Back in the days when CoCo ruled our worlds, just about the only way we got to see other j-pop acts was on Japanese Music programs like Music Fair, Pop Jam, and HEY HEY HEY Music Champ, and it was through watching the Top Ten countdown on the latter that we would get a grasp of what else was popular in the j-pop world. One group that always seemed to appear regularly on the tops of the hitmaking charts was a strangely named trio called GLOBE.
Every time I would see them top the charts, I would ask Dan if he knew these guys, and he’d say quizzically, “No, but MAN they’re always number one on the countdown!!!” At the time, we didn’t know the man behind this group was Tetsuya Komuro, the guy behind another act we loved in TRF (which , naturally, stood for Tetsuya’s Rave Factory), but we KNEW this group had SOMETHING about them, they were so popular!
It wasn’t until much later that finally, my friend (who had made a bunch of other great j-pop mixes) came through for me once again by including Globe’s latest single on his latest j-pop cassette mix! “Ah”, I said, “I’ve been WAITING to hear an entire song proper from these guys!”
The song on the tape was called “Feel Like Dance”, and it was THEN that I could tell it was the same producer and songwriter behind my favorite TRF songs, because this peppy, danceable little tune sounded JUST like the best of Tetsuya’s rave factory like Boy Meets Girl and Crazy Gonna Crazy! I loved it immediately, and immediately marched down to pick it up!
I would go on to enjoy all the other singles that Globe had to offer: Departures, Freedom, Joy To The Love (heck, a lot of ‘em are gonna end up here on my favorite singles list!) and I just LOVE Keiko’s voice, but I never quite understood why that white guy (Mark) who did all the rapping spoke such crummy English! You may as well have kept DJ Koo at that point…!