Qlair -- Sayonara no Chime（さよならのチャイム）

 

For me, the peak decade for female aidoru in the age before the Hello Project and the AKB48 girls poured in from the late 1990s was the 1980s in terms of quantity and popularity. So, I've had a curiosity about the individual aidoru and aidoru groups that came once the Showa Era ended in early 1989 and the Heisei Era began thereafter since by the middle of the 1990s, an aidoru desert had apparently been reached.

Qlair was a name that I had heard bandied about when talking about those final aidoru groups along with CoCo and Wink, but I never got to know them. They were a trio consisting of Sachiko Imai（今井佐知子）, Hiroko Inobe（井ノ部裕子）and Aki Yoshida（吉田亜紀）who graduated from a Fuji-TV-managed tarento training facility called Otome Juku（乙女塾...Teen Girl Cram School）. Qlair had a short run between 1991 and 1994 with 7 singles and 3 original albums under their belt.

Their 3rd single was "Sayonara no Chime" (The Goodbye Chime), released in January 1992. Sounding like a mix between the aidoru arrangements of those early 1990s thanks to the certain keyboards being used at the time and a summery Being song, "Sayonara no Chime" was written by Saeko Nishio（西尾佐栄子）and composed by Mioko Yamaguchi（山口美央子）. The story was all about reminiscing about that high school where a young girl missed out on an opportunity to make her feelings known to a boy she liked. Of course, it's bittersweet but the happy music gives a big hint that she has moved on to better pastures.

"Sayonara no Chime" was actually their lowest-ranking single in the Top 100 of Oricon, peaking at just No. 72. Now, as for the origin of the name, Qlair was derived from the song "Clair" by Gilbert O'Sullivan who I actually wrote about earlier today for his even more famous "Alone Again (Naturally)". In fact, during any of their live events, "Clair" would be played at the beginning while "Alone Again" would finish the proceedings.