Welcome to Labour Day and September 2025! Hopefully, things are swell wherever you are. Haven't really complained with the weather here in Toronto; it's been brilliantly sunny and not too warm or cool. To start off this day's round of articles on "Kayo Kyoku Plus", we have the usual holiday edition of Reminiscings of Youth.
I've read that Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" is one of the iconic songs of the 1980s. I would not disagree. That rhythm track and the sultry vocals fairly scream New Wave and synthpop extraordinaire. Used to hear this all the time on radio and occasionally I got to see one of the music videos for it including the one above. "Tainted Love" was released in July 1981 and became a huge hit all around the planet including Canada which had a No. 1 ranking for it as was also the case in Australia, South Africa and Soft Cell's native UK. In the United States, it peaked at No. 8 on Billboard.
Reading up on the story of "Tainted Love", I found out a couple of things which surprised me. One is that this was released in July 1981 (as mentioned above); I'd assumed that this was a 1982 hit but I guess with all of the chaos surrounding my trip to Japan as a high school student in that very month, it was probably easy to suffer mental time shifts. The other thing is that once again as was the case with Kim Carnes' "Bette Davis Eyes" and Joan Jett's "I Love Rock 'n' Roll", Soft Cell's biggest hit wasn't an original by the synthpop duo but a cover version of a song done many years previously. In fact, "Tainted Love" was originally recorded by Gloria Jones in 1965 as a soul B-side for a single that didn't become particularly successful. Remakes were made between then and 1981, but it was Soft Cell's synthy version that put it over the top.
So, what songs were at the top of Oricon in July 1981?
1. Chiharu Matsuyama -- Nagai Yoru（長い夜）
2. Masahiko Kondo -- Blue Jeans Memory （ブルー・ジーンズ・メモリー）
3. Toshihiko Tahara -- Kimi ni Kettei! （キミに決定!）
Toshihiko Tahara is a quite a singer and dance with a lot of back up dancers. Masahiko Kondo's guitars are down right cool! I like Chiharu Matsuyama's suit and I am a fan of Nagai Yoru（長い夜 ! The words are easy to understand and his singing is clear. When I started learning Japanese this was one of the songs I was able to figure out pretty quickly almost without the need of a dictionary.
ReplyDeleteHi, Brian. I didn't know about Matsuyama's "Nagai Yoru" until many years later but when I visited Japan in 1981, "Blue Jeans Memory" and "Kimi ni Kettei!" were the big hits. Matchy and Toshi were pretty hopped up on the caffeine in their performances.
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