- Lyrics: Michio Yamagami
- Music: Taku Izumi
- Arrangement: The Yellow Monkey
Original Lyrics
ルルル……………
愛し合うその時に この世はとまるの
時のない世界に 二人は行くのよ
夜はながれず 星も消えない
愛の唄ひびくだけ
愛し合う二人の 時計はとまるのよ
ルルル……………
時のない世界に 二人は行くのよ
夜はながれず 星も消えない
愛の唄ひびくだけ
愛し合う二人の 時計はとまるのよ
時計はとまるのよ
時計はとまるの
Romanized Lyrics
Lu-lu-lu-lu-lu…
ai shiau sono toki ni kono yo wa tomaru no
toki no nai sekai ni futari wa yuku no yo
yoru wa nagarezu hoshi mo kienai
ai no uta hibiku dake
ai shiau futari no tokei wa tomaru no yo
Lu-lu-lu-lu-lu…
toki no nai sekai ni futari wa yuku no yo
yoru wa nagarezu hoshi mo kienai
ai no uta hibiku dake
ai shiau futari no tokei wa tomaru no yo
tokei wa tomaru no yo
tokei wa tomaru no
Translated Lyrics
Lu-lu-lu-lu-lu…
When we love one another, the world stops
We’ll go together into a world without time
The night won’t give way to day, the stars will remain
A love song will just play
The two of us will love one another, and the clock will stop
Lu-lu-lu-lu-lu…
We’ll go together into a world without time
The night won’t give way to day, the stars will remain
A love song will just play
The two of us will love one another, and the clock will stop
The clock will stop
The clock will stop
Notes
Yoake no Scat is a song originally performed by Saori Yuki, released in 1969. It was an enormous hit, selling two million copies in two months. It remained number one on the charts for ten weeks, and in the top ten for four months. The success of this song allowed Yuki to appear on Japan’s New Years Eve music program, Kouhaku Uta Gassen, for the first time. She would go on to appear on the program every year until 1978.
(Saori Yuki performing the song on TV in 1969)
Yemon’s cover was released as a B-Side on their sixth single, “Nageku nari Waga Yoru no Fantasy“, which was released on 03/01/1995. It also appeared on the compilation “Triad Years Act II ~The Very Best Of The Yellow Monkey~” in 1997. Unlike a potential cover of a western rock song, you would assume that there would be a bit more work to take a 60s pop song and make it more suitable to a rock audience in the 90s. But the thing I love about this cover is that it doesn’t go in the direction you might think: It’s very true to the feel of the original, and isn’t particularly “rocked up” until Emma’s guitar solo halfway through the song. After that point the instrumentation is a bit more rock, but even then it’s not an over-the-top cover. It’s an arrangement that’s very true to the band’s roots, with one foot in Japan and one foot in the west.
This version of the song was only performed live once by The Yellow Monkey, that I’m aware of: At the Summer Sonic 2016 outdoor music festival with Saori Yuki herself singing with Yoshii. Yoshii also performed the song once during his solo career, on 12/28/2012 during a concert at Nippon Budokan. The concert was released on DVD in limited numbers under the name “Yoshii Beans”.
(This is obviously just footage captured by someone in the crowd from quite a distance. There used to be a better version on YouTube that was much closer to the stage, but it’s been taken down)
Yoshii was incredibly influenced by enka and Japanese pop music of this era, and Yemon’s sound draws more from it than most people realize. This song in particular left a huge impression on him on his childhood:
We went on school field trips to Tokyo in fifth and sixth grade, and after a show called “The Best Ten” had started airing, a feeling of really wanting to go back home to Tokyo had grown in me. A friend’s dad was a truck driver, and he sometimes took me with him when he had to go there for work. That friend, his dad, and I would drive through the night and listen to two radio shows that were popular with long distance truck drivers: “Utau Headlight” (“Singing Headlights”) and “Hashire Kayoukyoku” (“Go, Hit Songs!”). I forget which program it was, but one of them played a lot of older popular songs. As we were driving through Tokyo and listening to late night radio, Saori Yuki’s “Yoake no Scat” (“Dawn Scat”) came on. I think we were somewhere around Roppongi, but when that song came on I felt so happy. I thought “This is where I want to be! Where I want to live!”.
He also referenced it as being a possible inspiration for the sound he was trying to get on the mixing for Foxy Blue Love, an album track from The Night Snails And Plastic Boogie:
For that first album we stayed in Kawaguchiko for recording and then went back to Tokyo. But that was also the day that Nirvana’s “Nevermind” came out. So the recording engineer bought it and brought it back with him, and we listened to it on cassette. I couldn’t get over how amazing it sounded. I couldn’t stop thinking “How did they get this sound!?”, because it was unlike anything I’d ever heard. So “Foxy Blue Love” was the first song that the recording engineer started on during mixing, and he made it sound like Nirvana! But I listened to it and said “I’m sorry, let’s just give up. This is great, but it’s just not right”. Then I played a Finger 5 CD for him and said “Please try to make it sound something like this”. Then I played him Pink Lady or something and said “Give the snare drum a thick sound, like this”. A nice thick analog sound like Sweet had. I told him “Something that sounds like it was from ’75 or ’76 would be nice”, but then it turned into a little bit of a disagreement. The recording engineer was worried, but he went along with it. I was probably trying to revive “Yoake no Scat” (“Dawn Scat”), and all the music I listened to when I was a kid right then and there. It’s the foundation of why I make music, after all. I want people to hear something that has a cool sound to it.
He’d even continue to mention it periodically over the years when asked about Japanese pop of the era. For example, when asked about how a lot of that music was essentially just Japanese language versions of western pop music:
There were a lot of cases of some of those songs being more cool, even if they weren’t done as well (Laughs) I like Saori Yuki’s “Yoake no Scat” better than Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence”.
Though there are a ton of obvious examples of this throughout the history of Japanese pop, I admit I don’t get what he means here. Yoake no Scat isn’t taking very much from Sound of Silence, at least not to my ears…Anyway, I wish Yemon would have done more covers of song that influenced them as a band. While they did do a handful more covers of western songs later on (Till Dawn by T.Rex, a Japanese language version of Honaloochie Boogie by Mott The Hoople, Shout It Out Loud by KISS, and Ziggy Stardust by David Bowie), most covers of older Japanese songs from childhood would be reserved for Yoshii’s solo career much later.