Johnny Hates Jazz, TURN BACK THE CLOCK—An Oral History (Part 3)

To read Part One, click here.

To read Part Two, click here.

Clark Departs

Clark Datchler: That was a tough one. It was actually quite common for bands in the ‘80s to implode quite quickly. There were quite a few cases of bands that split up after their initial success. Part of it was the pressure of the situation. Bear in mind that, for a British musician in the 1980s, Britain’s second biggest worldwide export was music. It was absolutely, phenomenally important, as British bands were doing phenomenally well the world over, and I think I did feel a lot of pressure as a result of that. Also, when you’re in that situation, it brings out interpersonal differences that you either work to get over or you don’t. And in my situation, I found them insurmountable, and I left.

Calvin Hayes: Clark was leaving the band while we were still making the album. In fact, when he told us, his quote was, “Guys, the next album I make isn’t gonna be a Johnny Hates Jazz record.” He didn’t even want to finish that album!

Mike Nocito: When Clark left, my perspective was, “Why?” My argument to him was, “Okay, you want to do some solo stuff, but become more famous!” [Laughs.] I had worked in the studio with The Police before, and Sting was a famous artist in his own right, but that’s because they’d had several big hit records. That’s why he was famous. But when Clark left, well, of course I was upset. I felt like he was strangling the golden goose, if you like. It was there, and then it was just all taken away. But you move on. What can you do? You can’t force somebody to do something.

CH: I remember when I told my dad that Clark was leaving the band, his comment was that Clark would never, ever find a producer for hire who was as meticulous as Mike and I were. He also commented… he never used to call Clark “Clark,” he always used to refer to him as “that singer of yours,” so he said, “That singer of yours has shat on you and Mike from a great height.”

CD: I have to say, it was a very difficult parting. Traumatic, actually. And I think it was especially traumatic between Mike and I because we were…well, Calvin and I were good friends, but Mike and I were especially good friends. He was a good mate. We didn’t speak for 22 years after that, such was the ill feeling between everyone.

CH: The last meeting we had was after we did the Montreux Festival, which was the end of summer of ’88. That was our final television performance, and we had a meeting the next morning. We spent a couple of hours to get Clark to reconsider, and the final thing I said to him was, “Clark, if you picked up Smash Hits next week and read that Marti Pellow was leaving Wet Wet Wet to go solo, what would you think?” And he said, “I’d think he was a prat.” So…there you go. [Laughs.]

MN: 22 years. And that’s no emailing, no texting…that’s no contact. Nothing. Which is kind of weird. But then he called me up one day—he’d obviously gotten my number from his brother, who I was still friends with—and said, “Do you want to have lunch?” And I said, “Great!” Because we’d been pals. That was the thing: we were good friends…and then all of a sudden, we didn’t speak for 22 years! That was why it was so weird.

CD: But 22 years later, when Mike and I made contact, and we met in Cambridge at…I think it was a pasta restaurant! But we just sort of shook hands, and it was one of those classic moments when, y’know, no time had gone between the last time we saw each other. We just started talking, and we got on great. It was just, like, “Wow, it’s great to see my old pal after all this time!” And it wasn’t long before we were talking about doing a new album. So I’m so pleased that that happened. Not just on a professional level, but on a personal level.

Apart / Together

CH: I remember when Mike called me a day or so after he and Clark got back in touch, and he said, “Guess who I had lunch with?” And I actually had no idea. I said, “I don’t know, who did you have lunch with?” And he said, “Clark!” 22 years later… He said, “Yeah, we had a good meeting! You and him should get together.” And we did.

CD: After Mike and I renewed our friendship, we did a few Johnny Hates Jazz shows with the three of us in the band: myself, Mike, and Calvin. But Calvin found the pressure of those shows and of playing live too great, and it affected him adversely, so he bowed out.

MN: I guess there were pressures in his own life, and then we did the live stuff and I just don’t think he could handle it. I mean, I can’t speak on behalf of someone else, really. But to say that he was a bit stressed about the live shows is mild.

CD: This was before we actually started work on any album. I was writing material at that time for a new album, but we hadn’t begun work on it yet. That was a shame, but I think it was better for him. Probably better all around. He’s certainly, I think, happier for it.

CH: Everybody has different perspectives. My perspective that the three of us decided to do an album, and we spent a long time doing pre-production. I mean, if you added up the actual working hours, it wasn’t much, but…well, to put it simply, I suppose, the experience of being back in Johnny Hates Jazz with Calvin and Mike was turning into a very lengthy experience, and it wasn’t artistically or financially very attractive to me. I could see the way the record would probably turn out, and I knew it wasn’t really gonna be a record that I would particularly want to make. I thought the songs were very good, no question of that. I just felt that the process of making the record would not be a creatively enjoyable experience for me. Clark has very specific ideas about the sort of record he wanted to make, and I’ve no idea that it sounds exactly like he wanted it. But that wasn’t the sort of record I would’ve wanted.

CH: It’s funny, isn’t it? I mean, it seemed mad to me that we didn’t try working together again years ago. As my dad used to say, it might just be my aftershave, but it worked working with this particular group of people. There was just an energy between us, and over the years, I always wanted to see what the three of us could do together again. But I guess it didn’t work, or it just wasn’t in the cards. But what can you do? Funnily enough, though, I went to a bowling alley a few nights ago, and as I was standing there, there was a group of Americans who were, like, “Oh, you’re English!”—I’m a bit of an oddball here (in Spokane, Washington), being English—and asking me about what I did. And a friend of mine said, “Oh, he used to be in an English pop group!” And they went, “No, you didn’t!” And suddenly the video for “Shattered Dreams” comes on, like, a hundred screens in the bowling alley. And I could casually go, “Oh, yeah, that’s me.” [Laughs.] “That’s me sitting at the piano bench looking bored. There I am.

Turn Back the Clock—Track by Track

“Shattered Dreams”

CD: It’s an interesting one, “Shattered Dreams,” because I remember writing it in my parents’ front room, and my dad came in and he never made a comment like this before, but he said, “What is that you’re playing?” And I said, “It’s this new song I’m working on, ‘Shattered Dreams.’” And he said, “I think you’ve found it. I think you’ve found the one.” A short while later, the guy who ran Virgin America at that time, Jordan Harris, heard “Shattered Dreams” before it was released in the UK— bearing in mind that it came out in the States a full year later—and before it had been a hit, and he earmarked it as a hit and said something interesting. He said, “You know, the way things work, there really is only ever one hit, because as soon as that first song becomes a hit, all the other tracks start to sound like hits.” Now, whether that’s literally true or not is, I think, beside the point, but we needed a track that would really open the door, and, thankfully, “Shattered Dreams” turned out to be that one.

MN: “Shattered Dreams” is the song that carries the torch for the band, and we’re incredibly proud of it. When I heard it, I seem to remember saying, “Clark, you’ve just written a hit!” Because I’d recorded lots of his songs, and none of them had had all of the elements. John Wooler, the guy who signed us, he heard it, and he was, like, “It’s a hit!” Although we were good friends with a guy named Brian Rawling, who’s been part of an incredible production team that did the Cher record, “Believe,” and who’s had incredible success over the last 10 or 15 years, and I remember Brian kind of taking me aside as we were coming to the end of recording the song and saying, “You know, you’re blowing it here. This version is useless.” So he didn’t get that one right! [Laughs.]

CD: When Mickie Most heard “Shattered Dreams,” he said, “If that record’s a hit, I will stand naked in Harrods’ shop window for a day.” [Laughs.] That’s how much he cared for it.

MN: That is absolutely true. If you remember the old Filofaxes, it was written on a piece of paper in one of those, and he signed it. I was there. I saw it.

CH: Absolutely true, except that it was Selfridges Oxford Street. [Laughs.] What happened was, from the moment I heard “Shattered Dreams,” I knew it was gonna be our next single, and I purposely didn’t want my dad to hear it, because I thought, “Oh, he’s gonna insist on putting it out, and I don’t know whether that’s a good idea.” Then I thought, “Oh, well, I’ll just wait until it’s finished.” So the day after it was mixed, it was a Sunday, and I went to Sunday lunch with my parents, and it was only after that final mix that it sounded like a hit. I knew the song was a hit, but the record never sounded like a hit until it was mixed. I was very pleased with it then, though.

So after we’d had lunch and a couple of glasses of wine, I said, “I’ve got this finished record here…” And he was, like, “Oh, put it on!” He had this cassette boombox which was quite up-market and had some graphics on it, and whenever he played anything on it, he always added some very high top- end and some very low bass. But when I went to put the cassette on, he said, “Oh, no, make it flat.” I said, “But you never play it flat!” He said, “Yeah, but let’s hear it flat.” So I said, “Oh, okay,” and I flattened it, put the cassette on, and as soon as it came on, I thought, “Wow, the bass end is really good! Wow, I can really hear the vocals! Yeah, this is great!” ‘Cause this was the first time I’d heard it on his system.

So it finished, and…I was chuffed with it! [Laughs.] And I turned ‘round to him, and I said, “Well, what do you think?” And he went, “Nah.” And I went, “What do you mean, ‘Nah’? I think it’s a hit!” And he said, “Well, I dunno ‘bout that…” I said, “Well, don’t you think it’ll go at least top-40?” And he said, “Top-40’s not a hit.” I said, “Well, what’s a hit, then?” And he said, “Top 20. That’s a hit.” So I said, “So you don’t think it’ll go top-20?” He said, “If that record goes top-20, I’ll stand in Selfridges’ shop window naked.” And I had a Filofax, so I grabbed that, and either my mum or I wrote it out, one of us did, and he signed it, and then he actually wrote “Shattered Dreams” on it to specify that that was the track that he was talking about.

Of course, it actually took 13 weeks to make it into the top 20, gradually creeping up the charts. But every time it went up, we’d see him at the studio—because we’d started to record new material— and we’d say, “It’s still going up the charts? How’s Selfridge’s looking?” [Laughs.] And, of course, it ended up going into the top 5 for three weeks—and it’s actually one of my regrets, in a sense, that I never actually made him follow through with it. It may have created more of a press story!

CD: Now, it must be said that Mickie was, like, one of the ultimate hit-pickers. No one could come close to him. But like a lot of people, he simply didn’t hear “Shattered Dreams” as a hit at all.

CH: Nobody gets it right 100% of the time. Otherwise, they’d be flying around in Lear jets. But he definitely got that one wrong.

CD: We had a lot of people who didn’t hear “Shattered Dreams” as a hit. A lot of people thought, “You’ve got to be joking!” And it came back to haunt Mickie, because it became an almighty hit, but we did not request that he fulfill his promise, because he was one of our greatest supporters after that. He was really cool.

CH: Before we were successful, though, we’d walk into the studio, and if he was in reception, he’d go, “Oh, the Three Stooges!” [Laughs.] In fact, they used to put “The Three Stooges” on the session sheet! But the Three Stooges had the last laugh, didn’t they? Because a few months later, we had fans outside the studio, and film crews and journalists showing up, and photographers and Virgin Records staff…

MN: In Mickie’s defense, I don’t think he could get past that I was an employee, Clark was an exsongwriter for him, his son was in the band… Mickie was one of the greatest song-picking people that’s ever been in the business, so I just think he had a blind spot on this one. If it’d been from someone else, he would’ve picked it as a hit in a heartbeat. Also, it was done in sort of a style was that wasn’t necessarily his cup of tea. It kind of got past him, that one. But he admitted it afterwards.

CH: My father was very, very happy with our success. Just before he died, I did actually say to him, “I wish I’d accomplished more while you were around,” and he said, “Well, you got yourself to #1 in America. And these days, that’s not easy. But you did it off your own back.” That’s a really good thing, y’know?

CD: That’s the weird thing about “Shattered Dreams,” though: the list of people who thought it wasn’t going to be a hit far outweighed the people who thought it was going to be the case. And that’s kind of magical, in a way. I quite like that.

CH: The day we went in to record “Shattered Dreams,” we were signed to Virgin, so we were proper recording artists, now going back to RAK as clients, ‘cause I’d left the label as an A&R guy, and Clark was no longer involved with them ‘cause they’d dropped him. It was quite a joyous feeling. In fact, we actually wore these glittery birthday hats that we’d found at a service station. [Laughs.] And we didn’t actually record much on the first day ‘cause we spent most of it decorating the studio. We were just so chuffed to be back at RAK, this time as artists.

MN: One of the things that I really remember about it is that it was done, certainly for us, very quickly. It was probably done in about three days in total. Maybe two and a half.

CH: It took a bit longer than that. Not that it matters in the scheme of things. But I remember we actually went to two other studios at various points, including Ramport, which was the Who’s studio, where Quadrophenia was recorded. We tried to do some vocals there, but we ended up not using any of that.

MN: Some of the overdubs were recorded through the night, on downtime, sneaking into the studio when we didn’t have to pay, that kind of thing. Because we’d signed a singles deal, so there wasn’t a big budget. I just remember that all of a sudden there was a whole different pressure. Up to that point, I’d made records for other people, but now all of a sudden the pressure was on me. I knew how good the song was, so the record really had to have something about it.

CH: Funnily enough, one of the genius things that Mike did was…he was quite concerned about it before we went to make the record, and we discussed it a lot, but he said, “I really want to make the drums sound tiny.” I don’t know if it was influenced by by Donald Fagen, but it was really an out-of-step thing to be doing, ‘cause everybody was trying to make their drums massive. What made it work was that it gave the singer, Clark, more space. ‘Cause he didn’t have a huge Michael Bolton type voice. [Laughs.] Clark has a very good pop voice, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but the fact was that his voice wasn’t massive-sounding, so by not having to compete against a huge ambient drum sound, it made it a little bit different. And it probably gave the bass more space as well. Eventually.

There was a keyboard technician, a young kid called Chris Newman who worked for a hired company in London called London Sound Center, whose job was to deliver keyboards and musical equipment where people had rented it. Whenever we rented stuff, he would deliver it, and I could tell, like Mike was saying about when he did his first Al Sharp session, how he wanted to stay in the room. This kid was like that. One evening, he delivered some cymbals or something, ‘cause I was doing a drum overdub, and I had a chat with him and started talking to him about keyboards and Fairlights, ‘cause we didn’t have the budget for a Fairlight but I wanted to use some of the sounds. And he said, “Well, I could bring a Fairlight down tomorrow, ‘cause they won’t know about it.” I said, “Really? Would you?” “Oh, yeah, I could do that.” “Oh, great!” And then he brought it down the next night when we were working on “Shattered Dreams,” which is how we ended up with it on the song.

MN: I remember the last thing we recorded on “Shattered Dreams” was the bass. On Clark’s original recording, his demo, it was a pulse bass, and I never thought that that did justice to the song. My background, I like Steely Dan, and I’m kind of, well, I’m not going to say “West Coast,” but I just thought the song would be cooler without it. But we could never quite nail what the bass should be. And it was, I dunno, about two or three in the morning, the final day, the final session, and Clark was playing and just came up with this part. And once he did, we were done in 20 minutes, because it was there. It kind of pulled the whole thing together.

CH: I was fiddling around and came up with the basic feel of the bass part, and as soon as I came up with it, I turned to Clark, ‘cause he was and is a very accomplished synth bass player, so that was more his domain, and I said, “Look, you take over.” So Clark took over, and then we spent nearly a day, if not all of a day, just recording the bass part and getting it right. So it wasn’t an immediate thing. The idea came immediately, but recording it, that took a bit longer.

It was extremely problematic producing that record with Mike. It was. It was a nightmare, because we just had to keep re-doing all the parts! Mike ended up with, like, four snare drums sampled, all in different places. I mean, we were doing crazy things. We were flying in cymbal overdubs off half-inch tape…and most of it was being played manually onto tape, so there was no computer manipulation, so to get the right performances we were dropping in on beats and bars and… [Starts to laugh.] Uh, yeah.

But the thing was, we knew it was the best song. We started two other songs, including the first version of “Turn Back the Clock” —which we ended up ditching—and “Different Seasons,” and “Different Seasons” was sounding miles better, but we knew “Shattered Dreams” was the more commercial song, so, well, anyway, it was a nightmare. [Laughs.] I remember at one point Mike and I were working on our own on it, and it was quite late, and Mike just turned ‘round to me and asked, “Are we blowing it?” And he had a point, because it didn’t sound like a hit record. I remember us stopping a session and walking around Primrose Hill for an hour, and me saying, “Well, we’re just going to have to get it right. Come on, we can do it. We’ll do it!” But I wasn’t really sure whether we could.

In fact, I remember halfway through recording it walking out of the control room into the entrance of RAK, where I bumped into Alex Sadkin. He saw me walk out, and he pulled me outside, and he said, “What are you doing?” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, look at the way you walked out of the control room. You looked worried.” I said, “Well, I am worried!” He said, “Yeah, I know, but…you can’t look worried.” [Laughs.] “You’ve got to look like you know what you’re doing, and that it’s gonna be fine. ‘Cause if you start looking worried, then everybody else is gonna be really worried.” And I thought, “Well, that makes sense…” So I tried to bear that in mind, and, thank God, through the efforts of Bob Kraushaar and his mix, well, that’s when it finally sounded like a hit.

MN: Even then, it still never quite sounded good to me. Not until I heard it on the radio when it was top-5 in America. Then I thought it sounded pretty good. [Laughs.] “I Don’t Want To Be A Hero” CD: Another interesting one, because that was the song that I cared most about. It’s an anti-war song. I used to demo all the songs that I wrote at that time, and the three of us would listen to the demos and then work on what the record should sound like. “Hero” was a much slower, more somber song than it turned out to be, and I think that Mike and I in retrospect feel that, if we had our time again, we would’ve recorded that slightly differently. That said, it did us proud, by which I mean it did really well.

CH: Funnily enough, when Mike and I did the Turn Back the Clock reissue three or four years ago, I got a lot of the session tapes, including the demo for “I Don’t Want to Be a Hero,” and, well, all I can say is that the way it was as a demo, if that had just been tarted up and stayed at that tempo and in that style, I don’t think it would’ve been a hit.

MN: I always explain it like this, and I’m only half-kidding, but when “Shattered Dreams” was at, say, #5 in the charts, we got a call from Virgin, going, “When are you going to deliver the album?” And we said, “You haven’t asked us an album!” It wasn’t quite as absurd as that, but it almost was. All of a sudden we had this hit record that we now had to follow up, and anybody who tells you it’s hard to have a hit record, they’re right, trust me, but it’s even harder to follow it up. You know, it’s the classic situation where every stage gets more difficult, even though the first stage is virtually impossible to begin with.

CH: “I Don’t Want to Be a Hero,” you can tell from the chorus—and it was a very good lyric, too— that it would definitely be a follow-up hit, and it served its purpose. It’s not my favorite production, though. That’s one that definitely should’ve been redone.

MN: I was never happy with the recording, and I know Clark wasn’t, but it did the job. It consolidated the success we’d had, it kept the whole thing going, but I never thought we…I never even liked the mix. And I mixed it! [Laughs.] I just didn’t like it. It’s one of those things. But, again, it did its job, so…there you go.

CD: If you look on YouTube, I think you’ll find that it’s become one of the de facto anti-war songs for the recent conflict, and I’m pleased about that, because it was a message that I felt strongly about and wanted to convey.

“Turn Back the Clock”

MN: Initially, we did a 48-track recording of “Turn Back the Clock”—we included it as a bonus track when we remastered the album—and it took a lot of time and cost a lot of money, but I remember mixing it, sitting back and listening to it, and going, “This sucks! Now we have to do it again!” That’s not normal in studios. I mean, trust me on that. You can’t afford to do it. But to my mind, this song was way better than the version that’d we done. The record just didn’t do the song justice. So we started again.

CD: Kim Wilde was known to Mike and also Calvin for some time. I knew of Kim ‘cause I was a fellow RAK artist, as was Kim. She was also a Mickie Most protégé, so it seemed like a natural thing to ask Kim if she would sing on one of the tracks.

CH: Clark was never actually labelmates with her—she’d left RAK two years before he joined as a solo artist—but I used to work with her because my dad signed her originally. She had this record “Kids in America” coming out, and he wanted her to look like she had a group behind her, like Blondie. So I worked with her, going around and doing TV shows. I did a tiny bit of studio work, but mostly my job was just to mime playing drums. [Laughs.] She’s a really great girl, Kim. I worked with her for a bit, then I went off and did Hot Club, but she had an apartment not so far away, and I ran into her at the laundromat just as “I Don’t Want to Be a Hero” had come out. She was, like, “Congrats! Well done!” She was very, very pleased. And I remember she said, “Y’know, I like the new record even better than (‘Shattered Dreams’),” and I said, “Well, I don’t. I prefer ‘Shattered Dreams.’” And she said, “Well, I prefer ‘Hero’!” So I turned around and said, “Well, I’m doing the next single right now, ‘Turn Back the Clock.’ Do you wanna sing on it?” And she said, “Yeah, sure!”

MN: We didn’t ask her to do it because she was Kim Wilde. We just asked her because she was our friend Kim, and when that part came up in the bridge, it was, like, “Well, let’s ask Kim to do it!” She came in and just absolutely nailed it. She’s got a beautiful voice.

CH: She came in the next day, and when she arrived, we were doing another track, but since she’d got there, we put on the multi-track to “Turn Back the Clock,” and Mike started balancing it to give her a track to sing to. She told me subsequently that she was very impressed as she heard the track build as Mike started pushing up the faders. [Laughs.] She was sitting there, and he put the bass drum up, then the snare, high hat, percussion, bass, and so on, and she said she was, like, “Wow, this is a really good record!” And I thought she did a great job on it. Really great. She’s got a great sounding voice.

CD: She’s got a great voice, and she’s got a unique voice, which I think is something that Mickie instilled in me. The thing he looked for in singers was not the ability to be vocal acrobats…and I don’t mean that with any cynicism. There are certain kinds of singers who fulfill certain kinds of roles. But Mickie was interested in the sound of people’s voices, what was unique about their sound. He felt that I had that and tried to develop that in me, and he certainly saw that in Kim. I think that Kim’s presence on the track makes it sparkle a little more. And the strings on “Turn Back the Clock” were arranged by Anne Dudley. She’d done strings for ABC and we obviously knew her from being part of Art of Noise, so she was an obvious choice, because we liked Trevor Horn’s productions as well. So we asked Anne to score the strings.

MN: Anne came in to produce a record at RAK Studios, where I was working and Phil was engineering, so I got to know her there while she was doing that. This was a few years before Johnny Hates Jazz, so when we then wanted to do strings, it was, like, “Well, let’s ask Anne! I know Anne! She’s doing the best there is!”

CH: I thought that the work that she did, especially on Lexicon of Love, was fantastic, and plush as well. And she did have a side career as an artist and songwriter. I remember we wanted to put strings on the track, and…I can’t remember whose suggestion it was, but I certainly wouldn’t have been against it! But I think that the huge mistake, and I remember thinking it at the time, was that we didn’t have a meeting with her beforehand. The directive came between her and a phone conversation with Mike. I don’t recall meeting her before the session. There was no meeting to, say, pull a string sound up on a keyboard and say, “Could you change that bit?” or what have you. That didn’t happen. There was only the phone conversation with Mike, and I think the only directive he gave was, “Do something weird on the middle eight.” Which she did, but unfortunately I think it was…what’s the term? Lost in translation. I think what Mike meant was something cool and complex on the middle eight, but I dunno, maybe she thought he meant something else.

CD: The difficulty was that we were so busy with promotion and doing our own recording that we weren’t able to check in with Anne as she’d wanted us to as to how she was progressing with the string arrangement. So we actually only heard the string arrangement when we recorded it, that very day, and…I think it was a bit fraught. And, in turn, it was not the smoothest session.

CH: Julian Mendelsohn, he didn’t like it, either. And he was quite the man of the moment, as far as mixing hit records in those days. He was doing everybody’s. It’s not as though there weren’t some moments in the arrangement that weren’t really, really nice, but a lot of it didn’t work. There were notes that didn’t even work.

CD: We got on very well with Anne, for the most part, but I think we all found it difficult because of the lack of advance discussion, and I think Anne did as well, because we just didn’t have enough time to prepare. It turned out to be a really good string arrangement overall, but Mike and I felt very uncomfortable about the session, that somehow, because of the pressure of the day, it didn’t go as well interpersonally as we wanted it to. I, uh, won’t get into what was said between myself and Anne and Mike and Calvin, but it was something that we thought we would have to build a bridge one day.

CH: I did see some posting a few months ago that they were working with her again. Which is, uh, a bit of a turn-up, because about 10 years ago, she did an interview in Q Magazine about 10 records that she’d worked on or done arrangements on. The first nine were all artists like ABC, Art of Noise, and Phil Collins, all saying how wonderful the experience was. And then it got to #10, and it was, like, “The worst experience I ever had was doing a Johnny Hates Jazz session. At one point, one of them was actually singing down the talkback to say, ‘Can you change the note to this?’” And, uh, that was me. [Laughs.]

The other thing I remember is that, after doing it at CBS, we took the tapes back to RAK, and, actually, we sampled some of it, or we changed part of it, replacing some of it with Fairlight strings. So at the end of the day, some of that string arrangement I did afterward, to fix it! I never thought in a million years that that would happen, or that it would need to happen. But the strings on the final record sound okay, y’know? Not brilliant, but okay. Good enough. There’s a couple of moments that are really nice. But in that article, she was annoyed that we’d credited her for doing the string arrangement when it had been changed. I remember thinking, “Well, you’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t!”

But I think it was all just down to the fact that we didn’t really get to at least have a preproduction meeting. And I learned a lesson from it, because on the second album (Tall Stories), the standout track, “Let Me Change Your Mind Tonight,” I got another arranger—Del Newman—and when he came to work on it, we had two or three meetings with him, and he actually turned ‘round to Phil and said, “I want to know exactly what the chords are!” So Phil showed him every single note and chord, and by the time we did the string arrangement for that one, there were no notes or chords that clashed. We’d done our homework! [Laughs.]

CD: When Mike and I decided we were going to do the new Johnny Hates Jazz album, Magnetized, one of the things we decided to do was ask Anne if she would score the strings for three of the tracks. It gave us a chance to just sit down with her and, y’know, make sure there was no ill feeling between us after that difficult day all those years ago.

Whether there were or weren’t ill feelings, she was very wonderful to chat with, and she scored the strings and, unusually, because she doesn’t usually do keyboards on other people’s records now, she… I mean, as a keyboard player, I call her “the godmother of synth.” [Laughs.] In terms of the Art of Noise, she’s one of the major contributors to how keyboards are used in music. And she actually did a bit of keyboard work on the album, and she played brilliantly. The last thing she said to us was that, when we’re ready to play live, if we’re gonna have an orchestra, she’ll be there to conduct. So we’ve built our bridges again!

CH: I think probably, to be absolutely, brutally honest, it’s probably easier for them to build a bridge ‘cause I’m no longer involved in the band. It’d be easy enough for them to say, “Well, you know, it was all Calvin,” and make me the bad guy. Of course, maybe I’m wrong, but if I’d wanted to work with her again, that’s what I’d say! [Laughs.]

“Heart of Gold”

CD: In my opinion, a really good recording. You know, there’s one thing about writing a good song, and there’s another thing about making a good recording. I think Mike probably has something to say about this as well, but, y’know, there’s writing the hit song and there’s making the hit record, and on “Heart of Gold,” I think we nailed it. I really do. And that was true of “Shattered Dreams” as well. I was very happy with the recording of “Shattered Dreams” and of “Heart of Gold.” But “Heart of Gold” was a good illustration of my influences as a kid.

I was and still am incredibly eclectic in my musical taste, and back in the ‘70s, when I was growing up, music was treated like soccer or American football: you supported your bands, and if someone else was into another band, then they were your enemy! It was very territorial. I mean that slightly tongue-in-cheek, of course, but…I was into everything. I didn’t fit into any one particular camp. One of the artists that I loved, alongside the punk or soul or whatever other stuff that I was listening to, was Rick James, who did a track called “Mr. Policeman.” I loved “Mr. Policeman.” It’s from the Street Songs album, which had “Give It to Me, Baby” on it as well. “Mr. Policeman” was a bit of an inspiration for “Heart of Gold.” It was a semi-reggae track, big horn section. It turned out to be a good track.

CH: It was recorded over a long time, ‘cause it was one of the first that we started, but I’ve got to give Stevie Lang and Miriam Stockley credit for doing a really sterling job on that one. I remember arriving slightly late for that session, and Mike was already starting to record them, and I walked into Studio Two, I could hear them going, “Walking the street / Love don’t come cheap,” coming loudly up the hallway. I remember thinking, “Wow, this sounds fantastic!” They made a great contribution to that track.

MN: In my opinion, from my perspective, we had—in a way—already split up when it came out. The band was finished. So my memory is that neither “Heart of Gold” nor “Don’t Say It’s Love” were given a chance, because we weren’t promoting them. And you know what it’s like if you release something and you’re not promoting it. I mean, it’s done. It really is. So they were kind of half-assed singles, really. “Don’t Say It’s Love,” I don’t think we did anything on that. But “Heart of Gold” was sort of the beginning of saying, like, “Oh, we can’t do that TV show because we can’t all be in the same room.” Either someone was busy or…something. I think they would’ve done better otherwise.

“Don’t Say It’s Love”

CD: That song arguably should’ve been further up in the single chain, because…the mix we had on the album, we were never happy with, so in some ways it didn’t quite feel that it was where it needed to be to be a single. Ironically, when it finally got remixed by…I think it was Julian Mendelsohn, and he did a fantastic mix of it. I have to say that Mike was very much involved in that as well. He always got stuck in on the mixes. But suddenly it was, “Aw, man, this is the version that should’ve gone on the album. It should be the fifth single!” And, y’know, five singles is pretty good going for one album, and in those albums it wasn’t uncommon, but it was certainly still a good achievement. Again, it’s one of those tracks where, speaking of that particular mix, that I’m really happy with.

CH: It wasn’t Julian Mendelsohn who did the final mix that ended up being the single mix. It was Bob Kraushaar. But Clark wasn’t actually there as we were mixing that. He was in Holland, and he was on the phone with Mike for hours as Mike tried to get him to reconsider leaving the band. But funnily enough, just before I left the band, we were discussing that track, and Mike made the comment, “That’s the one that Calvin really got behind.” And I did! We kept remixing it and putting different stuff on it, and we’d done the video for it in North America, ‘cause it was going to be our fifth single here (in the UK).

I actually had an argument with the president of Virgin America because I wanted the remix of “Don’t Say It’s Love” with the Domenic Sena video to be our follow-up to “Shattered Dreams.” I didn’t want “I Don’t Want to Be a Hero” to be our follow-up in America. Why create a controversy about being anti-war? I mean, I played it to some relatives who suddenly got irate! We weren’t in a position to be Green Day, you know? That, and I didn’t think the record was as good, and we had a crap video for it. [Laughs.] “Don’t Say It’s Love” was the one I was pushing for as the follow-up.

“What Other Reason”

CD: A very sensitive song, and I think one of the tracks that was most true to the demo. I don’t know if Mike will remember that, but I remember the demo pretty clearly, the acoustic guitar solo and everything. It’s one that we haven’t…I don’t think we’ve ever played “What Other Reason” live. We’ve performed a lot of the others, but I’m looking forward to doing that one live, because I think it lends itself to a very intimate acoustic performance and I think will translate good in this time.

CH: That’s one my favorites, definitely, yet it’s one of the ones I had the least to do with. That was more Clark and Mike. I added some keyboards to it. I think there’s a countermelody that’s there that Clark liked, a bell part of something. But the thing I do remember about that track is that Clark had a demo, and I always liked it, but Mike and I were never happy with the middle eight, and so we wouldn’t record it. And Clark went off, and he came back, and he played us a middle eight, and we said, “Nah.” And went off a few days later and brought another middle eight and played it. on the piano. “Nah.” About the third or fourth time, he played us the middle eight that’s actually in the song. As soon as he played us that, we said, “Right, let’s record it. You’ve got it.” [Laughs.] And I really do think that’s a great middle eight!

MN: That’s a lovely little ballad, but there’s a guitar solo in that song, a Spanish guitar, that kind of encapsulates how I can get caught up in my insecurities. I hadn’t really played much on the album because when I’m producing something, I’m not really good at playing on it as well, because I have to keep stopping and listening. It’s just time-consuming. So I was kind of unhappy about it, going, “Oh, let someone else play it.” But for that, I said, “I’ll play this,” so I went off to one of the other studios with an assistant and recorded this guitar solo. It’s very simple, but whenever we’d play it, I’d always have it really low, because I just never was happy with it.

When it was mixed by a guy called Greg Jackman, who I’d learned from at RAK Studios, he put the guitar where it should be, making it pretty loud because, well, it’s a guitar solo! But I still didn’t like it. But then we’re on a plane, flying to L.A. and sitting in business class, and we’re sitting next to Brian May of Queen, we’re just chatting, and then someone says, “Oh, this is our new album,” and he says, “Oh, let me hear it!” So he’s sitting there, listening to it on the Walkman, and after “What Other Reason,” he goes, “Nice guitar solo!” [Laughs.] So that’s when I started thinking, “Well, okay, if Brian May thinks it’s okay, then I guess it’s okay.”

“Listen”

PT: I had written “Listen” when I was on tour with the Cure, in a hotel in Hong Kong. I used to take this little Casio keyboard with me, and we were the lobby, about to leave, and I said, “I’ve just had a really good idea!” And I had a little tape recorder, so I put it down, and then two months later, after we’d gotten back off of tour, I finished it off and made it into a proper song.

CD: At some point in the making of the album, I had written X amount of songs, and we knew that we were one short, and I think Mike said, “Phil played me this demo called ‘Listen,’ and I really liked it.” So I thought, “Well, let’s do it, then!”

CH: Clark did his vocal, I added some keyboards to it, and I think the whole string thing, I did that. But it was built from Phil’s demo, which I’d heard and, well, we all just immediately felt, “Well, this could work as a Johnny Hates Jazz track.”

CD: It’s one of only two songs that I recorded that I didn’t have a hand in writing, the other being “Foolish Heart,” but once we took the demo and worked on it, it fit really well on the album.

PT: Luckily, it was in the right key for Clark! [Laughs.] So, yeah, that was my sole involvement with Turn Back the Clock, really: a day, maybe two, just mixing “Listen.” But it was all on the tape, so it wasn’t too difficult to do. It was a really good demo, more like what you find these days, when people say, “This is my demo,” and you go, “Yeah, but it sounds amazing!” But that’s what you have to do for contemporary A&R people. They sort of like to hear the product. They don’t really want to hear a demo. They want to hear the complete thing, which was what I used to turn in as well.

MN: We changed some bits, but we really just loved the song. And I’d known the song for probably a year before. It’s a slightly different flavor, a slightly different sound, because Phil had started the track, so…it’s a nice break. It changes the mood slightly, which it is good.

PT: Mike did me a favor there, because, y’know, over the years, that song has earned its keep. It’s been a good worker. [Laughs.]

“Different Seasons”

CD: Calvin and I wrote that one together. Calvin had a melodic idea in mind, which became the theme of the song, and then I built it up and turned it into a song song, with more melody and lyrics.

CH: I had this bit of music, and Mike had liked it. In fact, when “Foolish Heart” was out, Mike and I were in Scotland or somewhere buying records from record shops, trying to get it up the charts… [Laughs.] And we were staying in a hotel, and there was a bar where there was a guy playing piano. And he took a break, and I said to him, “D’you mind if I play something?” And he went, “No, go ahead!” So I played this music, which was “Different Seasons,” and finished, and then the piano player came up and said, “Ah, isn’t that a great song? ‘On Golden Pond.’ Isn’t that just wonderful music?” And I, uh, didn’t put him straight. But I was thinking, “Well, that’s a good sign! He thought it was something that was already successful!

I played it for Clark. He’d stayed at my flat, which was ‘round the corner from RAK, ‘cause it was very late and he just crashed on the sofa at my place instead of driving back to Wimbledon. We got up early, and there was a session or something in London that day, but we had an hour, so he said to me, “Play that music you’ve got.” So I started playing it on the piano, he started jotting down some words, and within an hour he’d finished the lyrics and could sing it. Suddenly, my bit of music had now become a song! And I thought it worked really, really well, and not just because I was involved in the writing of it. [Laughs.] I don’t know that we did it justice with the recording—we never got that one quite right—but it’s a lot of people’s favorite song, and I think it was a good collaboration. Obviously, Clark’s main domain was the songwriting, and he was very, very accomplished, whereas Mike’s and my role was the production, but I’ve often wondered if, were he to have heard other bits of music that I’d written over the years, we might’ve collaborated again.

MN: I remember getting a letter—and I’m sure every artist could tell you a similar story—from someone saying, “Thank you so much for making this record, we played it at our child’s funeral recently.” [Sighs.] At that point, you just go, “That’s heavy.” But on the other hand, you’re thinking, “Well, we made a piece of music that moved people,” so it was an honor as well.

CH: What’s funny is that, in 1988, when the album was just out, the head of Radio One came up to me at a party for the number-one album, and said, “I think your next single should be ‘Different Seasons.’ If you were to release that, I’d put it on the A-list.” I dunno, maybe “Different Seasons” would’ve been a bigger hit than “Don’t Say It’s Love.” Personally, I felt a bit uneasy because I didn’t want it to appear that I was going to suddenly suggest that we put out “Different Seasons” as a single because I’d co-written it. I didn’t want it to see as it if was a conflict of interest! [Laughs.] But I do wonder what might’ve happened had that been a single.

“Don’t Let It End This Way”

CD: The last song on the album to be recorded, appropriately, and the one which ended up being the favorite song of the guy who ran Virgin Records at that time, a guy called Simon Draper. That’s one of my favorites on the album as well…but it was a heck of a race to get it done!

MN: We recorded it in about a day and a half, because we had to come up with a tenth song.

CH: We actually finished it, cut the album, and decided that it was too barren. So we stopped cutting the record, went straight to the studio at RAK and did the overdubs, then to a midnight session at SARM, Trevor Horn’s studio, put the overdubs into the mix. Then the next morning—seven hours later! —we went back and re-cut the second side of the album. That’s fast. [Laughs.] But you know what? I’m glad we did it, because it made the track that much better. It made it 20-30% better, in fact.

MN: It has a slightly different sound and vibe to it, because it was recorded quicker, but that doesn’t mean to say that you can record everything quickly and it’ll turn out good. But for some people, “Don’t Let It End This Way” is their favorite song.