Photo above courtesy of Armando@kinetic-image.com
One word I’ve found to be synonymous with the COVID-19 pandemic is “routine.”
Even as lockdowns begin to ease, there’s still not much I can find myself doing beyond working, caring for loved ones indoors, eating, reading, watching movies and television, and trekking to the grocery store once a week. In the early months of the pandemic, if I didn’t time things right, I’d be apt to wait on a line leading into Wegmans rivaling that of Disney World’s Splash Mountain.
During one of these instances, I decided to break up the monotony after an hour. I chose to blast one of my all-time favorite 1980s tunes from my phone — “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” by Wang Chung — as I danced my way into the store. Part of me did it for attention; part of me did it to see if it would spark a reaction (it didn’t…); and part of me did it just to have some kind of emotional release.
Laughing as I recalled this story, Wang Chung frontman Jack Hues offered the following: “I always felt the title should be sort of ironic because in this ‘terrible’ world can you really just have fun? But, of course, that is the answer in a way. You do need to just switch off from stuff for a while and just give yourself a break. Sometimes music can create that perfect five minutes of peace.”
“Everybody Have Fun Tonight” has always been a go-to track for me in times of good and bad. If I had a hard day at work; I’d play the track three times in a row in the car on the way home. It may be one of the finest examples of contemporary white soul I’ve ever heard. It’s brassy, buoyant, and tailor-made for weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. And, throughout this pandemic, it’s been as much a part of my daily routine as walking my dog.
Hues and band partner Nick Feldman, reacting to current times, have reworked their monster hit as “Everybody Stay Safe Tonight.” Featuring backing vocals from Valerie Day of Nu Shooz (“I Can’t Wait”) fame, the pair still maintain their uplifting lyrical message and upbeat musical sensibilities. The group’s efforts are being released in tandem with an virtual online concert this month dubbed “Back to the Basement.” Featuring other stalwarts of the new wave scene performing from their respective homes, proceeds with go to benefit the charity Direct Relief, supporting and celebrating doctors, nurses, first responders and healthcare workers.
Going back to the original version, I asked Hues to break down for me how it came together. While Wang Chung had already grazed the Billboard Top 20 in the U.S. with the reflective “Dance Hall Days” (1984) and had scored the soundtrack to the film “To Live and Die In L.A.”, there was pressure from Geffen Records for a more substantial hit.
“Nick and I had this process by which we would sort of meet up every couple of weeks. Nick would play me his ideas and I would play him mine and we’d sort of filter what we thought was appropriate for the band,” said Hues, speaking from his Canterbury, England home. “I remember him playing me this idea of ‘Everybody have fun tonight.’ He had that lyric and part of the chord sequence. I really liked that. I think he was quite shocked because I always tended to go for slightly more offbeat ideas. Obviously “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” is very direct but I think I had sort of liked that directness but sort of thought I could kind of make it ironic and play with it somehow.”
Hues adds he took overall musical inspiration for the song from the Beatles’ classic “Hey Jude.”
“In ‘Hey Jude,’ you’ve got this quite conventional song and then you’ve got the outro where everything happens and I thought we could do the same with ‘Everybody Have Fun Tonight’,” he said.
Initially incorporating the lyric of “Everybody Wang Chung Tonight!” into the song’s chorus as an ad-libbed lark, Hues was convinced to make the line an ongoing hook of the song by the band’s producer Peter Wolf.
“It became a sort of party anthem and in many ways it was,” Hues says. “I think at the time I found it a bit alienating almost. It wasn’t really what I was planning on. I was into it, but I was a little nervous about it.”
Ultimately the track would zoom up the U.S. charts, peaking at Number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 around Christmas 1986 behind the Bangles’ “Walk Like An Egyptian.” I feel one major reason for the song’s quick star power is the powerful horns driving the beat and energy of the overall track.
“Certainly one of the things that made Nick and I quite unusual in the English sort of punk scene, which is when we first got together, is we were both listening to Chaka Khan and Chic. I loved Marvin Gaye and Motown. So we had that,” Hues told me. “Wang Chung had this sort of funk element that is not usual amongst English bands and I was always interested in that sort of feel. In a way, I feel the band was a coolish blend of feel across the soul thing and the rock thing.”
Another standout element is the constant references to the group’s name, either directly or indirectly, which showcase a serious act not trying to take itself too seriously.
“We had a couple of days where Peter knew all the session singers in L.A. Siedah Garrett was one of those singers working with Michael Jackson. She was there. There was a whole bunch of guys and I remember standing in the studio sort of coaching them through the backing vocals,” Hues said. “I felt like such a charlatan because there was me with my sort of little English voice telling them what to do and these guys start singing and they just resonate in the whole room. Really beautiful vocal sound. We sort of did an ad lib track and one of them said, ‘Can you tell me what a Wang Chung is?’ and obviously we just kept that onto the mix.”
And then, of course, there’s the innovative Kevin Godley and Lol Creme (both members of 70s band 10cc) tailor-made video for MTV, and, if you believe urban legend, hospitals. According to Hues, the video’s rapid fire stop motion effects prompted the BBC to ban it in the UK due to the risk of viewers experiencing seizures.
“The video that everybody was in love with at the time was Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” and that had this stop motion kind of thing on it. So everybody wanted to do a video like that. Godley and Creme came up with this concept of a wooden box basically that we would be in and then all of this stuff would happen completely artificially,” Hues told me. “Me as a performer, I don’t do a lot of smiling so I think they decided that rather than trying to have a sort of happy-go-lucky video to match the happy-go-lucky track, that they would do this opposite emotion in a sense. So they said to me, ‘We want you to stand as still as you possibly can and just sing straight to the camera, no expression, and perform the song like 10 times and we’ll edit it together. So essentially that was the easiest video I had ever made because I just literally tried not to move.”
“We didn’t really quite know what we were going to get until we edited it,” Godley told me in a separate interview. “It looks like animation but it isn’t animation. It’s just us cutting very, very quickly between a number of different takes of the same thing.”
The irony of the group’s success is the fact that Wang Chung had another major hit off the same album (Mosiac), the Top 10 dance smash “Let’s Go!” To make it clear, this is not a one-hit wonder band. In many ways, “Let’s Go!” is just as catchy and irresistible as “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” yet unfortunately it tends to be overshadowed by its predecessor.
“I think ‘Everybody Have Fun Tonight’ maybe eclipsed it a little bit. ‘Everybody Have Fun Tonight,’ in its little way was sort of controversial because having the name of the band in the song at that time was very unusual. Back then I think it was considered by a lot of people like pretty bad taste to do that,” Hues said. “We weren’t trying to advertise ourselves; it was just meant to be this quirky thing but it did really catch on. I guess ‘Let’s Go!’ was a little bit more straight ahead. I think the video of that was a little more fun video, a little more throwaway so it didn’t attract the kind of attention “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” did.
Though the band would go on to open for Tina Turner, changing musical tastes and a changing musical landscape would lead the group to disband at the end of the decade. Fortunately, they would return years later with new music and live performances. Hues meanwhile has never lost his love for prog rock and the classic double albums of his youth. His latest solo album, Primitif, reflecting these tastes, was released earlier this year.
Though normalcy will still take time to occur per the pandemic, Wang Chung hopes their song — in all its incarnations — can still bring a little happiness to a world in need of a change.
“With this kind of strange year we’ve had with the pandemic and this weird shutdown thing going on — what it shuts down is all those really human interactions, not least of which is being in a room with people listening to music,” Hues says. “This track suddenly seems like a bit of a ray of light. I think people are really ready for something like a break for a couple of hours to just think of something else.”
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