Johnny Hates Jazz, TURN BACK THE CLOCK—An Oral History (Part 1)

If you recognize the name Johnny Hates Jazz, then it’s likely because of their biggest hit, “Shattered Dreams,” but beyond that brilliant bit of pop, it’s often forgotten that the band pulled a second top-40 placing in the States with their follow-up single, “I Don’t Want to Be a Hero” (#31), while the title track to their debut album, Turn Back the Clock, ended up as a top-5 hit on adult-contemporary radio. Back home in the UK, they managed to enter the charts twice more, first with “Heart of Gold” (#19), then with “Don’t Say It’s Love” (#48). Turn Back the Clock may have been a chart-topping album in the UK—indeed, it entered the charts at #1—but rather than continue onward with a sophomore effort, the band’s lead singer, Clark Datchler, instead made the decision to leave the band, spurring a separation between him and his fellow bandmates, Mike Nocito and Calvin Hayes, which would last for more than two decades.

Although the trio reunited for a series of live shows in 2010, Hayes’ subsequent departure led to Johnny Hates Jazz regrouping as a twosome, with Datchler and Nocito releasing a new Johnny Hates Jazz album, Magnetized, in 2013. When the album was still on the horizon, I reached out to the band and pitched the idea of doing an oral history of Turn Back the Clock, which led to interviews with the aforementioned twosome, but because I wanted to get as many voices in the mix as possible, I also reached out to Hayes as well as Phil Thornalley, who played a key role in the band’s evolution.

To my surprise, this decision did not sit well with Datchler and Nocito, both of whom made a point of indicating that they didn’t think that was necessary, but as a journalist, if the opportunity to speak to all the players is available, then of course you’re going to take advantage of that opportunity. After the fact, I realized that the reason why they were both so rankled was because it meant that they couldn’t present their streamlined, airbrushed version of the Johnny Hates Jazz story.

I should note that I did present them with a copy of this piece upon its completion, wanting to make sure that they had the opportunity to respond to some of the remarks made by Hayes in particular, but I was met with anger and even threats of legal action if I published the piece. I don’t know how you’d successfully sue someone for trying to compile the most detailed article possible and then giving everyone the opportunity to respond to everyone else, but I got so pissed off at the time that I just didn’t publish the piece.

And then when I did publish it, I did so in an unofficial manner, hiding it within my Contently portfolio, where you’d really have to go looking for it to find it. But now I’m putting it here on my Substack page as a multi-part saga. I hope you enjoy it.

Oh, and when you eventually hit the point in the piece where you go, “Oh, that’s why they were pissed that you talked to the other guys,” just remember that they had their chance to respond but instead got so pissed that I’d talked to the other guys at all that they couldn’t be bothered to respond with anything other than vitriol…and that’s on them.

Before the Band

Clark Datchler (vocals / keyboards / guitar): My father was a successful professional jazz musician, ironically, given that I ended up in a band called Johnny Hates Jazz, but he definitely encouraged me to get into music when he saw that I was showing a real interest. He actually helped me put together my first record, which was released when I was 17 years old. It was called “You Fooled Them Once Again.” I was backed by a quite well known reggae band in the UK called Aswad. It wasn’t a reggae record. Actually, it was more of a soul record. But one thing led to another, I got involved with one of the members of the band Visage, who did “Fade to Grey,” which was a big hit over here. Rusty Egan started to produce me, I got very much into electronic music, and through that I was signed to Warner Brothers in the States as a songwriter, so I actually moved out to the U.S. when I was 17 and lived in L.A.

Calvin Hayes (keyboards / drums): It’s not like I had showbiz parents who were trying to force be in the music business. It was something that was just a passion within me from day one. I learned to read from reading record labels when I was 18 months or two years old, so I didn’t exactly grow up deaf, dumb, and blind to music. I had a passion for records and music—and, of course, it didn’t hurt that my dad (Mickie Most) was one of the most successful record producers of all time! So I guess that’s where it started, and then I got into playing instruments around age eight or nine, around there. I had a passion for drums and piano. I’m kind of a rhythm player. That’s my forte, giving songs an edge and just making them feel good, really. I’m not a virtuoso musician, but if you want someone strumming something or playing a rhythmic part, then that’s what I’m good at, y’know?

Mike Nocito (bass): I started in exactly the way that everybody else did: when you’re 10, 11, 12 years old, you get a guitar. My older brother, Tony, played the guitar, so I was obviously influenced by him. I grew up in a small little village in England near an American Air Force base, and my best friend from when I was 12 years old is a guy called Phil Thornalley, who is very well known in the music business. He was in The Cure and wrote “Torn.” So he and I grew up together from when I was 12 years old, we were best friends, we were in bands together.

Phil Thornalley (vocalist): Mike’s family had been stationed at RAF Mildenhall. One summer they just appeared. [Laughs.] When he was younger, Mike had this huge shock of blonde hair that was very difficult to miss, and he was a really good sportsman. As kids, we all used to play football— before the music kicked in, that is. My older brother met Mike first, but there was a whole gang of us in the village, and it was really quite idyllic, because there were enough of us that we could form a couple of bands. Everyone got into music. Even the people who couldn’t play very well were in a band. Those heady days, when you’re innocent and just doing it for the love it…

MN: I remember one summer… My father was the principal of the high school on this Air Force base, so we kind of got the high school auditorium, since the school had closed for the summer, so Phil and I and my brother, we just camped out in the auditorium, and that was sort of our first foray into recording—and it was so cool! [Laughs.] We had the reel-to-reel tape decks going back and forth, just like the Beatles did, just overdubbing and overdubbing. I’ve always had an interest in the recording side.

PT: His brother got the tape-to-tape thing going—he was, like, five years older than us—but we had a rehearsal room that would sort of shift from one family’s summer house to the next family’s spare bedroom, garage, what have you. And eventually it ended up at the auditorium, where we used to make some, uh, preliminary recordings. [Laughs.] Mike and I were pretty keen songwriters even then. I guess were probably 14 or 15 at the time. We were also playing in a soul band, actually! Al Sharp was our mentor. He was a terrific singer. He’d been signed and had a record deal, and he was the first person to try and help us out. He took us down to London, and we met a publisher at the record company, and we’d play our songs hopefully, but it was just about to turn punk, and we were writing what were probably sub-Todd-Rundgren/Hall-and-Oates efforts.

MN: I remember doing a guitar session for Al. We went to Mayfair Studios, which is a famous studio, I was playing guitar for him, and I remember thinking, “I’ve done my part, but I don’t want to leave. I want to stay. I want to finish the record.” ‘Cause that’s what we were doing.

PT: I was not invited down to the session. [Laughs.] Nor were the rest of us. We just weren’t good enough, but Mike was a standout musician, well ahead of us.

MN: Pretty soon after that, Phil got a job at RAK Studios, which was Mickie Most’s studio. Phil’s mother knew someone who knew someone who knew someone…you know, the classic situation.

PT: Like Mike, I was fascinated with writing and playing music and making records, and my mother sort of picked up on that, so by a mutual friend—a doctor—I managed to get an interview at RAK Studios, which had only just opened up about six months before. It was really hard to get those jobs, but because I knew somebody, he put in a word, so I got the job of the tea boy that everybody shouts at. [Laughs.] It’s a psychological nightmare, really. In the studio, the producer is usually totally insecure, and he takes it out on the engineer, who then takes it out on the assistant or tape operator or whoever, so you’re right at the bottom of the food chain. Which is where I started.

MN: Phil was at RAK for three years and over the course of time he became sort of a big-shot engineer, and then there was one weekend he needed help, there was no one to help, so I went and assisted him, ‘cause he just called me up. And from there, I got a job. The guy who managed RAK Studios, his policy was that he would only hire new assistant engineers or tape ops if they went to public school, which is what they called private schools in the UK. But he left, and the guy who took over was the maintenance guy, so I was the first guy at RAK who wasn’t from a UK public school. I just had an American high school education. But because of my accent, I think that helped me, the idea of having an American kid working there.

PT: I said, “I think my friend Mike would work. He’d do the job.” And I think he did a couple of weeks as an intern, and then I said, “Yeah, he’s good enough.” [Laughs.] So then we were both working at RAK, which was just amazing. There we were, making proper hit records with producers who really knew what they were doing.

CD: On leaving L.A. and returning to Britain, I joined a band called Hot Club, which was signed to RAK Records. Calvin Hayes was also in that band.

CH: Hot Club was a band that I helped put together, with Glen Matlock from the Sex Pistols, James Stevenson, who’d been in Generation X and the Kim Wilde Group, which was before Hot Club, and originally the singer was Steve Allen, who (under the pseudonym Enrico Cadillac, Jnr.) had been in a group called Deaf School, a Liverpool band. We were signed to RAK Records and did a single which my father produced. And then Steve Allen left, and we needed a new singer, so we put an advert in the Melody Maker—you know, “band with record deal seeks vocalist”—and we got, like, 300 replies, and tapes with pictures.

So Glen Matlock and I were going through the tapes and stuff, and he pulled one out and said, “Wow, this guy looks cool!” And it was a picture of Clark and a demo tape he’d done. So we listened to Clark’s demo tape and said, “Yeah, this guy sounds really talented.” So he auditioned for us, and he got the job. And that was the genesis of me meeting Clark: through Hot Club. And then we did a single together, which was pretty dreadful. [Laughs.] And then he left the band!

So at that point, the band broke up, and I became the head of A&R at RAK for two years, which was a good experience for me. Also around that time, I started my association with Mike Nocito, ‘cause he was an assistant training to be an engineer at RAK. I did a session with him, and I was very impressed with his skills, so within two or three days, I suggested that we become production partners. So we started producing other groups and acts through RAK.

CD: By virtue of joining Hot Club, I got signed to a deal with RAK Records by Mickie as a solo artist. I liked Mickie very much, by the way. He was very important to my musical development, to Mike’s musical development, and, of course, he was Calvin’s father. But being signed by Mickie directly led me to meeting Mike. He was a young engineer cum producer at RAK Studios, and Mickie put us together, basically. He said, “You two should work together.”

MN: Mickie and his wife Chris, one night over dinner, said, “You should put Clark with the American kid.” So we started doing demos. At this point, I’d been assisting and was just starting to engineer, and Clark would come in, and that’s how we started working together.

CD: Mike and I recorded together for about four years before the band released its first single, but between us there were all kinds of fusions going on, and as synths and drum machines were very much on the rise at that time, we made use of them.

MN: The thing about Clark was that every time he’d come in, which was once a week or maybe once every couple of weeks., it’d be a different style. One time it’d be, like, a Prince-esque song, and the next time it’d be…not rock, but it’d just be a different style each time. In a way, one of Clark’s problems was that he was too good: he could write in any style, but he just hadn’t established a particular one to work in.

Beginning the Band

MN: When I started working with Calvin, I was at the engineering stage. In England, it’s different than American studios. They really throw you in at the deep end. I’ve talked with people, and it’s kind of a slow climb in American studios, and it’s much more conservative the way it’s done there. In England, it’s just, “You can engineer today. Into the deep end with you!” [Laughs.] So I started working with Calvin, and we started kind of producing stuff together for Mickie on RAK Records, and then, in our downtime, we started putting together this track.

CD: Mike and Calvin had actually started work on this track, “Me and My Foolish Heart,” and they had co-written it with a couple of other people, one of whom was Phil Thornalley.

MN: There’s another name on the songwriting credits for “Me and My Foolish Heart,” and…this is one of those great music business stories, at least from my perspective. Calvin was the A&R guy at RAK, and he was a great A&R guy. He’s very opinionated, but he absolutely knows his music, and one day he called me—he’d found out where I was in the studio—and said, “Come here, I want you to hear something.” So I went up to his office, he put this cassette on, and when the music came on, I was, like, “This is great! What is this?” But then as it went on, I didn’t like it. [Laughs.] But the intro I absolutely loved! And he said, “I’ve just gotten this tape.” I said, “Well, that intro’s absolutely brilliant!” So he called the guy up—Ian MacDonald—and paid for him to come down from Scotland, I think, and Calvin said to him, “The intro to this song is a hit.” ‘Cause Calvin would’ve been as bold as to say that, because that’s the sort of thing Mickie would’ve said. And Ian was, like, “Y’know what? This is the song I wrote, I can’t hear it any other way, but if you feel you can do something with it, go ahead!”

CH: I remember doing this mad piano part on the song. I did the first take not really knowing what I was doing, just playing. It was kind of influenced by Mike Garson, the jazz pianist who worked on Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs with David Bowie. I liked his sort of theatrical piano style, so I had that in mind when I played this thing on the first take, and…this shows what a really great producer Mike Nocito is: when I played it, he stopped the tape, and I turned around to him through the glass and said, “Yeah, I know it’s good, but I think I could do it better,” and he looked at me from behind the desk and said, “Absolutely not, I am not going over that take, let’s go to the next bit.” [Laughs.] So we went to the second section. When I did it, I didn’t know what I was doing, I wasn’t thinking about it too much, I was really just fucking around, but that’s probably one of the overdubs I’m proudest of, and it was only saved ‘cause Mike turned ‘round to me and refused to go over it.

PT: We were all in the same studio complex, and, basically, whenever there was any downtime in the studio, most of us had little side projects that usually involved ourselves as the artists, recording our songs, producing them, and so on. At the time, I was pretty hot as a mixer/producer, so I was working in the other studio, and…I think I’d finished, and Mike and Calvin were working on their piece of music in Studio One, and I just dropped in, and they said, “We’re doing this track, have you got any ideas?”

MN: Calvin and I did this backing track for the song. Meanwhile, Mickie had been in the studio the day we started it, recording something for his niece, who was doing a cover of Steve Perry’s “Foolish Heart.” Then Phil came in, heard what we were doing, and he said, “Yeah, I’ve got this idea, can I just go sing something?” We were, like, “Yeah, go ahead!” And when he walked into the studio…you know, there so many funny little things like that which happen, little elements that you don’t realize are going to be as important as they end up being, and the one here is that I’d written down the name of Mickie’s niece’s track on the box it was in and left the box lying there.

PT: Yes, as legend has it… [Laughs.] I saw the title “Foolish Heart,” and I thought, “Yeah, that’s a good title!” So I said, “Go on, put the mike up in the back room, and I’ll try something.” And I just wrote this song on the spot, over their changes. I think I had two goes, but, basically, I was singing lyrics, just sort of free-forming it, and…it was quite a cool moment, that kind that happens very rarely in your life, where you just kind of go for it.

CH: I remember as Phil listened to the backing track, he was sort of pacing up and down, and I could tell his mind was ticking over, and he immediately said to Mike, “Set up a mike, I’ve got some ideas.” And he’s exactly right: it was two takes, and two takes only. But the fact that he was totally adlibbing the lyrics to the melody was incredible. That we should have this bit of music which he could just hear and suddenly come up with that? It was a very magical moment. I was incredibly impressed.

PT: It wasn’t the greatest song. But it was the start of Johnny Hates Jazz when Clark ended up singing it and making sense of it.

CD: In the end, for whatever reason, Phil didn’t think that he was the right person to sing the track, so Mike and Calvin had a chat with me about doing it.

CH: Phil bailed out because he was going to produce the Robbie Nevil album, the one with “C’est La Vie.” So we decided to invite Clark to join us, and he came in and did the vocal on “Me and My Foolish Heart,” which was already recorded, and that became our first single as Johnny Hates Jazz.

PT: Yeah, Calvin’s got it right. That was more the thing. I was in demand, and we had this record coming up to do, and…I suppose, to be fair, when you look at which horse to back, you think, “Well, should I go make this record with Alex Sadkin, one of the greatest producers of the time, or shall I jump on this other thing?” Basically, I was just busy. And that turned out to be fortuitous, because they got the right man as a result. I think I lent them my drum machine when they were making “Shattered Dreams,” but from then on I wasn’t involved in Johnny Hates Jazz at all while Clark was in the band, apart from going up to the control room and having a spliff every now and then.

CH: We were discussing Clark joining the band—I remember he had a white trenchcoat on at the time—and it was just six months after he’d walked out of Hot Club and left me, but I remember him saying, “Calvin, if you give me this opportunity, I’ll never let you down again.” Portentous words, I suppose…

CD: It was a weird one for me, because I usually only ever sing on and record my own songs. But “Me and My Foolish Heart” had something about it that had a relationship to some things that I was working on, and I had been working with Mike, so I sang on the track, and Johnny Hates Jazz was born! And it was through “Me and My Foolish Heart” being released on RAK Records and not being a success, per se, but getting some good radio play that the guys turned ‘round to me and said, “Well, look, we need some follow-up material.” I said, “I’m gonna go away and write a Johnny Hates Jazz song.”

MN: I swear, a week later…I dunno, maybe I’m misremembering, but he came and played us a demo of “Shattered Dreams.”

CH: You know those pivotal moments in your life? That was definitely one of ‘em. I was still working at RAK as an A&R guy, and Clark came in just as I was leaving, but he came in with the cassette and said, “I’ve written a Johnny Hates Jazz song.” I remember taking the song home—I didn’t listen to it then and there—and about a half an hour later I put it on, and I called him immediately and said, “You’ve written your first hit single.” [Laughs.] I mean, I just knew.

MN: It’s a great demo. As soon as you hear it, you go, “That’s fantastic!” And then the next week, he goes, “Here’s another one,” and it was “Turn Back the Clock.” And what had happened was that it had given Clark an actual direction. It’s, like, “No, I’m not going to write something like Prince would do, I’m not going to write something like Earth Wind & Fire, I’m not going do anything like that, ‘cause this is what I’m writing for.” And to me, that was a great gift to Clark, ‘cause he concentrated on writing for a particular style.

CD: It was a great process, ‘cause “Foolish Heart” helped me plug into a way forward that…well, I was already going in that general direction, but it became much more refined with the other guys involved as well.

Naming the Band

MN: The name came about because of Phil’s wife, Julie. My brother-in-law broke a Dave Brubeck record at a party, and she said, “Oooh, Johnny hates jazz!” Now, it was just a natural thing to say because Johnny had just smashed his jazz record, but I remember hearing it and thinking, “Oh, that’s fun. That’s kind of interesting.” And then when it came to naming the band… I can’t remember, but there were definitely other ideas, and I kind of was putting other ones before Johnny Hates Jazz, but every time I said that one, everyone was, like, “That’s a good one.”

CD: I think that they were toying with the idea of naming the band Johnny Hates Jazz, and I came in and grinned broadly when I heard the choices.

CH: There were no other names in contention. During what became the first Johnny Hates Jazz session, for “Me and My Foolish Heart,” when most of the backing track was done, we were just wrapping up the session, and I said to Mike, “You know, I think this is sounding really good! And he went, “Yeah!” And I said, “Who do you think we should do it with? Who should we get to do the song?” And he said, “Why don’t we do it? Why don’t we do it as a band and just get a singer to sing it? Because if we give it to someone else and it is a hit, then they’ll have all the fun! They’ll be going off and traveling and touring and doing videos, and we’ll just be stuck in the studio making records with ‘em!” [Laughs.]

And that was a brilliant ploy, because I was, like, “All right, great, let’s do that! As soon as we put a vocal on it, we’ve got a band here!” It all happened in three or four hours! Then I said, “Well, what are we gonna call ourselves?” And that’s when he told me the story about his brother-in-law— ‘cause I wasn’t at the party—and that it was, like, “Oh, that’s a good name!” And I said, “That’s it, then. That’s the name of the group!” So I wrote it on the tape box: produced by Calvin and I, engineered by Mike, the date, and in the blank space for the name, I wrote “Johnny Hates Jazz.” And Mike said to me,” Welllll…surely we should think about some others…” And I said, “No, that’s it! We don’t need to think about any others. That’s perfect!” I just knew it would be memorable.

CD: Johnny Hates Jazz just made me chuckle. Or, rather, it made me chuckle for a moment, and then I thought, “Oh, my God, I’ve got to tell my dad that’s the name of the band!” And, y’know, I have a great respect for jazzers and jazz music—I was raised on it!—so there’s no personal commentary in the title of the band. They’re very proud of their musical form. It’s their religion, y’know? When I told my dad that the band was gonna be called Johnny Hates Jazz, he didn’t speak to me for a month, I think!

MN: We also liked the fact that it had “Hates” in it. It affects people. I remember being at RAK one day, and some big A&R guy from EMI in the States was there, and he liked jazz. And someone mentioned this name, and I remember he got kind of prickly. It was, like, “Hates jazz? Who hates jazz?”

CD: Yeah, it’s a good name. Still makes me laugh a little bit whenever I see it.

A Big Gig at Ronnie Scott’s

CD: I think that was deliberate, having a band named Johnny Hates Jazz play at a noted jazz club for their label showcase. Deliberate and very humorous.

MN: We thought it was inspired. And kind of funny. But, you know, we were and are kind of a strange bunch. [Laughs.] The first single sleeve didn’t even have us on the cover, and we did that intentionally. There’s sort of a Peter Cushing-esque, Hammer Horror-looking guy holding his ears. After we left RAK, we were going, “Okay, what are we going to do?” We were always…I’m not going to say “scheming,” but we were always aware of possibilities, and we just thought it would be quite funny to have it at Ronnie Scott’s. So we went there, and they said, “Yeah, you can have it for the afternoon.”

CH: It was my idea, actually, and, yeah, the jazz thing was number one, but there were other just as important reasons for doing it there. There was a great Steinway grand piano. The acoustics were good. Also, I’d been an A&R man for two years, and most of the record companies were—and still are—in central London, so I knew that if there were snacks there, you could see a short set, and, as it was in Soho, you could get back to your office…well, that was convenient, so I knew it’d be easy for an A&R guy to come and see it. I also knew that, as an A&R guy, I hated going out at night, so I didn’t want to do something in the evening. You’re not going to find many A&R guys who’ll actually go to a thing at eight or nine o’clock, so I purposely wanted it to be at lunchtime.

CD: I have to say that the people at Ronnie Scott’s were very kind. A bit perplexed by the band name, perhaps, but when they heard us perform, they were cool about it, and I think they quite enjoyed us. Now, as far as the reception from the labels… [Laughs.] I love the show biz stories of how bands get signed, and I’m sure they are totally elaborated upon and gilded slightly. You know, when we did the Ronnie Scott showcase, we invited many labels—at a time when, of course, there still were many labels—and I think three showed up. One left halfway through, two stayed ‘til the end.

MN: Did he say three? I thought it was two. Actually, no, I remember now, one of them was a junior executive or something, and we were, like, “Oh, well, they might as well have not bothered.” It’s never as romantic as you hear about it being.

CD: I can tell you, this idea of doing the acoustic gig and having all the labels vying for who’s gonna sign you…? No. No, no, no. It wasn’t like that at all.

CH: I don’t remember being deflated by the showcase, though. There were a few people there. Rusty Egan was there. He was an early supporter of Clark Datchler’s, so he was there, and he was quite enthusiastic about it. And there was a guy from CBS there named Gordon Charlton.

MN: I know one of them—was it Chrysalis? I can’t recall—offered us a deal.

CH: The guy from Chrysalis (John Owen Williams) had been in a band called the East Side Band, which had been assigned to RAK, so I knew him through my father. They were quite keen on us. In fact, it was between them and Virgin at the end.

MN: We went in and met with the guy (from Chrysalis). We made a demo tape which…well, I say it was a demo, but I was engineering it, so it was 24-track. [Laughs.] It was done in one day, but it was pretty decent, y’know? The two-inch kept going with each song starting right after the last, and it was “Shattered Dreams,” “Turn Back the Clock,” “I Don’t Want to Be A Hero,” all these songs that ended up being hit songs. So the guy from this record company said, “Okay, I’ve heard it, but I want you to put guitars all over it. I think you should be a rock band, kind of heavy.” And we were looking at him and going, “Uh, sorry, that’s more or less as it comes.” So we kind of got put off by that.

CH: Their other thing, I remember, was them saying, “It needs a big snare drum!” [Laughs.] I remember the three of us were sitting on the leather sofa in this opulent office right off Oxford Street, there were all these gold records on the walls, Billy Idol or whoever, but we looked at each other and we knew that this wasn’t gonna work.

CD: One of those others who stayed ‘til the end was the A&R man from Virgin Records, a guy called John Wooler…who is now our manager, by the way! John, with the help of another person at Virgin called Caroline True, who was a friend of ours already, got us signed to Virgin on a singles deal.

CH: All in all, I don’t think it was a bad result for a first showcase. At the very least, we impressed John Wooler enough to go back to the chiefs at Virgin, and they asked for a follow-up session, which was done at a recording studio near Oxford Street. It was just me on piano and Clark singing. Mike didn’t do that one. Either he had a session or he bottled out. [Laughs.]

CD: John and Caroline at Virgin had to convince the hierarchy at Virgin to sign us, because they were focused on all kinds of other things, and even when we got signed, I think that we were seen by some at the label as being inappropriate for Virgin, which very much had a strong self image of itself. I think at the time we ended up outselling all of our stablemates at Virgin, however, so they begrudgingly accepted us. Eventually.

MN: We didn’t hear about this ‘til after the event, but the Virgin sales reps would have sort of a monthly meeting where they would hear the new records that were to be released, and someone told me awhile later that when our record was played at the sales rep meeting, they all stood up and applauded, because it was a pop record! With a chorus! Because all the stuff on Virgin was less commercial and more serious, it was, like, “This is something that we can sell!” [Laughs.]

Stay tuned for Part 2, where we discuss the recording of Turn Back the Clock, take you through the LP track by track, talk about the band’s promotional appearances to support the album, the videos they made (and the directors who made them), and more!