Takashi Fujii -- Irene（アイリーン）

 

When I visited Tokyo back in the fall of 2017, I stayed at the R&B Hotel in Otsuka, not far away from Ikebukuro. The hotel served a complementary breakfast each day in the lobby but of course, I couldn't eat the same thing for nearly two weeks straight, and so I was grateful that right beside the hotel was a Royal Host restaurant. Variety is the spice of life after all, and I got to go there a couple of times, once for breakfast and once for dinner.

As has been the case for the past few months on Fridays, my urban contemporary contributions are made up of the four articles and then the weekly Yutaka Kimura Speaks article. But I'm making an exception here tonight in the form of a sixth article because of the RoyHo connection. A couple of days ago, I found out that the restaurant chain and actor-comedian-singer Takashi Fujii（藤井隆）collaborated on a project for the reason that both entities celebrated their 50th birthdays in 2022. Looking at the short documentary above via YouTube, I had no idea that RoyHo had started life in Fukuoka and that its interior décor in the early years was indeed quite royal.

As for that project, that was an album titled "Music Restaurant Royal Host" which was released last year in September. I'm not sure what the criteria were for his choices but I'm assuming that they were simply songs that he liked. One of those songs just happens to be a cover of Yasuhiro Abe's（安部恭弘）"Irene", and being one of my favourite City Pop songs, I not only did the article on that smoothie years ago, it was also No. 2 on the Yutaka Kimura Speaks series a few months ago. 

Fujii's more subtle cover won't ever make me forget the Abe original from 1984 but I'm still happy that there is someone out there who was willing to make a cover of this classic. In any case, I wish a belated birthday to both RoyHo and Fujii. I promise that I will have a meal at the former the next time I'm in Japan.