Wang Chung look back on their Dance Hall Days..
80s New Wave band still going strong after 45 years.. with lots more on the horizon
It’s one of those humorous but spot-on quotes that has been attributed to a number of icons, such as The Who’s Pete Townsend, Robin Williams, and Timothy Leary. “If you can remember the 60s, you weren’t there,” one of them said first.
In a similar vein, you’d need to have been living under a rock in the 80s – a decade with its countless crimes against fashion and an ubiquitous whiff of hairspray to help prop up those horrendous big hairdos – if you don’t remember hearing Wang Chung constantly on the radio and MTV.
You couldn’t avoid them at one stage with their three massive hit singles Dance Hall Days, Let’s Go! and Everybody Have Fun Tonight, which only missed out on the coveted No1 slot in the US charts due to unfortunate timing.
It was released at the same time as the Bangle’s banger Walk Like An Egyptian.
Wang Chung also just happened to score arguably one of the greatest film soundtracks of the 80s when director William Friedkin of The Exorcist fame asked them to work with him on his neo-noir movie To Live And Die In LA.
The title track is still one of my favourite songs of all time.
“It has endured very well, which is very gratifying for us,” the band’s co-founder Nick Feldman stated modestly.
Wang Chung songs have appeared on many other movie soundtracks in the 1980s.
But perhaps their other most notable movie credit is their cool song Fire In The Twillight – with its literally smashing music video in which Jack wrecks a vintage car with a sledge hammer – on the soundtrack for The Breakfast Club.
The offer to work with William Friedkin came out of the blue.
Speaking to me on Zoom, the band’s frontman Jack Hues recalled, “I was hanging out with a friend. This is obviously in the days before mobiles, and his telephone rang in his flat. It was for me, which was strange. And this American voice said, ‘Will you be there in half an hour, Mr William Friedkin would like to speak with you?’
“And I initially had this phone call with Bill Friedkin, where he was just talking about the movie he was making and saying he was using [the song] Wait off Points on the Curve as a temp track.
“In other words, they would look at the rushes at the end of the day and he would just have that playing while they were watching stuff.
“And he said, ‘That’s exactly the vibe that I want for the film’. It just felt like an amazing opportunity.”
Perhaps even more astonishingly, Wang Chung’s record label weren’t keen on the idea, because they wanted the band to get cracking on their next big hit single. Talk about pressure!
Jack continued, “Geffen were not into us doing it because this was at a point where we had Points on the Curve, Dancehall Days, Don’t Let Go!, which were pretty solid hits in America. But they weren’t number one records. So our task was to have a No1 record.
“And we weren’t really stepping up to the plate, in their opinion. We were writing all this arty-farty, dark stuff.
“They reluctantly in the end said, ‘Okay, you can have a week to do the soundtrack work, but then you’ve got to get back to the grind and write a hit single’.
“So it was all done under a lot of pressure really. But it meant we were producing ourselves; there was no big budget attached to it particularly.
“And I think those were sort of real virtues, in the sense that it allowed me and Nick to be ourselves and create something that was fairly undiluted. And that’s what comes across still. It’s quite a powerful bit of work.”
The final spellbinding album would have four superb songs on side A and four haunting instrumentals on side B.
It’s so brilliant that it’s hard to believe they didn’t spend months, if not years, perfecting it.
Nick said, “We did it in about three weeks. So it was, for us, incredibly quick. It had a spontaneous, sort of energetic feeling to the whole thing.
“And what Friedkin did was: he, in many cases, cut the movie to the soundtrack. Not completely, but in quite a few places.
“I think that gives the soundtrack a real sort of strategic, powerful position within that movie. It really helped the soundtrack to be at its maximum power.”
Nick continued: “It was an amazing experience being involved with people like Friedkin and his team, and going over to the States and hearing our stuff on the Todd-ao editing suite.
“But it also cleansed our palate, if you like, for the fight we were having to try and write a new hit. So we got stuff off our chest.
“It cleared the way for us to go into something much more commercial, for want of a better word, which is what the next record became.”
The next album Mosaic [1986] would include their massive American number two hit single Everybody Have Fun Tonight and Let’s Go!, which also went top 10 in the States.
The third single Hypnotize Me wouldn’t do as well as the first two singles, even though it was probably the best tune out of the three, but it still managed to go top 40 in the US Billboard Hot 100.
It was also used on the soundtrack for the Innerspace movie, which starred Meg Ryan, Dennis Quaid and Martin Short, whose father was from South Armagh.
It’s hard to believe it was exactly 45 years ago when Nick and Jack first hooked up with their first short-lived band, before eventually forming Huang Chung [meaning “yellow bell” in Mandarin] and then eventually changing it to their name for their second album Points on the Curve, which is one of my all-time favourite albums of that decade.
The Wang Chung name change was made at the request of their legendary record label boss Dave Geffen, who felt Huang Chung was too confusing for Joe Public.
The English group’s beginning was a bit like how it all started for Jimmy Rabbitte in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments, when he put an advert in Hot Press magazine’s classifieds section, asking, “Have you got soul? If so, The World’s Hardest Working Band is looking for you. Contact J. Rabbitte, 118, Chestnut Ave., Dublin 21. Rednecks and southsiders need not apply.”
In 1977, Hues answered a similar advert in the British music bible Melody Maker.
“Nick had put an expensive looking add in the musicians wanted section. I seem to remember it had a sort of border around it and stuff, so it stood out from the other ads. And I fell for this ad and I thought it was somebody important,” Jack said, laughing. Chuckling at the memory,
There’s lots happening. We’re going to get back in the studio & there’ll be lots more touring.
he quipped, “I certainly wasn’t at the time. It was a pure con job! It was all designed to look like an ad for some important new signed act, you know.
“But it wasn’t. I had this sort of quite complicated chord sequence designed to put the various applicants through their paces, and most of them couldn’t handle it at all.
“But Jack walked in and I just showed him the sequence, and he got it in about two seconds. And I thought, ‘Right, this is the guy’.”
Wang Chung’s lyrics can often be a lot darker than your average ‘80s pop band, especially on the non-singles stuff.
I’d always got the impression that their music would’ve worked perfectly as the soundtrack for American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, or anything else by the controversial author.
Nodding his head in agreement, Jack said, “Yeah, it’s interesting you say that, because, I think they are. You know, even on Dance Hall Days when it begins with ‘take your baby by the hand’, I think I was quite conscious of The Beatles’ I Want to
Hold Your Hand and that sort of innocent sense of love.
“And by the end, you know, [I sing] ‘Take your baby by the wrist’, which is a bit more violent in a way, and this sort of surreal sense of everything.
“So there was this sort of sense of the transition even in a simple pop song that you could create this darker vision.”
It was, Nick admitted, “a difficult time” when they worked on The Warmer Side of Cool, recorded with the renowned composer Peter Wolf, which was their last record with Geffen in 1989.
Unfortunately, it failed to set the world on fire.
Nick added, “I think it was a bit of a battleground that record, probably with Peter but also, in some ways between me and Jack.
“We were both wanting to do the record our respective ways. It was quite tense, you know.
“So I think that the spirit of that whole experience was not fantastic. In a way, it was quite the opposite of, say, [the] To Live and Die in LA experience.” Jack, who has also released several solid solo works and collaborated on a wonderful album with Tony Banks of Genesis fame, holds his hand up here, too.
“My sense of that record is we were trying to make a slightly sort of prog album, or the sorts of things we started to do on To Live and Die in LA,” Jack reflected.
“And that slightly more extended musically and darker side of what we did, you know, with Peter trying to shift everything into a kind of more bouncy sort of thing. But when I look back now, I think that this was the era of the emergence of Guns ‘N’ Roses and Nirvana, both signed to Geffen.
“And there was definitely a sense of the tides changing, with the 80s coming to an end. And we were – not so much Nick actually, because I think Nick’s far more open to the winds of change than I am – but I think I was retreating back into myself a bit on that record.
“And we needed to be branching out a bit more and maybe embracing some of those trends. You know, either the grunge or the hip hop things that were coming up.
“Neither of those things penetrated that album at all.”
They would certainly bounce back on an artistic level. The band’s last proper studio album might’ve been Tazer Up! in 2012, but then they gave us a gentle reminder of how great they really were in their heyday, when they teamed up with the City Of Prague Philharmonic to re-record all their greatest hits on the breathtakingly beautiful album Orchesography in 2019.
And it looks like the future’s so bright, they’ve gotta wear shades in 2023, to paraphrase Timbuk 3’s song.
“We’ve got this big retrospective hopefully coming out, of everything we’ve ever even dreamt of, let alone done.
“There’s a few technical or legal things we have to sort out, but we’re almost there,” Nick concluded. “And then we’re also working on some sort of digital motion capture of us, like the ABBA thing.
“We’re calling them Wangatars as opposed to avatars.
“There’s lots happening. We’re going to be doing some new recordings; we’ve both been writing.
“So we’re going to get back in the studio together and do some stuff for the first time since the orchestral record. Yeah, there’s lots going on. And then there’ll be lots more touring as well.”
They always say that you should never meet your teenage heroes.
But this clearly wasn’t the case when I got to chat with Jack and Nick of Wang Chung.
As Jimmy Rabbitte would say in the Dublin vernacular, “They’re both sound.”