Michael Hogan
I “discovered” Howard Jones on Top Of The Pops, miming along to his debut hit, ‘New Song’. He had spiky two-tone hair, a Roland keyboard and a Marcel Marceau-meets-Bez dancer named Jed, who mimed the lyrics by literally “throwing off his mental chains”. Naturally, I was smitten.
Come Saturday, I took my paper-round wages into town and bought the 7-inch from this hip little record shop I knew called Woolworths. As I played it on loop, I read in Smash Hits that “HoJo” was from High Wycombe, a bit of a hippy and a “committed vegetarian”. Even his poor dog was veggie. Somehow, these facts didn’t put me off.
In those days, record sleeves often included a PO Box number for the fan club. I sent off a £2 postal order, which bought a membership card (I was number 39 – such an early adopter), badge and biannual fanzine. The latter featured a competition to guess how many miles he’d travelled on his last tour. I put way more effort into working out my answer than I did into boring old schoolwork, hunched over an atlas with my Casio calculator. (SHELL OIL! BOOBLESS! Halcyon days.)
I only went and won, presumably because no-one else was tragic enough to enter. The prize? Two tickets to see my hero in concert (scream!) at London’s Royal Albert Hall (fancy!) including a chance to meet Howard after the show (scary!).
It wasn’t achingly cool, attending gigs accompanied by your mum, but that was the only way I was allowed to go. The pair of us boarded the Inter-City from Ipswich, then rode the Circle Line round to High Street Kensington, which seemed impossibly exotic. I spent the gig too nervous to truly enjoy it, thoughts occupied by our impending rendezvous and inevitable lifelong friendship.
Disappointingly, this didn’t involve hanging out with Howard on Soho’s late-night vegetarian scene. Instead he “worked the room” full of competition winners, shook my trembly hand and was as charming as a 30-year-old muso could be to a tongue-tied teen trying to pretend he did this all the time and that woman next to him wasn’t his mother. If only, like Jed, I’d thrown off my mental chains.
Jones played Live Aid the following summer but gradually the hits dried up. He even replaced Jed with a proper live band. Meanwhile, I moved onto the more sophisticated synth-pop of Erasure and the Pet Shop Boys. I never did go vegetarian. Neither did my dog.
Come Saturday, I took my paper-round wages into town and bought the 7-inch from this hip little record shop I knew called Woolworths. As I played it on loop, I read in Smash Hits that “HoJo” was from High Wycombe, a bit of a hippy and a “committed vegetarian”. Even his poor dog was veggie. Somehow, these facts didn’t put me off.
In those days, record sleeves often included a PO Box number for the fan club. I sent off a £2 postal order, which bought a membership card (I was number 39 – such an early adopter), badge and biannual fanzine. The latter featured a competition to guess how many miles he’d travelled on his last tour. I put way more effort into working out my answer than I did into boring old schoolwork, hunched over an atlas with my Casio calculator. (SHELL OIL! BOOBLESS! Halcyon days.)
I only went and won, presumably because no-one else was tragic enough to enter. The prize? Two tickets to see my hero in concert (scream!) at London’s Royal Albert Hall (fancy!) including a chance to meet Howard after the show (scary!).
It wasn’t achingly cool, attending gigs accompanied by your mum, but that was the only way I was allowed to go. The pair of us boarded the Inter-City from Ipswich, then rode the Circle Line round to High Street Kensington, which seemed impossibly exotic. I spent the gig too nervous to truly enjoy it, thoughts occupied by our impending rendezvous and inevitable lifelong friendship.
Disappointingly, this didn’t involve hanging out with Howard on Soho’s late-night vegetarian scene. Instead he “worked the room” full of competition winners, shook my trembly hand and was as charming as a 30-year-old muso could be to a tongue-tied teen trying to pretend he did this all the time and that woman next to him wasn’t his mother. If only, like Jed, I’d thrown off my mental chains.
Jones played Live Aid the following summer but gradually the hits dried up. He even replaced Jed with a proper live band. Meanwhile, I moved onto the more sophisticated synth-pop of Erasure and the Pet Shop Boys. I never did go vegetarian. Neither did my dog.
