John Hues

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Jack Hues has had a career that most musicians can only dream of. He studied at the Royal College of Music, he recorded sessions for John Peel, he topped the U.S. charts, scored major Hollywood motion pictures and is now, finally, releasing his first solo album, the double LP, PRIMITIF.

PRIMITIF will be released on March 20, 2020. PRIMITIF is the culmination of a career that has spanned 40 years and has seen Jack visit all four corners of the Earth, but we start our journey in Kent.

Jack grew up in Gillingham in the Medway Towns about 40 miles southeast of London.  He was interested in music from an early age.

“My dad was a saxophone player and my grandfather was a musician too, but it was hearing ‘Please Please Me’ by The Beatles on the radio when I was about 8 years old that made me wake up and think…ahhh, so this is MY music.”

Jack asked for a guitar that Christmas and while his parents agreed, they insisted he have proper lessons. Twice weekly Jack was taught classical and folk guitar and, unusually, how to read music, a skill that would serve him well many years later.

“By the time I was 18, I had passed Grade 8 guitar and got a place at Goldsmiths College, London to study for a music degree.  At this stage I knew very little about classical music. It was David Bowie and early ‘70s Prog that was my focus. The lines between genres were about as loose as they have ever been. Classical music didn’t seem remote, although I was turned down by 4 out of the 5 universities that I applied to, as Rock music was considered worthless by academics at that time.”

Jack got his degree and won a BBC Composers Competition which enabled him to take a year at the Royal College of Music studying composition and electronic music.

“Those four years immersed in classical music, particularly modern classical music, were very important and expanded my musical horizons immensely. However, when I came out of college the musical language I ‘spoke’ was rock music, albeit a highly seasoned vernacular.”

Jack played in a variety of bands until he met bassist Nick Feldman through a Musicians Wanted ad in the Melody Maker. They formed a couple of bands before finally distilling their talents into Huang Chung. The band later renamed themselves Wang Chung at the suggestion of the head of their record label, David Geffen.

“The name still comes up now. It was even on Saturday Night Live a couple weeks ago. I guess David was right.”

Jack wrote the future hit-to-be, “Dance Hall Days”, while still teaching guitar at various schools around London. The song proved pivotal in the band’s development and established Wang Chung as an international success. They were signed direct to Geffen Records in the U.S., so Jack’s career was based in LA throughout the ‘80s.

“I was fortunate to work on movie soundtracks during this time. William Friedkin (director of The French Connection and The Exorcist) commissioned us to score his movie, To Live and Die in LA, which was an incredible opportunity. We contributed songs to The Breakfast Club and Inner Space. In 1986 we had a Billboard #2 (Cashbox No. 1) hit in the U.S. with “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” whose chorus line ‘Everybody have fun tonight, Everybody Wang Chung tonight’ continues to capture the public imagination thirty years later.”

1987 saw Wang Chung on a coast to coast U.S. tour with Tina Turner and gigs all over the world, but by 1989, the times they were a’changing and the attention of the music business turned to grunge and hip hop. The band didn’t embrace either of those genres and eventually split in 1990.

"Through the ‘90s I did various projects. I scored The Guardian for Bill Friedkin. I was the only composer to ever work for him twice! I recorded a solo album for Columbia in the U.S., but for various reasons the project foundered. I produced an album for Arkana and an EP for Arturo, working with Mick Glossop. I co-produced a couple of albums with Chris Hughes for The Definition of Sound and Gene and I formed Strictly Inc. with Tony Banks (of Genesis) to record his eponymous solo album.”

For a change of scenery, Jack moved from London to Canterbury in 1998, only 25 miles away from where he was brought up, and with it came a new phase of his life which started to coalesce around Jazz. In the mid-nineties Jack met Sam Bailey and formed The Quartet, recording 2 albums Illuminated and Shattering with producer Chris Hughes on his Helium Label.

In 2012 Wang Chung reformed and released their first new album in twenty years called Tazer Up!.  Summer tours in the U.S. followed, but after a couple of years Jack stepped back from gigs to consider what he really wanted to do as he entered his seventh decade.

“I released a trilogy of collaborative albums between 2013-18. My ‘jazz’ work tended to be instrumental, focusing on my guitar playing, but meeting and working with poets revived my interest in words and music. “ROTE-thru” is probably the most extreme experiment consisting of a long semi-improvised poem spoken by David Herd and Simon Smith set to music which I composed as 12 separate sections to be played in any order. “A Thesis on the Ballad” to poems by Kelvin Corcoran is more conventional, setting his words to song-based structures, but including space for improvisation.”

Last, but not least, Jack recorded an arrangement of Beck’s “Nobody’s Fault But My Own” with his Quartet and members of Canterbury Prog band, Syd Arthur, plus Paul Booth on tenor sax. The recording was released in 2019 to critical acclaim. Also in 2019, in a parallel universe, Jack recorded and released an album of orchestral versions of Wang Chung songs entitled Orchesography to enthusiastic reviews.

Due to a series of personal losses, Jack found himself more concentrated on music than ever. In the first 3 months of 2018 he wrote and recorded most of PRIMITIF.  When asked to name the music that led him to the album, classical composers such as Schubert, Mahler and Debussy rub shoulders with Miles Davis, Robert Wyatt, Jon Hopkins, The Books and Lana Del Rey. He also wanted to design the album specifically as a 4-sided, double vinyl album, each side having a distinct character in the manner of The Beatles’ White Album or Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland.

“I worked on the album through 2018-19 with another intensive period of writing and recording at the beginning of 2019. The resulting double album is my first-ever solo release and is, for me, the culmination of nearly 60 years of fascination and ultimately, obsession with Music and Recordings.”

Music Videos:
"A Long Time" - Jack Hues
"Whitstable Beach" - Jack Hues