Four Leaves -- Odoriko（踊り子）

 

Through some of the Author's Picks lists that have been posted up recently, I've come to realize that kayo kyoku songwriters enjoyed certain common words in their titles. Another one is "odoriko" or "dancing girl" (but also "dancing boy" although the former seems to be more common) for some reason. I don't have enough songs in my knowledge to put up another Author's Picks under that theme quite yet, but I can mention that I remember Kozo Murashita's（村下孝蔵）wistful "Odoriko" and Momoe Yamaguchi's（山口百恵）swift and stately "Izu no Odoriko"（伊豆の踊子）.

Well, here's another "Odoriko"...this time, the 31st single by the Johnny's aidoru group Four Leaves（フォーリーブス）released in June 1976. Written by Yu Aku（阿久悠）and composed by Daisuke Inoue（井上大輔）when he was still writing as Tadao Inoue（井上忠夫）, formerly of the Group Sounds band Jackey Yoshikawa and His Blue Comets（ジャッキー吉川とブルー・コメッツ）, this is quite the brassy tune with a touch of that GS despite it having gone the way of the dodo in the very early 1970s. Compared to the other two songs that I cited in the previous paragraph, the whole thing about Four Leaves' "Odoriko" is a fair bit more sad and salacious as a dancer-for-money slips off the nice-person act and the latest conquest like lint off a sleeve.

For listeners who've picked up on the observation that there seems to be another earlier and more well-known song lurking in the background of "Odoriko", well, I searched that out and I discovered that it takes the riff and chorus from "Let's Live For Today", the 1967 hit by rock band The Grass Roots. "Odoriko" itself scored a No. 41 ranking on Oricon and proved to be the ticket for Four Leaves' 7th and final appearance on NHK's Kohaku Utagassen in their first run between 1968 and 1978.