79: Pink Lady, “Kiss in the Dark”

By Wm. on July 20, 2026

Today marks nine years of content of varying quality posted here at The Music of My Life. It’s been generally fun and occasionally cathartic to share pix from the past and type out the stuff running through my noggin, and as ever I’m grateful to any and all who stop by regularly. The first part of what I’ve come up with for my ninth blogiversary is plenty silly. We’re starting off with nine pieces of useless chart trivia from the only year ending with a 9 during the Classic Casey era, putting the songs on the 7/21/79 AT40 under the microscope.

—Song at #9: “Gold.” A vital remnant from the “uncredited Stevie Nicks backup vocal” era between Rumours and Tusk. Side note you likely knew but somehow I didn’t realize until the other day: all of the second singles (and none of the first or third singles) on the five Mac studio albums between Fleetwood Mac and Tango in the Night was a Stevie composition.
—Songs that would peak at #9: “You Can’t Change That,” “Mama Can’t Buy You Love.”
—Song that advanced nine positions: “Good Times.” That tune with the enormously influential bassline jumped from #13 to #4 in just its third week on the show. It would take four more weeks to best “Bad Girls.”
—Songs with nine letters in their title: “Good Times,” “Do It or Die,” “My Sharona.” In this issue Billboard listed Streisand’s current hit as “Main Event,” but the following week would change it to “Main Event/Fight.”
—Nine-letter words appearing in a song title: Beautiful (twice) and Moonlight. I actually can tell you what I was doing on the evening of July 21, 1979: multitasking, attention split between listening to AT40 on my portable radio and watching the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers on TV. (This page at ultimate70s.com confirmed my guess as to the date of the movie broadcast.) It’s a part of the second hour of the show, around the time that “People of the South Wind” and “Shadows in the Moonlight” play at #26 and #25, when I can picture myself sitting on the floor of our living room as Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo crack wise.
–Acts with nine letters in their name: Anita Ward, Elton John, Wet Willie.
—Songs that had a nine-week run on the show: “I Can’t Stand It No More,” “Do It or Die,” “Dance the Night Away.”
—Songs in their ninth week on AT40: “Ring My Bell,” “Boogie Wonderland,” “I Want You to Want Me,” “Dance the Night Away.” All four of the songs that debuted on 5/26 are still around.
—Songs in their ninth week on the Hot 100: “Bad Girls,” “I Can’t Stand It No More,” “I Was Made for Lovin’ You,” “Do It or Die,” “Shadows in the Moonlight,” “Lead Me On,” “Weekends,” “If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me.” But: if you tweak this last category to ‘Hot 100 or Bubbling Under,’ you lose Maxine Nightingale and add in the song at #40, “Kiss in the Dark” by Pink Lady, the first Top 40 hit by a Japanese act since Kyu Sakamoto’s “Sukiyaki.”

“Kiss in the Dark” is bog-standard late-era disco pop; perhaps what distinguishes it is the charm of the lilting accents of Mie and Kei as they phonetically sing about a guy they think is leading them on. The song would inch up to #37 in two weeks before it quickly tumbled off the chart. I remembered there was an ill-fated variety show they co-hosted with Jeff Altman that aired some time later (turns out it was in March of 1980), and maybe I tuned in briefly to an episode? I’m seeing now that then NBC head exec Fred Silverman came up the idea for the show, which clocks given other NBC disasters of the period (if you clicked the ultimate70s link above, you would have seen there was an episode of Supertrain airing on 7/21/79).

I don’t wish to knock “Kiss in the Dark” too much, though–I appreciated the novelty of the act at the time and am grateful to hear it again when those three mid-summer AT40s are re-aired.

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Changing tacks: Our family summer vacation in 1973 (when I was nine as it happens) was to Florida, our final destination being the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World, then less than two years old. One side trip on the way down was stopping off at Ocala and taking a glass-bottomed boat tour at Silver Springs. I’m pretty certain that our hotel was adjacent to WDW and we were able to ride a monorail directly from it to the park. While I’m sure Amy and I did many of the normal theme park things, my chief memory of the trip is of not feeling all that well, battling some nausea and lack of appetite until after returning home. I don’t have a solid feel for the dates we were gone, but mid-July would be a reasonable guess.

Ordinarily, I’d share a picture or two–I believe there’s one where Sis and I are being greeted by Donald and maybe Mickey–but I’m not home currently, in Florida once again instead. My sister, who’s lived near Orlando for more than two decades, is facing a significant health challenge and has an important medical appointment today. She could use some good vibes; I’m very concerned.