Kazuyuki Ozaki & Coastal City -- ...Yoko（・・・洋子）

 

For a guy who writes about Japanese music at a pretty frantic pace, it's always appreciated whenever I can get some sources and over the years, I've been lucky. Case in point, contributor JTM was very kind to send me some mid-1980s copies of the TBS music ranking show "The Best 10"（ザ・ベストテン）. Looking at hosts Tetsuko Kuroyanagi and Hiroshi Kume（黒柳徹子・久米宏）introduce the gamut of hitmakers on set and on site, I've been able to see some of the songs that I've already written about, but at the same time, I've also encountered singers and tunes that I've yet to write about. And just from one episode tonight, I was able to glean a whole bunch of them that I'm going to have to track down.

One group that came onto "The Best 10" was Kazuyuki Ozaki & Coastal City（尾崎和行＆コースタルシティー）. I'd never heard of these guys before and apparently by the time they got onto the show, Ozaki and the band had finally achieved some measure of success after about a decade of trying. In fact, they were pretty much on the verge of calling it quits when one song hit pay dirt: "...Yoko". This was their only single under their name released in November 1985.

Penned by Ozaki, this AOR/rock tune reminiscent of the West Coast sound of that decade, "...Yoko" is a rollicking number about what sounds like a fellow trying to tell the titular lass that their former romance should stay former and that it's all for the best. The song peaked at No. 21 on Oricon but more importantly, it won the grand prizes at the 30th Yamaha Popular Song Contest and the 16th World Popular Song Festival held in 1985. 

I gotta say that the Osaka-born Ozaki had quite the voice so I'm surprised that he didn't get any further fame. As it was, Coastal City soon broke up after the success of "...Yoko" and Ozaki went solo, releasing seven more singles into the 1990s and then one more in 2005. Three albums and a BEST compilation also came out, along with songs that he provided other singers. Sad to say, in his later years, he had to battle liver cancer and then in 2011, he succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 52.