Yukari Ito -- Sixteen Cubes of Sugar（16個の角砂糖）

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via david pacey

 

There was a scene in "Superman" (2025) when Lois Lane was pouring a ton of sugar into her coffee which struck me as being a very Lois Lane thing to do. I've enjoyed my Tim Hortons double-double, but even I won't put that much sugar into coffee or tea. I did have a friend who was pushing Lane levels of sugar infiltration, though.

Anyways, my last Yukari Ito（伊東ゆかり）article was delving into her City Pop/J-AOR phase in the late 1970s/early 1980s but this time, I'm returning to her very early days as a teenybopper singer back in the early 1960s. To remind folks, Ito was one of a number of pop singers who put out as many Japanese covers of English-language hits as they did original kayo kyoku, and it turns out her 7th single from July 1961, "Pocket Transistor"（ポケット・トランジスター）had a B-side titled "Sixteen Cubes of Sugar". Written by Takashi Otowa（音羽たかし）, the pseudonym used by any employee at King Records to translate an English pop song into Japanese, and composed by Jack Keller with arrangement by Hiroshi Miyagawa（宮川泰）, Ito does her Connie Francis best on this spritely tune with the amassed energy of sixteen cubes of sugar. 

Now as I said before, Ito's "Sixteen Cubes of Sugar" was a cover of an English-language pop song that had probably been released as recently as just a few months before the cover. I'd imagined that it was indeed the aforementioned Connie Francis who had recorded the song, considering the vocals and style. However, the original...with the same title...had been done by American pop singer Brian Hyland who had earlier come up with the more famous kitschy number "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini".