One song by Taeko Ohnuki（大貫妙子）within her long and varied discography that has always stuck with me all these years is her "Kuro no Clair" (Black Clair) which begins her 1982 album "Cliche". It's that lush Fashion Music creation sent up to the max as if the genre had been forced to watch every televised or cinematic version of "Wuthering Heights" or read some of the Gothic plots in a Harlequin romance.
Over the decades since the introduction of "Kuro no Clair" in the early 1980s, the song has been covered by at least ten artists including Kirinji（キリンジ）and Hiromi Iwasaki（岩崎宏美）. Another one is Ritsuko Kazami（風見律子）who included her more contemporized version of the song within her 1986 album "Aventurier"（アヴァンチュリエ）. It's more like enjoying that glass of wine in a Parisian bar of that decade rather than savoring one in a castle a couple of hundred years prior.
Then we have singer and actress Mayumi Hara's（原真祐美）take on "Kuro no Clair" from her second album "Vert Clair"（ベール・クレール）from February 1984. It starts with a melody that could be a remnant from the previous track or just a whimsical little interlude that fades out 40 seconds later before the familiar strings of "Kuro no Clair" elide in. The way that Ohnuki had woven one of her masterpieces, it would be very difficult to excise the Fashion Music essence, and I think Hara's cover is somewhere between Ohnuki's original and Kazami's more contemporary version. I can get that seaside castle-under-an-overcast-sky vibe from this one.
Looks like I am going to have to track down the original in order to compare it to Hara's cover. However, the cover version is the first version I heard I hope that does not make a little biased.
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