Vapour Trails -- Don't Worry Baby

 

Maybe for this one, it isn't so much a Reminiscings of MY Youth as it is a Reminiscings of Youth for a lot of Japanese people my age back in the 1980s. As was the case with last week's ROY entry involving the "William Tell Overture", this was also a Western song that adorned a Japanese TV program of that magical decade but the fact is that I didn't personally know about the show or its theme song until many years later through retrospective programming.

I'm talking about "Best Hit USA", a TV Asahi late-night show that ran between April 1981 and September 1989. It was hosted by the very amiable and English-fluent Katsuya Kobayashi（小林克也）and it struck me as being a Japanese counterpart to Casey Kasem's "America's Top 10" as both featured the popular charting songs in the United States. The friendly theme song for "Best Hit USA" that played every time right from the start was only known for its intro and maybe some of that first verse.

Strangely enough, I got to hear the whole song finally many years after "Best Hit USA" had finished its run and it was the first full track on "BRIO AOR: Off-Shore", one of a two-CD set of all those groovy and laidback AOR tunes that populated the 1970s and 1980s. This is the 1979 "Don't Worry Baby" by Vapour Trails consisting of John McBurnie, Andy Dalby, and Phil Curtis, a British band that specialized in those West Coast soft rock songs, and it was known as "Surfside Freeway" in Japan. The song was also part of Vapour Trails' one and only album from that same year, "Vapour Trails".

That's pretty much all I could find out about this band. Apparently, there is a current Scottish band known as The Vapour Trails which provides jangle pop and indies. Of course, when I hear or read "vapour trails", I usually think of Yumi Arai's（荒井由実）famous "Hikoki Gumo"（ひこうき雲）. 

As for "Best Hit USA", it returned to TV Asahi's broadcast satellite service in 2003 where it has continued talking about the popular stuff in America for over twenty years.

Now, since I couldn't get more specific than 1979 as the origin for "Don't Worry Baby", I've opted to show what was at the top of the album charts for that year in Japan. Here are Nos. 1, 4 and 6. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to cover the albums so the links below will take you to their representative tracks.

1. Godiego -- Saiyuki（西遊記）

4. Satoshi Kishida -- Morning （モーニング）

6.  Alice -- ALICE VII