and mid-1983, sometime in 1984, Kawashima went on the different path to head towards becoming an enka singer. Her penultimate single in 1987 was a Mood Kayo duet with singer/tarento Manzo Saita（さいたまんぞう）, "Tokyo Country Night"（東京カントリーナイト）. I took a listen to that one and will cover it fairly soon.