Rie Hiki -- Koi no Roller Boots（恋のローラーブーツ）

 

Wow! That was quite the time with disco. Fashion-wise, folks were running the gamut between bell-bottoms and hot pants in the 1970s. Then, there were the roller skates trundling along at the roller discos. I used to see them on television all the time but I was still too young to get into those places.

Not sure how the disco roller skate boom did in Japan, but I gather that it was enough to spawn at least a few songs about the phenomenon. Par example, there was a briefly known late 1970s aidoru by the name of Rie Hiki（比企理恵）with her debut single "Koi no Roller Boots" (Roller Boots Of Love) released in December 1979. 

I have to say that those disco strings doing the drop down from heaven made for quite the impressive introduction, and then the jaunty beat came in for Hiki. My impression is that the teenybopper tunes at the end of the decade were fully imbued with the disco rhythms, and that was also the case with "Koi no Roller Boots" which did very modestly on the charts by peaking at No. 199 on Oricon. I thought that the song seemed quite similar in arrangement to Ikue Sakakibara's（榊原郁恵）more successful "Natsu no Ojosan"（夏のお嬢さん）from about 18 months earlier. And as it turns out, both songs were composed by Ben Sasaki（佐々木勉）with Jun Hashimoto（橋本淳）providing lyrics for "Koi no Roller Boots".

Hiki, who was born Rieko Nakakoshi（中越理恵子）in Tokyo, only released a total of five singles including "Koi no Roller Boots" and one album for that one year until the end of 1980. Instead, she had a far more prolific career as an actress including a six-year stint as Wendy in "Peter Pan". Ironically, the aforementioned Sakakibara became famous for her long rendition of Peter Pan himself. One of her best friends is 80s aidoru Yoshie Kashiwabara（柏原芳恵）.