The Tube -- Namida no Harbour Light（涙のハーバーライト）

 

There's only a month left for Summer 2022 and I may have committed a sin by not having included the usual TUBE song. But that can be easily rectified.

"Namida no Harbour Light" (Harbour Lights of Tears) is being performed here at a 1990 concert when TUBE was fully in their prime as the ultimate in summertime goodtime boys. However, this first appeared on a B-side for their debut single "Best Seller Summer"（ベストセラー・サマー）in June 1985 when Nobuteru Maeda's（前田亘輝）band was simply known as The Tube. As with the A-side, this was written by Yoshiko Miura（三浦徳子）and composed by Kisaburo Suzuki（鈴木キサブロー）while the band took care of the arrangement. 

I guess that with Boz Scaggs' "Harbour Lights", a number of songs in Japan probably wanted to get that cool cachet of having their own harbour lights in the title. Anyways, since I could only find this concert version of "Namida no Harbour Light" which feels like a TUBE tune, I can imagine that perhaps the original recorded take of that B-side may have been more along the A-side as created by Miura and Suzuki with more of a Checkers or Rats N' Star vibe.

As I encounter more of these late summer tunes, I'm also feeling that such songs also have a certain angle on the whole love thing. Whereas the spring tunes hint at love blossoming and the autumnal kayo display the dried and cracked leaves of dead romance, songs such as "Namida no Harbour Light" seem to show off a transition of the experience of summer beach love into the wistfulness of realizing that though there were some good times, it's now time to end the seasonal fling and head back home, tears and all.