Microchip League (MCL) -- New York, New York

 

This week on Reminiscings of Youth, I once again reveal another song that I hadn't been unable to identify for literally decades, but finally could discover what it was just within the last few years. It was certainly the case with Higurashi's（日暮し）"Aki no Tobira"（秋の扉）, but unlike that one, this tune is neither Japanese nor breezy New Music.

However, like "Aki no Tobira", the tune stayed with me all those years into the 21st century. Back in my university days ending by the end of the 1980s, I enjoyed taping excerpts from radio and one of those examples was the Saturday-night radio shows that featured dance remixes. We had two stations in Toronto that provided us homebound introverts with our own dance parties, CKFM and CFNY. I often switched between the two stations between 9 and whenever past the midnight hour to hear all that vinyl scratching and stuttering. 

One Saturday night, I came across this really catchy techno tune with all of the beats and eerie synthesizers that you could throw a DJ at, with this boomer of a voice yelling out (and probably needing massive amounts of honey and lemon afterwards):

NEW YORK! NEW YORK! NEW YORK!

CITY OF ENCHANTMENT! CITY OF EXCITEMENT!

BE A PART OF IT! FEEL THE HEART OF IT!

The host of the radio show never said who it was by nor what the title was; or maybe I wasn't listening at the time. All I knew was that this techno band really wanted us to visit The Big Apple and hit a dance club or two. Ironically, I never heard this in a dance club like our local Copa or Sparkles...maybe because it was just a little too industrial techno. It was just the excerpt that I got from the radio and that was it during the prehistoric age before the Internet and YouTube.

So, two stints in Japan plus most of the last decade later, hearing that song on the audio tape when I wanted to feel nostalgic, I did punch in those above lyrics along with the words "dance remix" into the now-existent YouTube and other search engines, and what do you know? My mystery was solved. 

This is "New York, New York" from 1987 by the German techno outfit Microchip League or MCL, and nope, it doesn't really have anything to do with the Frank Sinatra trademark tune aside from a cute little toodle of that melody at the very end of the cool and ominous melodic odyssey. I always thought that "New York, New York" could have made for a great theme march for Rick Deckard if he had been magically transported back in time to the 1980s to track down some errant time-traveling replicants. Of course, there would have been a scene where he and the androids had to run through a Manhattan disco where Harrison Ford would have been just as awkward with his moves as Baron Zemo in "Falcon and the Winter Soldier".

I couldn't find out much about MCL itself aside from the fact that the members had been a part of another electronic dance band called Moskwa TV. Supposedly MCL itself had a brief time of it...just between 1986 and 1990.

Unfortunately, I couldn't track down in which month of that year "New York, New York" was released so I'll just be whimsical and decide to show what was at No. 1, No. 3 and No. 4 on Oricon in the month of May.

No. 1 Seiko Matsuda -- Strawberry Time

No. 3 REBECCA -- MONOTONE BOY

No. 4 Anzen Chitai -- Jirettai（じれったい）