Juicy Fruits -- Koi wa Bench Seat（恋はベンチシート）

Another scorcher in the big city. I think Toronto was even hotter and more humid than Tokyo yesterday and it's already feeling like my body temperature outside although we haven't quite reached noon yet. That watermelon above is looking very tasty.

It's been a while since we've had Juicy Fruits（ジューシィ・フルーツ）onboard so here is "Koi wa Bench Seat" (Love is a Bench Seat). This is a track on the rock n' roll/New Wave band's debut album "Drink!" from July 1980 and so it shares space with their most famous hit "Jenny wa Gokigen Naname"（ジェニーはご機嫌ななめ）. The melody by band bassist Yuuji Okiyama（沖山優司）takes things to a more conventional 50s rock n' roll feeling.

"Koi wa Bench Seat" is certainly a happy-go-lucky rollicking summer number but the lyrics by Haruo Chikada（近田春夫）show a relationship that isn't really meant to be. Vocalist and guitarist Atsuko Okuno（奥野敦子）plays the girlfriend who's getting increasingly agitated that her complaints about being squished inside her beau's sports car are falling on deaf and clueless ears. She insists that she still likes him (for now) but the rattled guy seems very reluctant to acquiesce to her demands to trade in the coupe. What accentuates the growing crisis is an eerie synthesizer bleating an emergency alert. I'm also assuming that it is composer Okiyama playing the guy stuttering "bench seat, bench seat, bench seat...".