So Nice -- Nichiyoubi no Summer Train（日曜日のサマートレイン）

 

Recently, thanks to Rocket Brown, I had the opportunity to translate the liner notes for the one and only full album "LOVE" (1979) by the band So Nice, a group led by vocalist/guitarist Katsuyuki Kamakura（鎌倉克行）. I was surprised to discover that this group which lavishly followed the sounds of Tatsuro Yamashita's（山下達郎）old band Sugar Babe was actually not a professional band but a student group from the Nihon University College of Art. For the years that Kamakura and his bandmates were students up to the late 1970s, they did the university and school festival route which ended up with them creating "LOVE", an album that only had 200 copies pressed. 

The liner notes also included a 2011 interview with Kamakura, vocalist/keyboardist Misako Matsushima（松島美砂子）, and drummer Nobuhide Mori（森信英）in which they expressed how over the moon they were over the fact that their university-age labour of love (no pun intended) that had no intention of being a serious resident on the record shop shelves was being put into service onto CD.

To quote one paragraph by Kamakura from the liner notes as translated by me: I thought I was going to die, this was such a dream (LOL). This is a record that was made by us as a graduation memento 30 years ago and now it’s become a CD to be sent to the world. On top of that, once remastering was done and we took another listen to it, the sound was so great that I was on the verge of tears. Up until then, we had a lot of doubts. The order forms were already out, but we were thinking whether they were thinking of us as riding on Tatsuro Yamashita’s coattails or defrauding fans. But listening to the remaster, we gained a bit more confidence. We had a feeling that our performance had been more all over the place but then we realized that we actually did do what we had set out to do. And finally, I feel that a lot of people including the younger generations will listen to this.

And that was back in 2011. Not too long after that, the whole Vaporwave thing was on YouTube and then some years later, "Plastic Love" exploded onto the international scene and the floodgates for City Pop opened up. I can only imagine how the band felt then.

Then again, perhaps I don't have to imagine all that much since in September 2018, the folks at So Nice amazingly got back together to record an analog 7" single with one lovely cover titled "Nichiyoubi no Summer Train" (Sunday Summer Train). Kamakura was behind the melody and a fellow named NOBE was the lyricist; I'm assuming that NOBE stands for drummer Nobuhide Mori. 

"Nichiyoubi no Summer Train" shows that So Nice never seemed to have left that band stage of 1979. It sounds as if it would be a perfect fit for "LOVE", and the So Nice/Sugar Babe sensation is still fully intact within the voices of Kamakura, Matsushima and all of the others involved in the chorus. I guess that lightning can be captured twice in a bottle.