Yumi Matsutoya

Yumi Matsutoya is a Japanese singer/songwriter, a female Cliff Richard, but considerably more diverse and a good deal more sexy (no offence Sir Cliff), quite western in her production and her sound, but... read more very Japanese in her approach and her lyrics. It seems Setsugekka means ‘moon, flowers, snow’ and the lyrics were about the memory of a holiday in an alpine resort, a holiday revisited, in which the singer recalls a forgotten love - like a memory of a memory, or an echo, kind of sad and nostalgic though ambiguous and inscrutable as we know the Oriental mindset to be. The sadness seemed to be as much about the weight of memories as the loss of a love, recalling the good times but with regret. I therefore envisaged a girl sinking under the weight of her memories and being dragged down through water by time i.e., by clocks, which I thought at first to be a clumsy metaphor but on completing the image felt that they worked fine - elegiac rather than prosaic. What you see is what you get. The major difficulty was in keeping the clocks disentangled and encouraging the model not to give up through exhaustion, kept trying to tell her to adopt an elegant shape, very difficult underwater, but she was great and survived to tell the tale, although I don’t suppose she is keen to remember all this too clearly, some memories are best forgot, but some images are best to keep.