I've been a fan of Japanese popular music for 40 years, and have managed to collect a lot of material during that time. So I decided I wanted to talk about Showa Era music with like-minded fans. My particular era is the 70s and 80s (thus the "kayo kyoku"). The plus part includes a number of songs and artists from the last 30 years and also the early kayo. So, let's talk about New Music, aidoru, City Pop and enka.
Credits
I would like to give credit where credit is due. Videos are from YouTube and other sources such as NicoNico while Oricon rankings and other information are translated from the Japanese Wikipedia unless noted.
It's been about 18 months since I last wrote about the duo Flat Face and their distinctive style of music. The last article I wrote about them dealt with their "Gas Tou no Shita de"（ガス燈の下で）from their 1986 debut and one-and-only album"Face" as this frantic technopoppy tune with European feelings.
Another track that I'd like to introduce is "Ike wo Koete"(Going Beyond the Pond) which is quite the opposite in tone. It's a whole lot more laconic and it sounds like an indies country-and-western approach to things with Yoshiko Takatori's（高取淑子）clear and resonant vocals leading the way. Strangely enough in a way, it also sounds like something that another eclectic duo, Swing Slow, would concoct a decade later.
There is the Ruiko Kurahashi（倉橋ルイ子）song "Gas Tou"（ガス燈）, a jazz torch song from her "Main Course" album of 1986 which has had me envisioning a romantic couple experiencing a magical night walk down a street lit up with gas lights.
It was just about five years ago when I first heard and noted the eclectic duo Flat Face featuring Yoshiko Takatori（高取淑子）and Mitsutoshi Takesue（武末充敏）as they handled music and technology to come up with their own European pop sound. And from their lone album, also from 1986, "Face", is "Gas Tou no Shita de" (Under the Gaslights), but it's far and away from anything old-style jazz. Instead, true to Flat Face's nature, this particular track has got a pretty busy synthpop and Europop rhythm which does sound like it could have been a candidate for a Eurovision contest. Also, unlike that couple strolling in the romantically lit evening that I mentioned in Ruiko's "Gas Tou", "Gas Tou no Shita de" has me imagining a couple of punky teens running all over the street escaping from some sort of trouble elsewhere.
I have to say that after becoming charmed by this pop song, I was stunned to realize that "Honeymoon In Paris" first achieved exposure to the masses all the way back in the mid-1980s. The arrangement sounded so ahead of its time at that time, and I think it possesses a certain indies quality. The song was used several years later from 1994 as the opening theme song for a travel program on regional Kyushu Asahi Broadcasting known as "Ruri Iro no Suna Dokei"（るり色の砂時計...The Azure Hourglass）. It ran all the way to 2012 with "Honeymoon In Paris" being used as the theme until 2009.
The duo behind the dreamy "Honeymoon In Paris" was known as Flat Face. Yoshiko Takatori（高取淑子）and Mitsutoshi Takesue（武末充敏）started the band in the early 1980s with their one and (presumably) only album "Face" coming out in 1986 which included "Honeymoon In Paris". According to Takatori's website, Flat Face "...used computers and digital equipments, played music as European sound (sic).", although from this particular song, I don't get an image of the group as being a synthpop act.
Also from her website, Flat Face broke up some time later with Takatori soon heading to the island of Bali where she was awakened to the pleasures of Asian music. She released her first solo single in 1998 and has been releasing material up to 2012.
Found this footage of Takatori and cheebow performing "Honeymoon In Paris" at a 2011 charity event.
And here is the first ending theme for "Ruri Iro no Suna Dokei" which was "Kiss of Life" as sung by Sade.
