"Turning Japanese" is a song by English band the Vapors, from their 1980 album New Clear Days. It was an international hit, becoming the band's most well-known song. The song prominently features the Oriental riff played on guitar.
According to songwriter David Fenton, "Turning Japanese is all the clichés about angst and youth and turning into something you didn't expect. Fenton intended the song to be a love song, with the character of the song "pining over a photograph of his ex-girlfriend" in his bedroom, drawing from Fenton's own experience of being rejected. Fenton wrote the song in his flat, but had problems writing the chorus. He said that the chorus then came to him suddenly when he woke up at 4am with the line "Turning Japanese, I think I'm turning Japanese" in his head, and he used it even though the words and the song title did not "really mean much.
The band suspected they would score a hit with "Turning Japanese", even delaying its release in order to make it their second single, hoping to avoid becoming "one-hit wonders". Nonetheless, they never matched the single's success. In Australia, it spent two weeks at No. 1 during June 1980, and, coincidentally, the song was also a minor hit in Japan.
15 сен 2024
