Some of this year's Winter Olympics took place in Milan, Italy and I've heard that it is one of European centres for high fashion, so it'll probably be a city that I'll never be able to visit with pride since I have all the sartorial taste of the Doctors Who of the 1980s.
A few days ago, commenter YMOfan04 sent me the link to this video of a song titled "Milano Fantasy" by Romi Yamada（ロミ・山田）. At first, I'd wondered if it were that veteran voice actor who had the Big Bad part on the entertaining anime "Kill La Kill"（キルラキル）over a decade ago, but that was actually Romi Park（朴璐美）and she would have been all of eight years old when "Milano Fantasy" was released. The only other person that I knew with that variant of name was German/French actress Romy Schneider.
Nope, actually, the singer here is Romi Yamada whose real name is Hiromi Yamada（山田ひろみ）. She was born in 1933 in Japan-annexed Korea and was both a singer and actress. From what I could glean from her J-Wiki biography, her career began in the early 1960s with songs from the kayo kyoku genre. However, her 3rd-last single was the 1980 "Milano Fantasy" which was written by Koutarou Aso（麻生香太郎）and composed by Osamu Shoji（東海林修）, one of the pioneer synthesizer players. And indeed, the song sounds like something quite New Wave and Euro technopop...perhaps a bit ahead of its time since I get some Gazebo vibes from listening to it. I'll have to find out from YMOfan04 about which synth was being used here.
One of the other trivia tidbits that I learned regarding Yamada was that she had her time working in Las Vegas and so she actually bumped elbows with many of the legendary Rat Pack such as Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. And apparently, one time, even the King himself, Elvis Presley, complimented her on her performance. I'll have to check out her earlier discography.
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