by Ron evans
This Monday night (June 6) new wave/post-punk pioneers Modern English will kick off their American Pacific Northwest tour right here in Wenatchee with a show at Numerica Performing Arts Center.
Musical categories are always a bit scattershot if not outright arbitrary, but Modern English has found devotees in the post-punk world as well as goth, dance and pop. One word we can likely all agree on - influential. Pulling from a career spanning over four decades, this tour will be offering everything die hard and casual Modern English fans alike could hope for. The show will feature a complete performance of their second album After The Snow (1982). The album featured their seemingly immortal mega-hit “I Melt With You” which you’d have to make your life’s quest to not hear being played somewhere at least once a week. Fans can also expect a string of other favorites as well and a slim (but visible) chance of something brand new. More on that in a bit. I spoke with bassist/songwriter Mick Conroy (who wrote “I Melt With You” when he was 18!) to learn more about this long-running band, weathering the changes in the music industry and what it’s like to see a hit song take on a life of its own.
Is the band all currently together?
We are all making our way - we are sorta scattered all over at the moment. But we will begin rehearsing and going over things this week.
This is the second leg of your American tour - is this tour picking up where the band left off pre-covid?
Well we hadn’t quite started touring yet but we were just about to when we saw the way things were going. And of course, everything stopped. We had no idea it would be three years before getting back. I mean, it was just so surreal. Robbie (lead vocalist) lives about 18 miles away from me - I live in Suffolk in England with my partner who is also our tour manager. We’d been living on a little houseboat preparing for the tour and we ended up being isolated there for ten months. That’s when we decided to do the new recording of “I Melt With You.”
Yeah, you did a Zoom version of it. It’s great, and it seems to have been popular (over 1,000,000 views so far), were there any new works or performances during the lockdown?
Well, we had this idea (of touring) for the 40th anniversary of After The Snow and so we did a live recording of it at the O2 in London and we released that as a live album which was great. We also did a great bit of writing for a new LP that we will be working on soon. Apart from being locked up we all stayed pretty busy. And of course you know… all of those books that you promised yourself you were going to read if you ever got the chance and then you just end up watching The Crown or Breaking Bad.
So there is a new LP in the works - can we expect any music from those writing sessions at Wenatchee’s show on Monday?
I’ll say probably not, but you never know. For this tour we really wanted to focus on After The Snow mostly. But we’re also doing a couple of songs from our first LP (Mesh & Lace), a couple from the third (Ricochet Days) and about two songs from the last album (Take Me to the Trees).
This tour features the original lineup of Modern English. Talk about the history of the band a bit - was there always a group trucking along or were there any breaks along the way?
We’ve had a couple of extended breaks over the 40 odd years. Yeah. You know, we still love playing music and there’s nothing else that we really enjoy doing so much together - we’ve known each other for so long.
We kind of started off as this punk rock band who couldn’t really play our instruments, but the thing that kind of got us going and has kept us going is the energy that you put into trying to make music. With this new album, what we’ve got so far is quite noisy, quite energetic. And it’s really just all of us trying to have a good time at the same time - like we always had and that’s what we liked about all these other bands around in those early days. We didn’t know at the time but I guess it was called post-punk.
There’s been a huge resurgence of interest in post-punk in recent years. Both from the perspective of falling in love with these early bands that were pioneering it but also new bands following closely in the footsteps of that sound. Are you able to hear that in some of the newer bands?
Oh yeah, and I’m so old I swear I can even guess which albums they’ve got in their record collection. There’s a band called Actors from Vancouver who I really like. And a Portland band called Soft Kill who I would bet grew up listening to the Chameleons. They are great and becoming more popular. They’re currently on tour in England actually.
As a band that has endured this long, you have seen many changes in the landscape of the music industry. Talk a little about your experiences in navigating those murky waters.
Well, when we started it was a tiny bit like how it is now for a lot of bands - completely DIY, you do it yourself. In 1980 we made our first singles on our own label. And then we signed to this brand new label called 4AD who went on to become kind of like, an epic company with the Pixies, the Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance and now it’s almost a major label in itself. But at the beginning of 1980, the only person that would play you on the radio was John Peel on the BBC Radio late night show in England and that got you coverage in Melody Maker and various other music papers. No money, so we just had to go out and tour and hope people came to see. Or hope they saw your record in a record shop, and they liked the cover and if it was in the right section in the 45 or the album section, people would buy it. But when we were licensed to Warner Brothers in America, with “I Melt With You” after our second album came out, suddenly it was a completely different world. And there were press people you know - every town that we went to do a concert, there was a local Warner Brothers rep who was driving us around to radio stations and that sort of thing. And there were some stations that played top 40 and other stations that played you know, college radio, in places like Boston and all that was really helpful for us, right? Whereas now since Napster came along, and you know…Spotify and all of that - it’s back to DIY. I’m originally the bass player in Modern English, but I’m also The Chief Executive Officer of Social Media for Modern English. I’m also the studio engineer for Modern English, and Robbie’s the singer and the rehearsal coordinator.
I bet Jimmy Page would suck at being Chief Executive Officer of Social Media.
Right! But you have to know these things now. You have to do it all again just like the very early days. When we tour we have this lovely lady, Ramona, who does our social media. And we have a manager, the long-suffering Josh, who we’ve worked with for over 40 odd years. But, you know, we’ve finally got our publishing rights back, and we have our own physical masters back as well. So we now own everything.
That’s incredibly rare for a band of that era.
Yes. It took us a while and we had to do a lot of ‘ducking and diving’ as we say in England.
I’m friends with Danbert Nobacon from Chumbawamba who actually lives fairly close to Wenatchee.
Really? That’s fantastic!
He (and the rest of the band) refers to their massive hit “Tubthumping” as The Big One and I always love talking to him about the strangeness of having such an anthemic hit song under your belt. Forever. “I Melt With You” is one such mega-hit and I’m curious how you all feel about that. Is it a two edged sword? Or do you just enjoy the success of it and ride it out?
Wow. Well…first I can tell you that I had no idea, I mean of course I wouldn’t have any idea - I was 18 years old when I wrote “I Melt With You.” It was one song and there were loads of others. But to this day people will know the words to “I Melt With You” more than they know of Modern English. And it’s like…well we do have other songs, but at the same time I’m truly happy that people really like the song.
It’s funny, we recorded that in Wales and I took a cassette of it to Ivo (Watts-Russell), our guy over at 4AD. I played it for him and he said “You guys turned into The Byrds.” Our LP before After The Snow was kind of dark and gloomy and he was kind of confused by this new one. But the brilliant thing about 4AD was they let us put out what we wanted, we had creative freedom. So that’s what we came up with.
Movies, TV, radio, viral videos. I even heard it in a Burger King commercial years back. What are some of the strangest places you have seen it pop up?
About 20 odd years ago a really old friend of mine rang me up and played this piece of music that was quite mellow, but in a kind of bossa nova thing and said, “Do you recognize this?” And I said, no, who is it? And he said, “it’s you. Someone’s covered your song in a bossa nova. Nouvelle Vague is the name of the band. It was really funny to hear it like that. They also did “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division, again in bossa nova.
One day the TV was on and we were watching The Simpsons, and when it went to the commercial break I went out to go and make a cup of tea. And as I was walking out of the room, I heard the beginning notes from Melt and I thought, what is going on? And I turned around and it was a T-Mobile advert. I thought, “Oh great. Now we’re selling T-Mobile phones.” But from time to time I get people ringing me up to tell me they heard it somewhere. I guess it’s in “The Lincoln Lawyer” on Netflix which I haven’t seen.
But you know, we just never realized that in the future, you’ll be playing this song on something called a mobile telephone. My friend Jesse (Quinn - bassist for Keane) said they were on tour in South America recently and they looked up the downloads to their own music on Spotify to see what songs were most popular in that part of the world and that’s what they used to create their setlist for the show which is fantastic.
But yeah, the success of that song is just…one of those things that just kind of happened you know?
I’m sure Wenatchee will be on their feet this Monday and singing along at the PAC, and I’ll be one of them.
Great! We are really looking forward to playing Wenatchee. I hear you guys are known as the Apple Capital of The World.
We were at one point, the influx of apartments and condos where some of the orchards once were may have changed that, I’m not too sure - but I will say we certainly have the best apples you can get.
Oh good, I’m gonna have to get me some apple pie when I’m there. I love pie.
Don’t miss your chance to see this iconic band on the local stage. Seattle’s Julian Blair will be opening the show, so get there early and grab a drink or three.
Monday, June 6, 2022 | 7:30pm | $29-$59
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