Released today in 1985: Hardest Part Is The Night

Vertigo VER22

John Francis Bongiovi Junior, later known as Jon Bon Jovi, was born in New Jersey. He had a keen interest in music from an early age and having joined local bands with friends, began playing clubs by the age of 16. By the 1980s he was fronting live performances for bands and putting together a repertoire he could release as a solo artist. Through family member Tony Bongiovi, co-owner of New York’s music complex Power Station, he was able to secure studio time to record demos of his songs with a variety of session musicians. These eventually saw release in the late 1990s as The Power Station Years: The Unreleased Recordings, under his birth name John Bongiovi, his first professional recording having also been released under that name in 1980. That year, Christmas in the Stars: The Star Wars Christmas Album (a kind of concept album set in a droid factory making gifts for Santa to deliver, featuring Christmas-themed songs) was being recorded at Power Station and Tony Bongiovi recommended his cousin for the song R2-D2 We Wish You A Merry Christmas. He got the job and on the album’s release on 10 November 1980 the public got to hear John Bongiovi for the first time.

In return for these opportunities, he accepted low-paid employment at Power Station, duties which according to an unauthorized biography by Laura Jackson, “amounted to those of a general errand boy. He swept floors, made coffee, went to the bank, placed bets for people and fetched hot snacks for hungry clientele. It was menial work that paid around $50 a week, but Jon was in his element. He did not mind running out for beer for David Bowie. He liked getting to work in time to collide with Mick Jagger arriving at the studio. And as a young guy pushing a broom, he manfully overlooked it when the odd less even-tempered diva would be unnecessarily bitchy to him.” In 2000, he told the Mail On Sunday about one of the diva encounters, with a Silk Electric-era Diana Ross. Ignoring a ‘Do not enter’ sign on the door to deliver a package to her, he “made the mistake of calling her Diana, to which she sharply replied ‘Can’t you read, you moron? It’s Miss Ross to you. Now get the fuck out of my studio.’ ‘It was’, says an older Bon Jovi, ‘a bit of a surprise, but as soon as I left the studio, it was a case of ‘Well, fuck you too, man.’ Don’t get me wrong, she’s still a great singer. But I gotta tell you, Miss Ross ain’t my boss.’”

A couple of years later, he took a demo of one of his own songs, Runaway, to a number of record companies looking for a deal but none was forthcoming. He subsequently joined an existing rock band, Scandal, as guitarist, but when a local NY radio station picked up Runaway and it became to an airplay success, Mercury records took an interest and he left Scandal to bring together some musicians to help promote a full commercial release of his own song. Keyboardist David Rashbaum, who had played with him in one of his early outfits called Atlantic City Expressway, was the first on board. Rashbaum had left their band to study medicine, but changed his mind and transferred to the New York music school Juilliard; he gave up his studies on receiving the call from Bongiovi and recommended that drummer Tico Torres and bass player Alec John Such be added to the line-up. Last to be recruited was lead guitarist Richie Sambora. An album was recorded in late ’83 under the working title of “Tough Talk” at Power Station with Tony Bongiovi co-producing; it was released with an eponymous title in the US on 24 January 1984 once it had been decided that the group should be called Bon Jovi. Runaway followed a couple of weeks later as their first single, but it wouldn’t see release in the UK until the autumn as She Don’t Know Me was chosen by their UK label, Vertigo, as the lead single here. Similarly, Mercury US and Vertigo UK disagreed over which would make the best lead single from Bon Jovi’s second album 7800° Fahrenheit: Mercury favoured Only lonely (a #54 hit there) while Vertigo went with Hardest Part Is The Night, which gave the band their first chart appearance here when it made #68.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Aug. 23
1985
BON JOVI (Jon Bon Jovi) Hardest Part Is The Night (Vertigo VER22)
Bryan FERRY Don’t Stop The Dance (EG FERRY2)
THOMPSON TWINS Don’t Mess With Doctor Dream (Arista TWINS9)

Released today in 1986: You Give Love A Bad Name

Vertigo VER26

✰ BONNIE TYLER IN THE EIGHTIES
Poor Bonnie Tyler. The gravelly-voiced Welsh singer made three highly competent albums for CBS in the 1980s, achieving varying levels of success with each. All three should have been – and could have been – major hits: she was signed to a record company that knew what it was doing, her performances were the strongest of her career, the production values were superb, and the songs themselves were strong enough as time would show. A great many of them were to become well-known in the hands of other artists after Tyler’s original versions were released. But she herself failed to reap the commercial rewards she deserved from such a collection of quality material.

The first of Tyler’s CBS works was Faster Than The Speed Of Night, released in 1983 and her most successful album. Lead single Total Eclipse Of The Heart went to #1 in several countries, but it was in the UK that this success was most notable: after four albums recorded for RCA in the late Seventies had failed to chart, she finally had a hit album in Britain. It yielded some other minor hit singles, but it was two standalone singles that return her to the UK Top 10: A Rockin’ Good Way, a 1984 duet with Shakin’ Stevens that went to #5, and Holding Out For A Hero, recorded for the ‘Footloose’ soundtrack the same year and a #2 hit (held there for three consecutive weeks while Mick Jagger and David Bowie were at #1 with Dancing In The Street) when it was given a second push in 1985.

The latter song was included on her next album Secret Dreams And Forbidden Fire, which was where the hits dried up. Although the album itself sold reasonably well, the singles taken from it – and nearly every one of its eight tracks was issued as a single somewhere in the world – received little radio airplay and therefore struggled to chart. Of the six UK singles featured on the album, only Holding Out For A Hero achieved sales in the volume Tyler deserved; follow-up Loving You’s A Dirty Job But Somebody’s Gotta Do It was the only other hit and only just made it, peaking at #73.

Amongst the songs featured that could have done much better as singles was Desmond Child’s If You Were A Woman (And I Was A Man), a rock anthem that should have been a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Released in March 1986, it was Tyler’s final single on the US Hot 100, reaching #77; it made #78 here. Child was known to be disappointed that such a strong song, with a fine vocal from Tyler, hadn’t gone on to achieve more. Teaming up with Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora of Bon Jovi, they re-worked the song, changing the lyrics and emphasizing the catchiest elements of the tune. Bon Jovi’s (admittedly superior) version, titled You Give Love A Bad Name, went to #1 in the US and was the first of a string of big hits for the band in the UK.

Tyler retained Child’s services as producer for her third and final CBS album, Hide Your Heart. (It was issued in the States as Notes From America, the opening track on the album and one of its four singles.) Once again, the song selection was impeccable. However, lead single The Best, released in January 1988, stalled at #95: a frustratingly poor showing, especially as the song would be a world-wide smash for Tina Turner the following year. Coincidentally, another track on the album, Don’t Turn Around, had originally been recorded by Turner and used as the B-side to her 1986 single for Capitol records, Typical Male. CBS didn’t seem to pick up on the song’s potential either as Tyler’s version remained as an album track. Island records did, though, and in the same year Tyler’s version appeared, reggae group Aswad took the song to #1 in Britain. Finally, one of the tracks from Hide Your Heart that was chosen as a single, Save Up All Your Tears, flopped when Tyler put it out, but it would be an international hit for Cher in 1991. Her last release of the 1980s was the compilation album Heaven And Hell, a joint effort with rocker Meat Loaf, the connection being producer (most notably, Faster Than The Speed Of Night) and songwriter (most notably, Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell) Jim Steinman.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Aug. 1
1980
David BOWIE Ashes To Ashes (RCA BOW6)
Hazel O’CONNOR Eighth Day (A&M AMS7553)
U2 A Day Without Me (Island WIP6630)
1986
BON JOVI (Jon Bon Jovi) You Give Love A Bad Name (Vertigo VER26)
Billy IDOL Catch My Fall (Chrysalis IDOL13)

Released today in 1987: Wanted Dead Or Alive

Mercury JOV1

When former Smash Hits editor Mark Ellen was looking to leave to found Q magazine in the mid-80s, he needed to find someone to take over the voice of Black Type, the supposed compiler of the letters page – and he couldn’t have picked anyone better than Tom Hibbert. Black Type’s benevolent neutrality towards his correspondents and the pop stars and minor celebrities they wrote to him about was an exaggerated (but not much) version of Hibbert’s general style of journalism: joining the regular writing team for Smash Hits in the mid-80s, he was perfectly suited to the irreverence found in its pages. It was all with the benefit, though, of a solid knowledge of popular music. Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne, an aspiring journalist in the 1980s, describes Hibbert’s writing as “offhand, intensely knowledgeable, iconoclastic, conversational and very funny.” ¹ Ellen remembers his “cavalier humour and softly ruthless interview technique” and his “fond, waspish and lightly mocking deconstructions” ² of the stars of the day. Such was the strength of his prose, it didn’t matter if you were interested in the artiste he was writing about: some witty or perceptive (or both) observations would be made, making the article worth reading.

Here’s an example of his wit. In March 1987, as Bon Jovi’s single Wanted Dead Or Alive was released in the UK, Hibbert was in the US interviewing lead singer Jon Bon Jovi ³. He introduces JBJ to readers thusly: “Jon takes a delicate sip from his teacup. The sunshine wafts in through the window, trickling through his hair and it becomes disgustingly evident that this man has not been beaten with the ugliness stick. He is simply ravissant, my dears…” The mock reverence was a hallmark of Smash Hits writing and Hibbert was the master. Apparently flippant, he could lure the subject into a false sense of security, having them reveal things that in more guarded moments they might have kept to themselves. In the same interview, Hibbert tells us that “the American cover of Slippery When Wet shows a foxette in a wet t-shirt; the British version, thankfully, is more refined”, and here’s what he reports JBJ saying about that album art: “Well, I’ve heard that we’re sexist – probably because of the album cover, but that wasn’t sexist at all. It was much better to put a picture of her on the cover than a picture of a guy on the cover, know what I mean? You’ll never find that problem in this camp, you know?” Charming.

Perhaps Hibbert’s most famous piece for Smash Hits – and arguably the publication’s finest moment – was when he interviewed Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the run-up to the General Election of 1987. (Why? “Simple, really,” he wrote in the article, “you see, pop goats, she wants you, the youth of the nation, batting on her team. Fancy that.”) It was vintage Hibbert: he pressed her on issues she clearly didn’t want to discuss and secured a few awkward confessions and admissions, but also acknowledged her ability to charm. He summarized this as “she displays an eagerness to please combined with a skill in evasion – riding roughshod over interjections – that marks her out as the ‘professional’ she is.” (The much-repeated story of her alleged selection of Lita Roza’s 1953 #1 (How Much Is) That Doggie In The Window? as her favourite song, which later led to Hibbert’s observation that she was “obsessed with free-market economics even as a child”, was not recounted in the published article.)

Despite his successes, he wasn’t always happy writing for the magazine. “Strangely enough, working on Smash Hits could be difficult,” he said in a 2001 interview. “You spent all your time flattering people and putting in little jokes to cheer yourself up and then these people you never hear of any more – Howard Jones, Nik Kershaw – were always threatening to sue. It usually turned out to be about getting the names of their wives wrong. We’d have to explain that it wasn’t actually libellous.” ⁴ Nevertheless, in the days before PRs being in attendance at interviews, Hibbert was one of those journalists who took full advantage of his interviewees. Ellen invited him to contribute to Q when that was launched in 1986 and his “Who The Hell…” columns were legendary. It was only when ‘celebrities’ got wise to his style and how their words could be presented in the magazine that the supply of potential subjects began to dry up, and nearly 100 pieces the feature came to an end. Hibbert went on to write for other magazines and national newspapers including a regular column in The Observer.

Throughout this period he wrote or edited numerous books on music, including rock ‘year books’ and books on record collecting; a collection of his “Who The Hell…” features was also published. His career was brought to a premature end by ill-health. In the late 90s he was hospitalized after succumbing to pneumonia; he was unable to work thereafter. He died in 2011 following complications from diabetes. You’ll find his name mentioned frequently throughout this blog.

¹ Stanley, Bob. “Caught by the Reaper: Tom Hibbert”, caughtbytheriver.net, 2 September 2011.
² Ellen, Mark. “Tom Hibbert obituary”, The Guardian, Guardian News Group, 2 September 2011.
³ Hibbert, Tom. “I’m Superman!”, Smash Hits, EMAP, 8-21 April 1987.
⁴ Gorman, Paul. “In Their Own Write: Adventures In The Music Press”, Sanctuary Press, Sanctuary Publishing Ltd, 9 November 2001.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Mar. 30
1984
The CURE (Robert Smith) The Caterpillar (Fiction FICS20)
1987
BON JOVI (Jon Bon Jovi) Wanted Dead Or Alive (Vertigo JOV1)
Julian COPE Eve’s Volcano (Island IS318)
Owen PAUL Bring Me Back That Spark (Epic OWEN6)
THEN JERICO (Mark Shaw) Prairie Rose (London LON131)

Today in 1987

The first ‘British Invasion’ of the American charts took place in the mid-1960s, with acts from the UK regularly making the upper reaches of the Billboard Hot 100: in 1965, a record 14 of the Top 40 singles in the US were by British artists. It wasn’t until the 1980s that it happened again: the ‘Second British Invasion’, propelled by new wave and synth-pop bands from the UK, began in the summer of 1982 and lasted until 1986. It peaked on the 16th July 1983, with half the Top 40 (including 7 of the Top 10 singles) coming from the Brits. Apart from the music, a driving force behind this level of success were the accompanying videos: stations like MTV wanted to show varied and interesting promotional clips and the easiest way to achieve this was to include those coming from across the Atlantic. The most popular musical genre in the States at the time was rock, and rock bands tended to make music videos replicating the look of their stage performances. Videos with a storyline – such as The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me Baby – became popular simply because of their originality, and in turn the music got more airplay.

As the 80s progressed, so the variety of promotional clips improved for artists working in all genres of popular music. Accordingly, home-grown talent returned to fill the Billboard charts again, and by the autumn of 1986 the Second British Invasion was officially over. The chart for the 7th of February in 1987 shows how different tastes were between the UK and US:

Number of British artists in the US Top 40: 5
Duran Duran; Dead Or Alive; Peter Gabriel; the group he used to be lead singer for, Genesis; and (rather surprisingly) Samantha Fox – the highest placed of the bunch climbing five place from the previous week to #5.

Number of Smash Hits covers stars in the US Top 40: 7
Duran Duran; Samantha Fox; Pete Burns (as part of Dead Or Alive); Madonna; Jon Bon Jovi’s Bon Jovi; Beastie Boys; Bangles.

Acts in the US Top 40 who never had a hit single in the UK:
Billy Vera and the Beaters; Chico DeBarge; Benjamin Orr (but his former band, The Cars, did have hits); Corey Hart; Eddie Money; and Jeff Lorber and Karyn White (although White did chart on her own – their duet was a one-off, and Lorber had a chart album).

Other US Top 40 hits that failed to chart in the UK:
Will You Still Love Me? by Chicago; We’re Ready by Boston; You Got It All by The Jets; Nobody’s Fool by Cinderella; This Is The Time by Billy Joel; and I’ll Be Alright Without You by Journey.

In addition, two singles in the US Top 40 were not issued as 45s at all in the UK: Huey Lewis and the News’s Jacob’s Ladder (it was released as the B-side to their single Doin’ It (All For My Baby) in the UK); and Without Your Love by Toto.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Feb. 7
No release scheduled for this date.