Fairies -- HEY HEY 〜Light Me Up〜

 

What is Eurobeat? Yes, it's a bit of a silly question for me to be asking since we already have had a KKP Label with that name and many songs under that title for years on our blog. Certainly I do recognize the overall sound of it because I used to dance to it back in the late 1980s: y'know stuff like Bananarama's "I Heard a Rumour" and Sinitta's "Toy Boy". But as for the background of it, I had to look it up in Wikipedia's relevant article which stated that it was double-pronged in origin (yes, do stop giggling😁): a) a British variant of Eurodisco-influenced dance pop and b) a hi-NRG-driven form of Italo disco. Of course, I had to dig deeper to get some insights into Eurodisco, hi-NRG and Italo disco. My friend and fellow administrator Marcos V. would be of massive assistance here.

The interesting thing is that within the Wiki article on Eurobeat, Japan has been included as a regional global centre for the genre along with Germany, the UK and Italy (apparently the term to use is J-Euro). In the late 1980s going into the 1990s, Japanese music did have its Eurobeat sector, usually with the singers or bands adapting the original Italian or UK song into Japanese, although Kyoko Isobe's（磯部恭子）"Fujun?"（不純?）may be considered a homegrown version. One of my favourite examples is "Dancing Hero" （ダンシング・ヒーロー）which really put Yoko Oginome（荻野目洋子）on the map. Recently, there's even been DA PUMP's "USA".

In any case, over the past few days, I decided to see whether there has been any further developments in Eurobeat and although I can't say that it wasn't quite near yesterday, the now-defunct aidoru group Fairies（フェアリーズ）released one of their more successful singles in February 2018 titled "HEY HEY 〜Light Me Up〜". Marcos actually mentioned them for the first time in "Kayo Kyoku Plus" back in 2017 as one of the groups of note in his "Early 2017 Special Selection". 

The talent agency Rising Production wanted to cobble together a song-and-dance group that could go up against the best in the world in terms of dancing and singing, so they set out to audition dozens of candidates across Japan before the final selection of seven women was made to debut in 2011. "HEY HEY" was their 16th and penultimate single when Fairies was down to a quintet. Listening to the song and seeing the above music video (which is truncated), all those 90s memories of bodycon dresses, feather boas and Tokyo dance clubs started percolating from my head again. Yup, it was good ol' Eurobeat in the house.

"HEY HEY" hit No. 2 on Oricon. There was just one more single from Fairies before they stopped all activities in June 2020. Not surprisingly, the song was a cover for the 1990 original by Vanessa.