A blog of recent clips, reporting and notions on what's happening in pop culture of interest to me. Written by Cynthia Wang.
My page for current articles and reporting, random thoughts on TV, music, movies, etc.
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In the middle of a milestone tour, the singer returns to the screen
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A heady whiff of nostalgia seems to follow actor Ione Skye and her husband, Australian musician Ben Lee, wherever they go, given the legacy of her 1989 teen classic Say Anything… and the smile-inducing joy to be had any time his rousing 2005 hit “Catch My Disease” comes on the radio. In a rare joint interview and photo shoot from their part-time home in Los Angeles, they banter about the highs and lows of their 13-year marriage, talk about their latest projects and reveal what they’re reading in their loved-up book club of two
Nine years after releasing “Riptide,” the Melbourne singer-songwriter puts out his most personal album yet.
After winning The Voice Australia in 2016, Alfie Arcuri has toured the world with his personal brand of pop. But speaking to the LGBTQI+ community through his music has been his biggest reward. Arcuri talks to me about his latest track, “Handsome Man,” in WHO’s March 21, 2021 issue.
Nick Van Eede of Cutting Crew. Photo courtesy of August Day Recordings.
Isolating cozily in his old farm house near Hastings, England, Nick Van Eede watches the news, pours a fine spirit (or two) and has a good chuckle about idiosyncratic behavior in a pandemic age. An elderly neighbor has just returned home from the hospital, recovering from the coronavirus. Yet coming up the driveway they share, “His social distancing disciplines were a little bit tricky,” Van Eede concedes. “He walks up and goes, ‘Here I am! Give me a hug!’
“And you’re like, ‘OK, but not OK!’” he adds with a laugh. “We love you, but just back, back away!”
Not six months ago, the Cutting Crew lead vocalist and songwriter basked in the embrace of enthusiatic audiences on the ‘80s Mania tour with Go West, Wang Chung, A Flock of Seagulls and Pseudo Echo. He had completed a successful sweep through Australia performing hits such as “One For the Mockingbird” and “(I Just) Died In Your Arms” to packed venues.
“The tours are fantastic,” says Van Eede, 61. “I mean, who would have thought all these years later, a bunch of old guys would still be out there in front of a sold-out audience in Sydney, or in New York, or in London? And the songs survive. So I know that’s something that blows me away every day, that 33 years later, I can still do this.”
Not only can Van Eede still rock out live, he’s found a new appreciation for his songs by re-recording them. The result is Ransomed Healed Restored Forgiven, a compilation album released by August Day, a label specializing in collaborations between orchestras and pop acts.
Ever since the English musician formed Cutting Crew with Canadian guitarist Kevin MacMichael in 1985, Van Eede insists that family, friends and fans have told him that their band’s rousing rock anthems and lush ballads would work well with an orchestra. So when he got the opportunity to bring fresh interpretations to their classics and deep cuts alike, he jumped at the chance.
“We're not better than Human League, you know, we're not better than Rick Astley. We’re different from them,” Van Eede offers with candor. “But I think our songs and our arrangements are very open to the orchestral treatment. And boy, oh boy, we got it.”
First, Van Eede had to consider what made albums like their 1986 debut Broadcast special (“funny bits and cross-fades, a little headphone candy, as we called it”) and what made Cutting Crew’s concerts stand out (“arrangements to make things work better live”). Then, he had to fuse those parts while he stayed in Hastings, the mixing engineer was in Slovenia, the orchestra was in Prague, and guitarist Gareth Moulton was in Manchester.
Partnering with him was strings arranger Pete Whitfield. They came up with a process by which they would reference composers to arrive at the right moods and soundscapes. For “Berlin in Winter,” a song Van Eede wrote about Cutting Crew being able to perform in Berlin two days after the Berlin Wall fell, Van Eede said simply, “Russian.” Whitfield replied, “Shostakovich.” On the 2006 track “No Problem Child,” which Van Eede had written about his daughter Lauren growing up in rural England, he told Whitfield, “Vaughan Williams,” and all was again understood. “I had input, but I won't claim to know any of the notes that were changed,” he says. “We just kind of went with it.”
Although ballads such as “I’ve Been In Love Before” and rockers like “One For the Mockingbird” retained key quaities of their forebears, tracks such as “Broadcast” brought out surprising vocal performances from Van Eede.
“When you're 15 years old, you want to be in a pop group, and then the next dream is that one day you might get a record deal,” Van Eede says. “And then you dream that one day you might get a hit record, and we sure did. But it's 33 years later, and to sing with just an orchestra on a song like “Broadcast,” just me and the orchestra with headphones on? I was crying. I have pictures of tissues at my feet.”
His next revelation involved Jackie Rawe, the artist Cutting Crew bassist Colin Farley had recruited to sing backup on 1989’s “Everything But My Pride.” After reconnecting at a mutual friend’s birthday party, he learned she now resided in the town five miles away from his home, making it easy to have her reprise her vocals on the new album. But rediscoveries weren’t just in store for Van Eede. Moulton found he could honor Kevin MacMichael’s original riffs on “I’ve Been In Love Before” by bringing out more flamenco flavor in the nylon-stringed guitar parts. Of the band’s co-founder, who died in 2002, Van Eede says, “I'm sure that Kevin up there will be looking down and going, ‘Well done, boy.’”
Van Eede then recalls when MacMichael introduced classical guitar to the ballad in 1986. “We were living in a loft apartment down in SoHo in the middle of Manhattan and we found an acoustic guitar on the top of the wardrobe in the place we were playing,” Van Eede says. “And he didn't bring an acoustic guitar over for the sessions, Kevin. So he found this old acoustic guitar and he played it, and it was out of tune, and it was weird.” Nonetheless, the band loved it, even when others didn’t. “I mean, the British press hate us,” Van Eede says, “and I remember somebody writing something like, ‘Yeah, it's a good song. It's number 10 in the charts, but the guitar is out of tune,’ and I wanted to write to him and say, ‘Yeah, because we found it on a fucking wardrobe!’”
Kevin MacMichael (left) and Nick Van Eede. Photo courtesy of Nick Van Eede.
After a good laugh, Van Eede pauses. He transitions to the time he had stepped away from the music he and MacMichael created just after the release of third album Compus Mentus in late 1992. “We're in the '90s now and Soul II Soul and Neneh Cherry and all these beautiful new sounding urban dance acts were coming through,” he explains. “Our time was done.” Yet a TV producer in Hamburg wanted Cutting Crew for big show and booked them for the gig. The fact that they weren’t top billing didn’t bother them, but performing after three women with pink-dyed hair and matching pink poodles did.
“We just finished playing a song and I looked over to Kevin, and he looked at me, and that was the moment we knew,” Van Eede says. “We just gave each other a hug, and it was like, ‘OK, things have moved on now.’ It's the moment where you realize it doesn't mean that things in the future will not get better. It just means that at that moment, you are supporting pink poodles!” Although Van Eede misses the late MacMichael profoundly, he has come to enjoy seeing how others have enjoyed the music they’ve made together, including their biggest hit, “(I Just) Died In Your Arms,” which continues to get radio play along with featured moments in Super Bowl ads and films like The Lego Batman Movie.
“This song defines me,” Van Eede says. “I mean, there are many bands that have had 10 hits, so many bands that have had 20 hits. We've had two, three, four hits. But this song is so big that it eclipses everything that I have ever done. And so it's become my lover, my — and I don't mean this inappropriately —my bank manager. But it’s my passport to many more things.
Like tapping into pop culture and crossing generational lines. “It doesn’t surprise me because a good song is a good song and a great song is a great song,” he says, “and apparently this is a great song.” As for his favorite use of “(I Just) Died In Your Arms”, the premiere of season three of Netflix series Stranger Things takes it. “That,” he says with glee, “was the coolest!”
Now he’s hoping that, when he and Cutting Crew are able to hit the road once more, they can fill concert halls with fans of both their original and orchestral compositions. “I know what we’re doing is not new,” Van Eede says. “I am absolutely aware that when I was a little boy, I watched The Moody Blues and Deep Purple playing with orchestras. Hundreds of bands have done it before. But if you can do it well, and if you have great strings, and if you can still sing, and if you still got a great guitarist, and you still got people that care, this really can happen.”
Cutting Crew’s latest album is out now.
Cutting Crew in 1989 with the release of second album The Scattering. From left: guitarist Kevin MacMichael, bassist Colin Farley, vocalist Nick Van Eede, and drummer Martin “Frosty” Beedle. Photo courtesy of XO Kaytea.
a-ha. From left: Paul Waaktaar-Savoy, Morten Harket, and Magne Furuholmen. Photo supplied by Frontier Touring.
The song comes on and you picture the story immediately, a hand reaching out of a comic book to a lonely girl in a diner, beckoning her to join him in an animated fantasy land complete with a real-world mirror.
Or, the video comes on and you nod in time with the beat, getting ready to play air keyboards and, when the chorus reaches its crescendo, belt out the highest note, whatever your actual vocal range.
Either way, you smile.
Such has been the legacy of a-ha's 1985 global hit "Take On Me" and the iconic film clip created for it, directed by Steve Barron and animated by Candace Reckinger and Mike Patterson.
"Steve was the man during that early period of music videos," a-ha keyboardist Magne Furuholmen, 57, says. "We were lucky to meet him at the peak of his powers, and I think he enjoyed working with the band as we were new, excited, and perhaps gave him a lot more creative freedom than established artists who were already concerned with their image."
On the eve of their first Australian tour since 1986, the Norwegian synth-pop trio are nearing 1 billion YouTube views for their now 4K-restored "Take On Me" video, currently sitting on more than 985,645,000 views as of Jan. 20. Once they reach that mark, they will be in the same territory as classics such as Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody".
"We knew the hand-drawn rotoscope technique in the video would make it look completely unique," Furuholmen says, "but no one is prepared for something to have such an impact."
Reflecting further, he adds, "We were never ones to sit back and watch our videos, or indeed listen back to our own music, but whenever it comes on randomly, it feels good to see that it still feels really unique and special even 35 years after it was made."
In November, the band released a three-part documentary on their YouTube channel about the making of "Take On Me" and how the song and video have endured in pop culture. Vocalist Morten Harket, 60, who reunites with actress Bunty Bailey, 55, in the second episode, says that "the spirit of the song was also there in that video. That's the key element, really."
The video, which accompanied a revised version of "Take On Me" by producer Alan Tarney, set the stage for the clips that followed it from their debut album Hunting High and Low.
Using the same characters in "Take On Me" for "The Sun Always Shines On T.V." video "was Steve's idea, and we liked it," Furuholmen says.
However, although the filming techniques in "Hunting High and Low" differed from "Take On Me", Furuholmen admits, "We did, at this point, start to worry a little whether the whole animation thing would possibly affect the songs and pigeonhole the band as something 'made' or 'fake.'"
That's why he, Harket and guitarist Pål Waaktaar-Savoy, 58, relish the opportunity to perform Hunting High and Low in its entirety on their 2020 tour, and especially in the Southern Hemisphere. "Coming back to Australia has been a recurring dream within the band for years and years," Furuholmen says.
In regard to modifying or restructuring any of their album tracks for the show, Furuholmen explains, "There is a balance to be struck. Within the band, we might think some of the early demos for the album contain motifs, rhythms or arrangements that were changed or a little lost during recording and have a wish to champion these, whereas for people who bought and loved the album, [they] are, of course, excited to hear the particular album versions live."
Rick Astley. Photo by ShootTheSound for 5050 Media House
a-ha will share the bill with English crooner Rick Astley. "We may have met randomly once or twice years ago," Furuholmen says, "but no, we have never been within each others’ orbit before.
As I understand it, Mr. Astley is a much loved artist in Australia, and with the 80’s as the common denominator, I would expect many fans to be able to relate to both our musical oeuvres for a wider concert experience."
Thinking back on Hunting High and Low, Furuholmen says, "Each song carries a set of memories and circumstances. For us, they are markers of the time and our shared experiences on this crazy ride of 35 years we have had together."
a-ha with special guest Rick Astley will tour Australia and New Zealand starting February 19.
This week, we look at Rian Johnson’s whodunnit Knives Out and other faves of the genre (who doesn’t love Murder By Death?), and offer a preview of the ARIA Awards.
While Tamara speaks to Joel Creasey about the first time Australia will pick its entrant for Eurovision, I got the scoop from Sheppard and Alfie Arcuri on their approaches to song-writing for the annual song contest.
The last time I spoke with Ryan Eggold, he was still playing Tom Keen on The Blacklist. Now he’s a doc in New Amsterdam, a show that has been a hit in the US and has come to Australia. I also preview the Grammys, which is strange because I’m used to writing about it after the fact!
Adam Hills shares memories from the original run of Spicks and Specks on the eve of a reunion special.
My last sets of Back Chats! Check out my interviews with Rachael Blake, Todd McKenney, Steve Kilbey and Craig Reucassel, not to mention a shout-out to Vaaaanjie.
Anytime I can champion more diversity in the magazine is a good thing, and this week, it's a chat with Michael Hing, whose documentary series Where Are You Really From? tackles head on the "double from" question many Asian Americans and Asian Australians have encountered. From there, I talked to MKR judge Manu Feildel about his menu for the Hoyts Lux movie experience. In the issue on stands with the June 25 cover date, I spoke to John Cameron Mitchell, the pioneer behind Hedwig and the Angry Inch, for the Soundtrack of My Life feature, and took a look at the final four on The Voice.
I have interviewed Delta Goodrem often during my time (so far) in Australia but never for a cover. This May, Delta had a miniseries, Seven's biopic Olivia: Hopelessly Devoted to You, and a regular gig, Nine's The Voice, along with an album of Olivia covers, all hitting the same time. She spoke with ease and candor. Although the cover line may have emphasised newsy beats of the moment, Delta was nonetheless complimentary in a reply to my tweet thanking her for her time. Her response was unexpected but really sweet and generous. In addition to the online story, you can read the print interview in the WHO tab of the Telling Stories section on the site. Following the Delta cover is my short take on fave show Aggretsuko, which you can also find under my Shameless Plus tab, and interviews with Marcia Hines and Myf Warhurst.
I got to do a quick review of Avengers: Infinity War this week, which came before editing WHO's pick-up of EW's amazing Marvel Cinematic Universe package for next week's issue. Also, spoke to blues legend Robert Cray and got to set up the upcoming fourth season of The Bachelorette and tease the next episode of MKR. Rarely do I get a chance to do a pop-culture list, but when asked to do an Avengers-themed post, I enjoyed writing about The 10 Most Badass Women of the MCU.
I had no idea how fun it would be to talk to Men at Work's Colin Hay. He has had a long residency at LA's Largo (old and new locations) and is such an insightful, witty guy. He indulges me in a Soundtrack of My Life interview. I also have I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here's host Julia Morris for a Last Word.
Anyone who knows me knows I adore Ben Folds, so it was great to talk to him on the eve of his Paper Aeroplane Tour and then actually see him at the Sydney Opera House, complete with surprise guest Tim Minchin. Here is the chat, followed by some pics from the night we caught his show, and if I can work it properly, a video, too.
The fun part about a Year-End issue is getting a chance to follow up with stars you met/spoke to earlier and ones you wanted to speak to. Included here are my items on Sophie Monk, Jimmy Barnes, Lisa Wilkinson, Casey Donovan and Rob Collins. I also spoke to the incredible Bria Vinaite of The Florida Project and offered my review of Twin Peaks: The Return.
