Akiko Kobayashi -- Thief in the Night

 

Ahhh...the orchestra hit, the music version of the trendy spice peppering pop songs of the 1980s and 1990s. I used to hear this all the time on songs on radio and television back as a high school and university student. Probably one of the biggest examples was Yes' "Owner of a Lonely Heart" (which I will definitely cover soon enough as a ROY).

I'd wondered for years whether that familiar blast actually had a name. Well, it does and I saw the above video by Vox which goes further into its history. It's quite fascinating, actually. In any case, the orchestra hit has also been used in Japanese pop culture, but my ears have been accustomed to hearing it not so much in music, but in anime and game shows on Japanese TV.

But there is one song in kayo kyoku that has stood out in my mind because of its use of the orchestra hit, and it's unusual not just for the famous sound effect. Singer-songwriter Akiko Kobayashi（小林明子）first became famous for her hit tune "Koi ni Ochite"（恋におちて）in 1985, and since then, she's been known to me as someone who seemingly preferred to tackle the calming side of music via AOR and light pop.

However in her 2nd album, "Kokoro no Mama ni" (心のままに）from 1986, there is one track among all of the laidback pop that stands out, and that would be "Thief in the Night" which I believe starts off Side B of the original LP. I did know that Kobayashi once fronted a rock band before she made her official debut as a pop singer in the mid-1980s, but I was still surprised when my university friend first introduced me to "Thief in the Night" which was written and composed by Kobayashi.

Out of her entire discography spanning several years, "Thief in the Night" is far and away the most dynamic song that I ever heard by Kobayashi, and on first hearing it as a citizen of the 1980s, I was enthralled by the song for sounding like something that should have been the theme tune for some action thriller. And yet, when I wrote up the article for the source album more than a decade ago, I did mention that "Thief in the Night" didn't quite stand the test of time partly because of all of those orchestra hits which bombarded my ears like bullets fired by Schwarzenegger. I frankly thought that it grew a little cheesier over the decades.

Well, having heard it once more these days, my attitude toward "Thief in the Night" has begun to float upwards again, but not quite to the thrilling levels of my university days. Still, with all of the work on the blog for the past ten years giving me a number of insights on music and history, I can re-appreciate Kobayashi's tune in terms of what was trendy within pop music all over the world back in the 1980s.

It is good to have Akiko Kobayashi back up on the blog again since she's one of the singers whose works on YouTube have sometimes tended to get the copyright strike deletions. I actually put up one song by her a few months ago that got that treatment, so my last viable article about her goes back to 2019 when I wrote on her Xmas tune, "Anata ni Suteki na Christmas Present Agetai na"（あなたに素敵なクリスマスプレゼントあげたいな）.