Lead vocalist Jack Hues talks love, career & creating ubiquitous 80s hits
Wang Chung plays Red Butte Garden on Wednesday, August 6, along with other 80s-era heavy hitters Rick Springfield, John Waite, and Paul Young. Doors are at 5:30 p.m.
After spending the entirety of his life in the UK, Wang Chung’s Jack Hues recently relocated to Austin, Texas. It’s where he is when we catch up with him. He married a girl he couldn’t let get away, he said. He’s getting used to his new surroundings there, but settling in just fine.
Maybe being responsible for time-tested songs like “Everybody Have Fun Tonight,” “Dance Hall Days,” and “To Live and Die in L.A” helps. If nothing else, those three songs alone have helped the English new wave duo enjoy a lengthy career.
“It’s certainly not what we planned,” Hues says about their first surprise hit. “Dance Hall Days” made it to the top 40 in the UK, peaking at No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100. “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” followed, going all the way to No. 2 on that same chart.
The songs still follow Hues around, showing up in the most curious circumstances.
“I’m renting an apartment currently. I was standing in the front office, waiting to speak to a lady about the trash being taken out, and ‘Dance Hall Days’ started playing,” Hues says. “And I immediately thought to myself, ‘We have arrived!’”
Q: The now-famous line we now know (and tend to repeat on cue) — “Everybody Wang Chung tonight” — that was supposed to be replaced, right?
Hues: Yeah, yeah. Back in those days, to use your band’s name in the song seemed a bit desperate. We were just mucking around musically. And the disdain we received from certain music critics for leaving it in — and that initial hesitancy for them to like what they were hearing — faded into the fun people have had with the song ever since.
Q: What’s it feel like to create songs that have stood the test of time?
Hues: It’s amazing for many reasons. I was in the UK, where we’re less well known than we are in this country, and I remember “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” coming on in a restaurant. I was looking particularly disheveled after losing a night’s sleep in the studio. This waitress came over and I wanted to say, ‘I wrote this song,’ but didn’t. I thought she might call security.
“Music is a harsh mistress to devote yourself to. At our age, we’ve done a lot of devoting. We’re in place to reap a certain set of rewards.” (J. Hues)
Q: And when you wrote “Everybody …,” you had to know it would be a hit.
Hues: We needed it to be. “Dance Hall Days” was an international hit. We had the problem of following it up without doing the exact same thing again. As an artist, that’s impossible.
Out of the blue, director William Friedkin got in touch with us, and we did the soundtrack to his movie, To Live and Die in L.A. In retrospect, it may have been our most commercially successful project. At the time, it wasn’t a successful movie. It was so dark. The soundtrack didn’t even make a mark on the charts, which is what we were supposed to be doing.
After that, we needed a number one record. “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” was about doing that, and it worked out. Music is a harsh mistress to devote yourself to. And at our age, we’ve done our share of devoting. We’re in place to reap a certain set of rewards.
Q: Does music run in your family?
Hues: My dad was a saxophone player. His sense of being a musician was that it was about playing live. He didn’t understand recordings, which is what I was doing. He said stuff like, ‘If you’re on time for a gig, you’re late.’ Or ‘You’re only as good as your last gig.’ There was a slight military sense to all that, really, of almost being in a war.
Q: So it was your father who helped you get into music then.
Hues: He facilitated it. Seeing The Beatles and hearing them on the radio got me to play guitar. My dad was a trained musician. He said he’d get me a guitar, but I had to take lessons and learn to read music in return. As a kid, you don’t notice how much time you’re spending repetitively learning to write out treble clefs. But by the time I was 18 and thinking about attending university, I could study music at that level because I had the right background. I studied classical music — there were no courses in rock or jazz — but three years studying Bach and Mozart was incredibly good for me. That genre remains the center of my musical interest.
Q: And then Wang Chung happened after you answered an ad in the Melody Maker.
Hues: I was 23, just out of college. I moved back with my parents, because I had no money. I quickly fell in with a bunch of local musicians, a covers band, and they liked that I was writing songs. A mate of theirs had a recording studio, and the band developed from there.
Q: What do you think surprises people most about your shows?
Hues: The impact of it is far bigger than they might expect. Maybe people think of four artists from the 80s using music videos as a backdrop, that it’s all a bit artificial. And in the 80s, we were obsessed with drum machines and synths. It was the latest technology and it gave us our very characteristic sound. But when you see these bands play now, we’re all fascinated with drums and guitars. The synths are in there, but it’s really translating those songs into this legacy of rock and roll, of the ’60s and ’70s. It’s got that other history to it, of what inspired us as kids.
Want to Wang Chung tonight, later this week? You totally can. Tickets are still available.
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