Johnny Hates Jazz, TURN BACK THE CLOCK—An Oral History (Part 2)
To read Part One, click here.
Recording the album
CD: We started recording the album in demo form late in 1986. “Shattered Dreams” came out, I think, in March ’87, and it climbed the chart. As was the case in those days, you had to get it to climb the chart maybe 10 places a week, if not more, to keep radio interested in playing it. And that’s what it did.
MN: It went into the charts at #161, so it’s, like, “Okay, that’s not very good.” In fact, I remember meeting the Virgin America guy when “Shattered Dreams” first went into the charts. He sat us down in this office, and he said to us, “I love your record, guys, I think this is going to be a top-5 hit in America.” All I remember thinking is, “God, please don’t anybody tell him that it’s just gone in at #161…” [Laughs.]
And then the next week it went to #91, which is still rubbish. But it’s creeping up. And the next week, if it doesn’t go up, then that’s it. The record company pulls it. But then the next week, it had to go into the top 75, and it went in at #75. And that’s what kept happening. The next week, it went to #56, and the next week, it had to get into the top-40, and it went in at #40. At that point, shops like Woolworth’s would start stocking your record, at which point more people would start buying your record because, “Well, if Woolworth’s is stocking it…” But every single week we were wondering, “Is the record just going to disappear?” I’m sure every band can say the same kind of stories. It’s never as simple as anyone thinks.
CD: All that time the record was climbing the charts, we were continuing to record. Now, bear in mind we were very self-contained, and still are between Mike and myself. I was the singer and songwriter, one of the keyboard players; Mike was producing, as was Calvin; Mike was engineering, Calvin was doing the other keyboards. We just did an awful lot, the three of us, so we had a lot on our plate.
MN: There was huge pressure. This isn’t typical or normal of other bands, but think about it: I was engineering it, and I was producing it with Calvin, so when we weren’t in the studio, the album wasn’t ticking along with someone else. It wasn’t like Trevor Horn was recording stuff while we were away! I mean, if we were away doing a TV show, the record wasn’t being made! But, y’know, before I was in Johnny Hates Jazz, that’s what I used to do. I specifically remember working, tape operating and assistant engineering on a Duran Duran record, and I remember thinking, “Man, they’re going off to Italy to do a TV show! How cool is that?” [Laughs.] “I’d like to be doing that…but I’m coming into the studio tomorrow, working with some other band!” In fact, we drove the mobile studio down to the south of France for Duran Duran to record at one point. So I was, like, “This is what I want to be doing! I don’t want to just be stuck in the studio!”
CD: Y’know, the way we made records back in the ‘80s, which was true of other artists as well, we spent a long time, took a lot of care, and put a lot of effort into how a record was made. It was just an ethos that we had. The idea that you would have a writer over here and a production team over there, and then there’s a singer, and you put ‘em all together and create a musical vehicle…it’s more common these days, and it certainly was in the ‘50s, but it wasn’t so common back then. A lot of us did a lot of things ourselves. Not all of it, but a lot.
MN: But, you know, this was the first record we’d ever made as a band, so as far as finding other players…I can remember someone recommending someone, they’d come in for the day and do something, and we were, like, “Oh, that’s quite good, we’ll keep a bit of it,” but not being blown away. But one person who was constant throughout the album was the late, great J.J. Bell, the guitar player, who had done a lot of the Trevor Horn stuff, like the Grace Jones record. J.J. came in one day, and we immediately like him, and he just looked great. [Laughs.] And then he started playing, and we were, like, “This is fantastic!” And he then played guitar on all of it.
Keyboards were more or less all done by the band, and…we didn’t have too many outside players. Well, we had a guy named Frank Ricotti, who’s absolutely one of the all-time great percussion players, and he came in. In fact, on “Shattered Dreams,” the bongo solo, that’s Frank. We had this middle bit, and we weren’t quite sure what to do, and Frank said, “Let me try something!” And he went in, did the bongos, and it was, like, “That’s it, thanks!” One take, done. [Laughs.] You know, when you have great players, those things happen, don’t they? Frank’s played on the new Johnny Hates Jazz album as well. His history’s incredible.
CD: When “Shattered Dreams” suddenly went into the top 40 and, in the UK, climbed to #5, and then it started to happen all over Europe, and then all over Asia—this was before the U.S. release— we were flying all over the place, sometimes two countries in one day, doing TV shows and radio interviews and photo sessions and videos, whilst finishing the album. And it was an absolute mad dash to get it done in time so that it could be released in January of 1988. So, yeah, it’s not the easiest way to make an album, but it’s what we had to do.
MN: It was incredibly difficult. I always say to people, and it’s true, that there were eight months where I never had a single day off, because there just was no time. I’m not complaining about that. It’s great! If you’re busy, you’re doing well, aren’t you? CH: The whole idea was to make an album where people would like every track, and while I do think a couple of tracks could’ve been better, like “I Don’t Want to Be a Hero” and “Different Seasons,” the one comment that’s resounded for the past 25 years whenever people talk about Turn Back the Clock is, “Y’know, I can put it on and leave it on.” And that’s the thing that makes me the happiest.
Hitting the promotional trail
CD: To be honest, we didn’t do much live performing back in the day, and part of the reason was that I left too soon to do that.
MN: I don’t know that we did any live performing beyond the showcases, did we?
CH: We didn’t do a single gig. But we still sold four million albums. [Laughs.] Of course, after the album came out, we should’ve toured. But the option of having a world tour wasn’t available to us when Clark left. When we first showcased for Virgin, they asked us if we were going to do shows, we said, “Of course we are!” Mind you, we had no intention at the beginning. We kind of fooled them into thinking we were going to tour, because we knew our strengths were really in the studio. But, Christ, after all that success with the album coming out… I mean, my God, how many more million records would we have sold? But, unfortunately, we didn’t have the option.
CD: We did, however, do many, many TV appearances.
MN: I looked at my passport awhile ago, and I think I counted 120 flights in eight months, and they were all TV appearances. In fact, we were just doing a show in Bangkok with Rick Astley, and we were talking about the same thing. Rick was saying, “My God, how much did we all fly?” Sometimes you’d do four flights in one day! Because you’d fly to Munich, then you’d fly from there to Berlin, but then you were going to be doing a show somewhere else, and you’d fly somewhere else after. And that was just kind of normal. It was just insane. Great fun, though. [Laughs.] I’d never complain about the promotional stuff.
CH: Because Virgin hadn’t signed us for an album and we were producing ourselves… I mean, it wasn’t like we had Stock-Aitken-Waterman and just could wander in every few days and do the odd thing and then just piss off. But the singles were coming out all over Europe, and if we were still recording, then we had to do this insane promotional stuff and try and make the album at the same time. But, y’know, at the end of the day, the album didn’t really suffer for it, and we managed to do the promotion. I don’t see why you can’t do that. If something’s important or if it’s gonna make you money, then go do it, and then come back and record. It just made it doubly hard that we were producing it and having to promote it. Not to mention the fact that normally you’d finish the album and then spend the next six months promoting it. But it didn’t work out that way for us.
CD: I can remember one notable TV appearance we did, in Germany, when I think we were promoting “I Don’t Want to Be a Hero.” We were doing pretty well at that point, and I think we were getting more and more relaxed with the amount of promotion we had to do. I remember the three of us sitting in the dressing room, chatting away to t
he makeup artist, completely oblivious to what else was happening, enjoying the whole experience, talking about what we had to do when we got back and what else had to be recorded, and we didn’t realize that the show had started. [Laughs.] So there we are in the dressing room, which was in a different area, up a couple of flights of stairs, and we hear someone say something in German, and—if I’m right about the song—we suddenly hear “I Don’t Want to Be a Hero” start. And we looked at each other and thought, “Holy shit!” And we raced down these stairs, these metal stairs that are clattering like crazy throughout the studio, raced onto the set, and I reached the microphone just in time for the first line. And that’s just one of the more minor anecdotes! But it’s kind of intrinsic to the time. Flying by the seat of your pants, that’s what it was like.
MN: Oh, God, I remember that show in Germany. [Laughs.]
CH: You know what? I remember that, too! [Laughs.] But, you know, when you’re on promotional tours, the whole thing is a rush to wait. “Quickly, get your makeup! Get your clothes! Are you ready?” And then you go, “Yep!” And they say, “Okay, then, come back here.” And then you wait for an hour or so, thinking, “I could’ve done with another hour in bed!” I guess it was a combination of all that, along with them constantly saying, “We’re ready! No, we’re not!” I think it might’ve been my arrogance, actually, that caused that, as I recall. I think I said, “Ah, we’ve got a couple of more records before us,” and then all of a sudden ours was on! I think I was doing my trousers up at the time…and I’ve just realized that sounds terrible, and I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. It was a changing room, you know! But what I do remember was that Mike was a consummate professional: he walked on first, because he was more ready than Clark and I, and he was miming the bass as he was running out. [Laughs.] So not, uh, one of our more professional moments.
MN: Stuff like that was just so typical, though. It was all so chaotic. We were doing a TV show in Italy once, and somebody…for some reason, they had record “Shattered Dreams” onto a different format to play it, but no one had actually listened to it, and the record had skipped. So while we were doing the TV show, there was a skip in the second chorus, I think it was. How embarrassing! And there was another TV show as well. I think it was the first one we ever did in Germany, and Roger Daltrey was on there as well, promoting some record of his, but it was something like seven o’clock in the morning, and it was in a shopping mall somewhere. So you’ve got people standing all around you drinking coffee, and little old ladies are walking by shopping, while you’re promoting your record. It was all quite absurd.
A Close Encounter with Future Greatness
CD: There were two videos for (“Shattered Dreams”), and the good one, the U.S. one, was directed by David Fincher. We didn’t realize where he was heading, of course, though I think we figured that he was going to do something.
CH: Yeah, I don’t want to be rude about the other directors—although I will say that Dominic Sena, who directed the “Don’t Say It’s Love” video, was fantastic—but once you’ve worked with the best…
MN: Whenever you work with someone who’s great…well, you know they’re great, don’t you? So it’s not a surprise that David’s done as well as he’s done.
CD: David directed the US video for “Shattered Dreams” as well as the video for “Heart of Gold.” We did the new video for “Shattered Dreams” because the UK video was, uh, not good. Not in our opinion, anyway.
CH: When “Shattered Dreams” was finished, a week after I’d played it for my dad, Virgin heard it and scheduled it, and one of the first things that happened was that we got called into a meeting with the video department. We sat down, and the woman who ran the video department—I think her name was Tessa Watts—she was a bit of a battleaxe, but I did admire her in some way as well. She was a tough old biddy, but at least she commanded respect. As we’re sitting there, she sort of said, “Right, what are we going to do with this video? What ideas have you got?” What we should’ve said was, “Oh, we don’t know anything about videos, so what do you think?” But what they did was give us piles of videos by directors and say, “See which director you like. And what do you think the concept should be?”
Clark and Mike, they were quite into film, and one night we took time off a session to go and see Stand by Me, because they were big Stephen King fans. After they came out of the cinema, they were going on and on about how we should do a video like that for “Turn Back the Clock.” But, of course, then you’re trying to reproduce a $20 million dollar film when you’ve got 30 grand. [Laughs.] And, you know, having a song that’s…it’s not the toughest song in the world, but then having a sentimental video with it, it makes it even more syrupy. But you don’t know this when you’re making it.
MN: We went to the States to redo the video because Virgin America were going to release the single, and we went to the office of Jordan Harris and Jeff Ayeroff, the two big guys at Virgin, and they said, “We want to use this guy named David Fincher.” And we said, “Cool, cool.” They said, “Okay, well, we’re just going to show you his show reel.”
CD: He was directing a few other people’s videos at the time. He did “Englishman in New York” for Sting. But he was kind of a young Hollywood brat. [Laughs.] He was a very confident fella. But he had some great concepts, and we got on really well with him.
MN: David came in and met us, this young kid. A brat. [Laughs.] That’s what I call him. You know, he was very confident and he was younger than I was. Like, a couple of years younger. But I remember chatting with him, and it was, like, “Okay, so we’re gonna make these videos.”
CH: I remember I got on well with him because he was into English humor, really into Monty Python, but he was, well, a bit of a brat, really. [Laughs.] The day after the meeting, the stylist walks in and goes, “You wear that, you wear that, you wear that…” Then we showed up on the set, didn’t know what was going on, we just did what we were told. We weren’t there for the edit, we had no creative input whatsoever, but then we saw the final video, and it was just in a different league altogether.
MN: We’d made a few videos up to that point, but I remember going into the set, and I think it was the same studio that “Billie Jean” had been done in, which was also a thrill. I remember looking around the set, thinking, “I have no clue what this is gonna look like.” But that’s actually really cool. It’s when you walk into the set and you go, “Oh, okay, I see, I sort of get it,” that the videos tend to be kind of useless, or they’re not very good. On this one, though, it was, like, “Holy… I can’t tell what it’s gonna look like!”
CH: There’s something that’s actually kind of a shame about that video, really, because if we’d had that from the get-go, and if the other video hadn’t been so cheesy… I mean, the original “Shattered Dreams” video is terrible. [Laughs.] It’s really embarrassing. But if people had been seeing that second video in the beginning, then I think the perception of the band would’ve been very different.
By the way, I also have to say that David Fincher did one of the cleverest things I’d ever experienced in doing videos. I also did videos with Kim Wilde before Johnny Hates Jazz, so it wasn’t all new to me. But at one point, he said, “Right, I need you to do some stuff. “ I said, “Okay,” and he sat me down at the piano, on the bench, and I sat there. And sat there, and sat there, and sat there. And I could see people walking around, and it looked like we were having a break! And about 10 minutes later, he walked over and said, “Right, you’re done.” [Laughs.] I had no idea I was being filmed! He purposely did that. And after 10 minutes of sitting there and thinking, “Well, I’m sitting here, now what’s going on?” And I started to get a little bit irritated. And he got a shot of me looking irritated. And after he told me that he’d already shot me, he said, “And, by the way, your video persona should always be that you don’t want to be there.” And he put that shot into the video, and it’s great, y’know? I just wish I wasn’t wearing white socks. I don’t think it affected sales, but I still see ‘em every time.
CD: The video for “Heart of Gold” was another one by David, and I’m sure he said it was the first time they’d used this computerized robot camera that was locked into this same camera move, so that it just kept repeatedly recording this same moves every time. Each of us went into the set and just did it a dozen times each, with the camera recording it using the same moves every time. So that was pretty cool.
Critical slings, arrows, and occasional praise
CD: The reviews were really a bit of a struggle, actually. I found it a bit angering, because there was kind of a double standard at work back then. In some ways, I feel that it continues to be so. When you talk about “‘80s music,“ people have this impression of what it is, and I think that, for some reason, bands like The Smiths aren’t classified as ‘80s bands. Well, I’m afraid they were ‘80s bands. It was just a different aspect of what was happening in the ‘80s. U2 emerged in the ‘80s. And there’s nothing wrong with that! But what I think happened was, Johnny Hates Jazz was in a difficult position, because we emerged in ’87, and the era of electronic music and New Romantics was beginning to come to a close. We didn’t realize that, at the time, we were effectively the last electronic band to emerge in the ‘80s. And we were an electronic band. We were synth-based. I mean, we used other instruments as well, but…
And there were other bands that were emerging at the same time, especially the Stock-Aitken-Waterman productions, that were not that. It was a very different ilk. I think we kind of got caught up in the tail end of one era and the beginning of another, and that other era was what was going to happen in the ‘90s. On one hand, I’d like to say I mentally stuck my finger up to any critics we had because we were doing so well, but that’s not how I viewed things. I wanted to sit down with every single one of them and argue it out with them and prove them wrong! [Laughs.]
MN: The press was hugely mixed. In the UK, the press we got for “Shattered Dreams” was very mixed, part of it negative, that we were lightweight, rubbish pop. But the first time we went to Italy to do a TV show, this Italian journalist sat us down, he put the microphone up, and he said, “So, a pop Steely Dan!” And I was, like, “Whoa! You hear the subtleties that are in the music!” One of the great things with Clark’s songs are the subtle chords going on, but it’s so subtle that they can actually sound complicated. But here was this journalist who, at least in my mind, had heard it for how we had done it. So that was kind of thrilling.
CD: I have to say, in actual fact, we had far less detractors than we might have had. And, weirdly, the best magazine or newspaper article we ever had was in New Musical Express. The guy that interviewed us just heaped praise on us. I think there was a contingent of the serious music press that recognized that there was a lot of effort going into the songwriting, into the record making, and they wanted to give us kudos. At that point, I think I breathed a sigh of relief. [Laughs.] When NME endorsed us, I thought, “Okay, that’s cool. I can chill out now.”
MN: The guy in NME, he just nails it, ‘cause he takes it from a different perspective. He goes, “Okay, all my colleagues hate this. Why would they hate it? Because to them it’s a threat.” [Laughs.] I enjoy reading it whenever I’ve seen it subsequently.
CH: We did get some good reviews. The guy from Billboard (Timothy White) gave us a brilliant review. But, personally, I don’t care what critics say. I’ve never cared that Johnny Hates Jazz is not the hippest band in the world. I mean, I’ve had real insults about it! But I’ve just laughed to myself, thinking, “Well, we’ve just told four million copies and we had a great experience. Let’s see you do it!” [Laughs.]
I think the one review that really annoyed me was Rolling Stone. Maybe it’s because it left such a scar, but from what I remember, it got something like one star and didn’t really discuss the music at all. In fact, the whole focus of the review was the cover, and it was basically saying, “How could three male models possibly make a good record or be musically talented?” That we were pretty boys, basically. And I thought, “If you’re going to review a record, then at least critique the music!”
But you can’t hold much trunk with Rolling Stone, because they didn’t give Nevermind by Nirvana a very good review, either. In fact, they said it was disappointing, not as good as their first album, and they gave it two stars. And then, y’know, three years later, they’re doing books on the guy and talking about what a genius he is and how brilliant an album it was. So it just goes to show what they know. I mean, when it comes to Johnny Hates Jazz, you can say the music’s not your cup of tea, you can call it cheesy, you can say this or that, but for its genre, it’s good. Sometimes music in different genres might not be to my taste, but I can appreciate when something’s well-crafted and well put together. And our music was certainly that.
CD: At the end of the day, I think most everyone views the Johnny Hates Jazz records differently in retrospect. In the 2000s, the whole of the musical era of the ‘80s has been reappraised, and we— Johnny Hates Jazz—have come out rather well as a result, and I’m pleased about that, as you might imagine. [Laughs.] In fact, it’s often been stated online that we were the most underrated band of the 1980s, and I really do think that’s true. I think we were never quite seen in the light we should’ve been. And possibly would’ve been if we’d stayed together.
