Latest news with #WangChung
Forbes
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Rick Springfield, Wang Chung, Excite As ‘I Want My 80s' Tour Continues
MURPHYS, CALIFORNIA - SEPTEMBER 16: Rick Springfield performs during the "I Want My 80's" tour at ... More Ironstone Amphitheatre on September 16, 2023 in Murphys, California. (Photo by) Over the course of more than five decades, rocker and actor Rick Springfield has sold more than five million albums, tallying record sales in excess of 25 million worldwide while charting a whopping 17 singles in America. They say everything is cyclical and the 2025 concert calendar reflects that, with 80s and 90s acts experiencing a renewed resurgence. Featuring Springfield alongside fellow 80s acts John Waite, Wang Chung and Paul Young, the 'I Want My 80s' tour stands as a perfect example, with the chart topping collective crisscrossing the country into early August, a run set to wrap up August 10, 2025 in Henderson, Nevada. 'We went out with Rick last night…' mused Waite midway through a Friday night performance in New Lenox, Illinois (about 45 miles southwest of Chicago), part of the village's annual summer concert summer series (one which has featured acts like Ringo Starr, Sheryl Crow and ZZ Top since its inception). 'He took us out to dinner, the whole crew - and it's a fabulous crew,' he explained. 'And we got wrecked. Just wrecked,' said Waite with a smile. NIAGARA FALLS, ONTARIO - AUGUST 09: Paul Young performs during the "I Want My 80s Tour" stop at OLG ... More Stage at Fallsview Casino Resort on August 09, 2023 in Niagara Falls, Ontario. (Photo) Following an appearance by country act Chris Young earlier this month, the New Lenox concert series wraps up in August following a performance by pop singer songwriter Andy Grammer on Saturday, August 16. 'Come on, stand up!' implored co-founding Wang Chung guitarist and vocalist Nick Feldman. 'Let's have a dance!' While temperatures soared toward 90 in the Chicago suburbs, Wang Chung offered up a rewarding set despite the heat, taking to the stage with virtually no break following a quick set from English hitmaker Paul Young, who finished up with his take on 'Every Time You Go Away.' While Hall & Oates failed to release the track, from their 1980 album Voices, as a single, Young took his cover to #1 in America five years later, an early highlight Friday outside the Windy City. Out of early cuts like 'Rent Free,' 'To Live and Die in L.A.' and 'Let's Go,' Wang Chung quickly hit their stride. CEDAR PARK, TX - AUGUST 23: Musicians Jack Hues (2L) and Nick Feldman of Wang Chung perform onstage ... More during 'Lost 80's Live'' at the HEB Center on August 23, 2018 in Cedar Park, Texas. (Photo by Rick Kern/WireImage) Lead vocalist and guitarist Jack Hues cupped his left ear with his left hand as Feldman leaned into him, with tracked sax ringing out during the group's performance of 'Dance Hall Days.' 'You gotta help us out with this next song!' said Hues excitedly. Putting their spin on 'Should I Stay or Should I Go,' a 1981 hit for U.K. punks The Clash, Wang Chung reworked the song's familiar chorus as the suburban faithful took over lead vocal. 'If we're gonna have some fun tonight, should we wang or should we chung now?' asked the singers rhetorically of the near capacity crowd. 'We drove a million miles - to get to New Lenox tonight,' joked the vocalists, continually reworking lyrics as they egged on the Chicagoland crowd, moving deftly into their biggest hit 'Everybody Have Fun Tonight' (a #2 hit in 1986 from the group's gold fourth album Mosaic). Over the course of about an hour, singer songwriter John Waite took a unique look back, touching upon everything from The Babys to Bad English throughout his set on stage in New Lenox. 'These guys have been my friends for decades!' said Waite, introducing his all-star band. INGLEWOOD, CALIFORNIA - AUGUST 30: Singer John Waite, former member of The Babys and Bad English, ... More performs onstage at YouTube Theater on August 30, 2022 in Inglewood, California. (Photo by) Out of a sparse intro, Waite's group, featuring longtime Matchbox 20 guitarist Kyle Cook and drummer Alan Childs (David Bowie), slowly built to an all hands jam during 'When I See You Smile,' a 1989 smash #1 for Bad English, which found Waite handling lead vocal on a Diane Warren-penned track featuring Journey members Neal Schon, Jonathan Cain and Deen Castronovo. Continuing the hit parade with his own 'Missing You' (a #1 from his sophomore studio effort No Brakes in 1984), Waite looked back upon The Babys, a British rock act which found Waite performing again with Cain as well as drummer Tony Brock (Close Enemies). 'Come on, stand the f–k up!' implored Waite, arms held triumphantly aloft as the group worked up 'Back on my Feet Again,' putting their spin upon Led Zeppelin's 'Whole Lotta Love' as Waite's set entered its final moments. 'Hello!' said Springfield to rapturous applause on stage in New Lenox. 'Good lord. We went out last night - all of the bands,' he explained, picking back up a story begun by Waite about a half hour earlier. 'Any time I get together with John Waite, I always drink too much,' continued Springfield, echoing Waite's sentiment. 'But we're very happy to be playing with these guys! We're big fans.' Springfield, 75, spun a whirling dervish during 'I'll Make You Happy,' shredding a bouquet of roses as he windmilled away ala Pete Townshend on the opening number. STERLING HEIGHTS, MICHIGAN - AUGUST 06: Rick Springfield performs at Michigan Lottery Amphitheatre ... More on August 06, 2023 in Sterling Heights, Michigan. (Photo by) 'Warning: Loud Noise' read the drumhead accurately as Springfield tore into 'Affair of the Heart' from his platinum 1983 album Living in Oz. Engaging in a choreographed sway with bassist Siggy Sjursen, Springfield spun his guitar over his left shoulder as the energetic cut drew to a close, following up with the Sammy Hagar-written 'I've Done Everything for You.' An early medley hit upon megahits like 'Jessie's Girl' and Eddie Money's 'Two Tickets to Paradise.' But Springfield was saving a poignant message. 'I figure our job is to give you a few hours of freedom from the monkeys in your heads that tell you bad things. It does the same for us,' he explained, striking a resonant chord for a moment on stage Friday outside Chicago. 'My little PSA every night is that I deal with depression,' Springfield continued candidly. 'I talk about it,' he said. 'Because you're not alone and you can't keep it inside - because that's when it does its damage,' said Springfield, shining a needed light on the importance of mental health in 2025. 'I try to turn it into a positive. I write. And this is the first song I wrote about that,' he said, introducing 'World Start Turning.' 'It's a lifelong thing - deal with it the way you want,' advised Rick Springfield midway through Friday night's 'I Want My 80s' tour stop in New Lenox, IL . 'But this is how I deal with it," said the rocker, returning to form.
Forbes
30-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Wang Chung On ‘Everybody Have Fun Tonight' Amid New Compilation Set
Wang Chung (L-R): Nick Feldman and Jack Hues. Nearly 40 years after it first peaked at number two on the Billboard chart in 1986, Wang Chung's celebratory hit 'Everybody Have Fun Tonight' continues to be a fixture of pop culture. In addition to being played on the radio and streaming services, the song has since made its way into television and movies, including That '70s Show, Sex and the City, Ghosts, The Goldbergs, Ricki and the Flash and This Is Us. Most recently, 'Everybody Have Fun Tonight' was featured in the trailer for next year's Grand Theft Auto VI. For Wang Chung — the British duo of Nick Feldman and Jack Hues — that track and their other big smash from the 1980s, 'Dance Hall Days,' are the gifts that keep on giving. 'It is shocking in a way,' Hues says. 'The durability of 'Dance Hall Days' and 'Everybody Have Fun Tonight' is pretty remarkable — and given that we didn't really do anything for about 20 years after we split in 1990. So the fact that various high-profile things adopted the songs during that time, it's quite interesting.' Meanwhile, a two-disc compilation, Clear Light/Dark Matter — which was recently released through the Seattle-based music technology company SING — seems poised to prompt further renewed interest in Wang Chung. Aside from 'Everybody Have Fun Tonight' and 'Dance Hall Days,' Clear Light/Dark Matter contains other popular favorites from the band's catalog, such as 'Wait,' 'Hypnotize Me,' 'Let's Go' and 'Praying to a New God.' 'It feels like it's about time in a way,' Feldman says. 'It seems like a really good time to make that kind of summary of where we've gotten so far. I think it covers a lot of ground in a good way that is very kind of digestible, obviously, to the hardcore Wang Chung fan, but also maybe people who are you know a little less familiar with all of our deeper work as well.' 'Wang Chang is 'Everybody Have Fun Tonight" and "Dance Hall Days,' both of which are essentially big commercial hits,' adds Hues. 'But Wang Chung is also 'To Live and Die in L.A.' And it's also the more ambitious songs on The Warmer Side of Cool and Tazer Up! So there's a lot there. I think Nick and I always were interested in the freedom that came with making so-called pop records that you could bring a lot of material to the table.' Also notable on the compilation are a recent remix of 'Everybody Have Fun Tonight' and a live performance of 'Fire in the Twilight" (which originally appeared on The Breakfast Club soundtrack from 1985) from Toronto's El Mocambo. And especially for die-hard fans, the compilation delves into several album tracks going back to their 1982 debut record as well as demos for such songs as 'Dance Hall Days' and 'To Live and Die in L.A.' 'To go back to [the demos], you hear how fairly accurate we were in our sort of realization of what the recordings would be, even though these demos were recorded literally on a little four-track recorder in Nick's flat in London,' says Hues. ''Dance All Days' has the low synths and the kind of drum rhythms that we wanted. But it's also interesting to hear how much more focused and slightly faster the tempo of the final version of the track became.' The new compilation is a sign that Wang Chung's previous studio albums could seeing a reissue at some point. 'We've been looking at re-releasing studio albums in deluxe editions with outtakes and demos,' Hues says. 'But finding a really good home for that project has been difficult. We finally found this company called SING, which was very enthusiastic. And we decided the best way to prelude a sort of sequential re-release of the albums would be by doing a career retrospective, which is what this is, essentially." The arrival of Clear Light/Dark Matter comes as the band is marking their 45th anniversary this year. Formed in London in 1980 under the moniker of Huang Chung, they released their self-titled debut album two years later. The group later moved on to a new label, Geffen Records, and changed their name to the slightly more pronouceable Wang Chung. Their 1983 album for the label, Points on the Curve, yielded the sublime hit 'Dance Hall Days,' which peaked at number 16 on the Billboard chart. 'I guess we reach this sort of crossroads point where it's a bit like the last chance saloon in a sense,' says Hues. 'You've got a bit of profile, but you haven't yet nailed it. There was this kind of pressure in a sense. But somehow I managed to squeeze out 'Dance Hall Days' in that situation. I remember I was teaching guitar in those days at various secondary schools. The ideas came from a session where a kid didn't show up for their lesson one time. I sort of remember sitting in that classroom amongst the desks strumming away—'Take your baby by the hand' and starting to hear the song in my head.' 'We did record 'Dance Hall Days' for Arista with the producer Tim Friese-Greene, who produced all the Talk Talk stuff,' adds Feldman. 'We loved Talk Talk, but it didn't quite capture the song well enough.' Portrait of members of the British Pop group Wang Chung as they pose backstage at the Park West, ... More Chicago, Illinois, May 2, 1984. Pictured are, from left, Nick Feldman, Jack Hues, and Darren Costin. (Photo by Paul Natkin/WireImage) 'Around that time, we met a manager, David Massey,' Hues says, 'who saw the potential for the band in America. He saw this slightly cinematic quality that the music's got would not be appreciated or particularly well served in the U.K. at that time. So he took 'Dance Hall Days' to the States. We got a couple of offers, and eventually it got us signed to Geffen. Very fortunately, Arista allowed us to take the song with us and re-record it.' One famous fan of the Points on the Curve album was American director William Friedkin, best known for his hit movies The French Connection and The Exorcist. He who enlisted Wang Chung to do the soundtrack for his 1985 crime thriller To Live and Die in L.A. The music for the movie was a stylistic departure from the band's commercial/pop music side. 'We actually embarked on a follow-up album to [Points on the Curve], but it wasn't going particularly well,' Hues says. 'I remember being with a friend of mine in central London at his apartment. His phone rang and this American lady said, 'I want to speak to Jack Hues.' So he gave me the phone. And she said, 'Will you be at this number in half an hour? Mr. William Friedkin would like a conversation with you.' 'Then Billy, as I came to know him, was on the phone," Hues continues. "We had this sort of hour-long conversation where he just talked about the fact that he loved 'Wait' in particular, off of Points on the Curve, and that he was using that as a temp track. So when they had finished the day's shooting, he would watch the rushes back and have that music playing in the background. He said, 'That's the atmosphere that I want.'' 'We were so excited to work with a legend like him,' Feldman remembers. 'The record company was going, 'Where's our three-minute single?' And [Friedkin] was saying, "I don't want a song. I want long-form, gritty, dark, intense music with no vocals.' It was so thrilling for us. The whole experience was amazing. But it also really helped to cleanse palette, I think, to move on to the next more commercial record.' That commercial record became 1986's Mosaic, co-produced by the band and Peter Wolf. It yielded the hits 'Hypnotize Me,' 'Let's Go' and the now-iconic 'Everybody Have Fun Tonight.' As Feldman recalls, the latter track went through various iterations. 'So the very first stage was that I had this sort of chorus idea,' he says. 'It was quite slow, and it was 'Everybody have fun tonight.' I played it to Jack. I thought he'd go, 'Well, you can't have a song called 'Everybody. Have Fun Tonight.' That's just terrible.' But he was like, 'I like that.' I thought, 'Really? Well, you're not going to ask to change the lyrics?' 'So we recorded it,' Feldman continues. 'It was like a 'Hey Jude' tempo,' quite slow. And at the end of it, Jack just threw in this ad lib of 'Everybody Wang Chung tonight.' It was just a throwaway thing. When we played the demo to Peter Wolf, he was like, 'I love that. That's got to be in every chorus. And you've got to speed the track up and restructure it.' So we did that in the studio. I wasn't sure it was a hit. I thought it was either the worst thing we'd ever done or brilliant.' 'I remember [David Massey] coming into the studio,' adds Hues, 'and tears came to his eyes with the sense of, 'This is it. This is brilliant!' So that's always a good sign.' Following the success of 'Everybody Have Fun Tonight,' Wang Chung's next The Warmer Side of Cool (1989), marked a change in approach. Featuring 'Praying to a New God,' the album incorporated more guitar-oriented rock—an indication of the end of the synth-dominated New Wave '80s. 'It's great to have that sort of success and the hits that we had on Mosaic,' Feldman says.' But I think it left people with the impression that we were now a sort of pop band, which I think were always a bit more than that. So I suppose [Warmer] was a slightly conscious way to try and reorientate the perception of Wang Chung.' 'This was at a time when really everything was changing and Guns N' Roses and Nirvana were the new bands at Geffen,' says Hues. 'I think the decision to call it a day was probably the right one.' During Wang Chung's hiatus in the 1990s, Feldman and Hues worked on their individual projects before regrouping by the 2000s. Since then, Wang Chung has recorded two records (2012's Tazer Up! and 2019's Orchesography) and consistently toured on their own and as part of '80s package bills. This summer, they will be on the road for a bill featuring Rick Springfield, John Waite and Paul Young. Wang Chung today 'I suppose we're like a couple of veterans coming back from the war,' Feldman explains about his and Hues' partnership now going nearly 50 years. 'You've been through so much together. There's such a strong bond. And we respect each other.' 'It is a long marriage,' adds Hues. 'It's had its ups and downs for sure. But we get on well as people. Nick is a great guy. We give each other a bit of freedom to do things we want to do. We've had some really pretty sound success as Wang Chung, but it's not been so heavy that it's swept us off our feet. Just listening to each other, I think, that's essentially what's kept us together.'
CNN
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
Hollywood Minute: Brian Wilson and Roger Daltrey duet
The legendary singers perform with The Miraculous Love Kids for new single, Wang Chung gets remixed, and a new solo album from Don Felder. Rick Damigella reports.
CNN
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
Hollywood Minute: Brian Wilson and Roger Daltrey duet
The legendary singers perform with The Miraculous Love Kids for new single, Wang Chung gets remixed, and a new solo album from Don Felder. Rick Damigella reports.
