trf -- Hey! Ladies & Gentlemen

 

Perhaps it's a bit early in the week to bring in the dance stuff but hey, it's trf. Still have quite the nostalgia for them after first hearing about them just a little before I headed for Japan for my second tour of duty as an English teacher.

Of course, there were their heyday in the mid-1990s with big hits like "Boy Meets Girl" and then their contribution to the 1998 Nagano Olympics, "UNITE! THE NIGHT!", brought them back to the charts. But there are probably some trf songs in between that I most likely didn't give my full attention to. For example, the title "Hey! Ladies & Gentlemen" rings a bell but I can't say that I could remember the song off the top of my head. 

Released in June 1996 as the group's 14th single, this was another one of Tetsuya Komuro's（小室哲哉）creations. It's got some of that House beat in there although for some of that other techno stuff in the arrangement, I'll probably need YMOfan04's or Marcos' wisdom in terms of categorization. Within all that synthesized rumbling, there is a story about sweaty bodies being invited for some fusion on the dance floor. Hey, it's the 1990s! "Hey! Ladies & Gentlemen" peaked at No. 4 on Oricon and it went Platinum. As for an album, it appears on the January 1998 album "WORKS -THE BEST OF TRF-" which was at No. 1 for a couple of straight weeks and eventually became the 25th-ranked album for the year. It also became the campaign song for Tokyo Beauty Centre.