It was the summer of 1986, and the Nu Shooz song ‘I Can’t Wait’ was a Top-5 hit all over the world.
Our label, Atlantic Records, sent us over to Europe to do press and TV appearances; not the whole band, just Valerie and me. We were too busy to notice that the label wasn’t interested in the band, and was marketing us as a Husband and Wife ‘Synth-Pop’ Duo from Portland, Oregon.
We had an eight-hour hop over the North Pole. A car picked us up at Heathrow. On the way into town, our song came on the radio. Pretty cool!
So here we are in London.
It was the Pre-Internet era, what we call ‘the Horse and Buggy days.’ There was no way to do research into which media outlets we were slotted to appear on. We didn’t know if we were going to be on the British version of Dick Clark or Howdy Doody. Nowadays it’s so easy. Does the interviewer have an audience of ten thousand, or a million…or twelve? Is the show we’re going on a local morning show, or syndicated around the world?
Besides being jet-lagged and shell-shocked by our sudden rise to fame, we were clueless about the music business…I mean the POP music business.
We were scheduled to be on a show called Top of the Pops on the BBC. Never heard of it.
John’s Journal from 1986
But first, we were ushered into a recording studio, where a room full of musicians was re-recording our song! What? The label rep took us aside and quietly explained that the British Musician’s Union requires that British musicians have to be hired to play any music that will appear on TV. I remember the guitar player didn’t have the part quite right, but the horns and the backup singers were better than the record!
I asked the label guy, “Do we have to use this version?” “Oh no,” he laughed. Nudge nudge wink wink. “This is all for appearances. Don’t worry.”
Before our appearance on Top of the Pops, we flew up to Manchester to be on a cute little ‘jukebox’ show, a sort of Dick Clark/American Bandstand in miniature. Fine Young Cannibals were on the show too. The audience was mostly middle-school kids. (Thirty or forty years later, someone sent us a clip of that show which was re-broadcast in Germany!)
Our driver for the British leg of the trip was a portly gentleman named Bil. [One ‘L.’] He took a liking to us right away and vice versa.
“You folks aren’t like the usual Rock Stars,” he said. “You’re real people.” He went above and beyond the call of duty and showed us around London, a city he clearly loved. I remember he showed us some Medieval doorways on London Bridge, barely five feet high. “People were much shorter then.”
John and our driver, Bill, on the London Bridge.
He took us to the oldest Toy Store in England, established in the late 1700’s. He bought me a little box of toy soldiers- I still have them- dressed like Hussars from the Crimean War. He introduced us to his wife, and we all had fish and chips at his local pub. All in all a perfect London experience; one we never could have had as mere tourists.
I think we did a couple of morning shows, and then it was onto Top of the Pops. I was used to hiding out in the corner of our nine-piece band, so now I’m feeling naked. It’s just Val and me out there doing these silly dance steps, miming our song. But what I mostly remember is I made one of the worst fashion choices of my career, a stupid, ill-fitting beret!
It was all a great big swirl.
A different driver picked us up to go to the airport, and we never saw BIL again; never got to thank him for being the best part of our trip.
Then it was on to Paris.
The French label put us up in a palatial suite at the Hotel Nikko overlooking the Seine.
I think we did about ten TV shows while we were there, mostly morning shows. I don’t know how effective it was since we didn’t speak French. The last thing we did was a TV show called ‘La vie du Famille.’ (Family Life) It was a kind of Ed Sullivan/Hollywood Palace kind of revue…you know, pop singers but also jugglers. I can still hear the theme song in my head forty years later:
La vie du famille
C’est important
Also on that show were Vince Clarke of Erasure, and the ‘Soul Makosa’ man, Manu Dibango.
Backstage, taking an old-fashioned 80s selfie.
Next, it was on to Italy, where we did some radio.
(They pronounced the name of our band like New Shoots.) We were scheduled to appear at an outdoor show in Sienna. It was part of a festival called the Pallio, sort of like the running of the bulls in Pamplona, but with horses. It had been going on for the last 500 years!
Sienna, Italy
Squads of Ghibbellines and Guelfs did that drill where they toss flags in the air. The food was better than in France, that’s for sure. And I was getting used to the Synth-Pop-Duo thing. To get out of doing dance steps, I refused to lip-sync guitar and hid behind a dead keyboard instead.
There was a Brit Punk band called Sigue Sigue Sputnik on the show, with their Statue-of-Liberty hair-dos. They were flipping off the audience. Well, I never dug the Punk thing.
Anyway, the point of this story is, in the Pre-Internet era, there was no way to look things up, to find out what we were getting into. As we learned much later, Top of the Pops was beamed all over Europe and in the 80s had an audience of FORTY MILLION PEOPLE!