When it comes to dancing, I think that I was about several years too late for those named dances such as the Twist or the Swim which were back in the 1960s or so, and although I was around for the disco 1970s, I was too young for the dance floor to experience the Hustle and the Bump.
The university days were the time that my friends and I went to the nearby dance clubs and by that point, I don't think there were any named dances. When some of our favourites such as New Order's "Bizarre Love Triangle" and Depeche Mode's "Strangelove" hit the speakers, we did our own thing. Mind you, me doing my own thing often had some other dancers misunderstand my moves and scream out "Does anyone know how to do the Heimlich Maneuver? We got a choker here!"
I've done articles about some of those 50s and 60s tunes from America or Europe that got their own Japanese cover versions during that decade and tonight I've found this song from Italy titled "24.000 Baci" (24,000 Kisses) by Adriano Celentano. Created by Celentano, Ezio Leoni, Piero Vivarelli, and Lucio Fulci in 1961, it has struck me as this liberating rock n' roll tune to get the kids up and out on the floor.
According to the Wikipedia article on "24.000 Baci", there were covers done in a few other countries, and as I said off the top, Japan was no different. Not long after the original by Celentano came out, the late actor/singer Takashi Fujiki（藤木孝）debuted his singing career in May 1961 with "Ni-man Yon-sen no kiss" which may have been a bit more of a mouthful to say but had the same meaning of "24,000 Kisses".
With Motohiro Arai（荒井基裕）providing the Japanese lyrics, Fujiki's cover possessed that same ol' rock n' roll sensation but with perhaps a bit more of a boss arrangement and the singer having an interesting clipped delivery. One piece of trivia that I found out about him was that he seemed to not only have an ability to sing but also to dance, so he did a number of Twist songs to the extent that he was even labeled as "The Twist Man" to help bring in that particular dancing boom into the nation.
In 1966, Masaaki Hirao（平尾昌章）gave his own frenetic version of "Ni-man Yon-sen no Kiss" that had more of that Italian flair in the arrangement. Checking his discography, I'm not sure whether his cover had come out as an official single but perhaps it came out as part of that compilation you see in the video thumbnail above.
Then in October 1972, aidoru group Golden Half（ゴールデン・ハーフ）that I first wrote about back in 2017 released their own take on the song as their 7th single. Their version had a mix of that Italian flavour as well as some of the late 60s/early 70s rock feeling. One difference was that the title was slightly changed to "Ni-man Yon-sen Kai no Kiss"（24,000回のキッス...Kisses 24,000 Times）.
