Fact #161795

THE STORY OF JOHNNNY HATES JAZZ

Interviews conducted by Johnny Black

Calvin Hayes (Johnny Hates Jazz) : Being on stage was never my motivation. I came from a background of production and writing and playing.

I had been in a band called Hot Club with Glen Matlock, one of the original Sex Pistols. When our first singer left, we put an ad in the Melody Maker and Clark was one who came along to audition. He’d been writing songs for years. He had a publishing deal with Atlantic when he was just fifteen. He also had a great voice.

Mike Nocito and I had been producing together so, when Hot Club split up, we started writing songs together. We were both very influenced by what was then deeply unfashionable West Coast rock, like Steely Dan, where there was a definite jazz feel to the playing. We had done a bunch of songs and we got Clark in to put his vocals onto them. That was how we did Me And My Foolish Heart (1986), our first single as Johnny Hates Jazz. It got good reviews and a lot of airplay, but it wasn’t a hit.

We got a deal at the end of 1986 by playing an acoustic showcase gig at Ronnie Scott’s Club one lunch-time. We could do a ‘real’ gig because we didn’t have a touring band. We had no following as such. Ronnie’s had the jazz connections, and it had a lovely grand piano, so we played our songs acoustically. Several record companies showed up, and we were offered deals by Chrysalis and Virgin.

The Chrysalis deal was a longer term thing, with more money, and better points and the chance to do an album but when we went to have a meeting with them, they guy said, “We really like that song but you’ll have to put some heavy guitars on it, and make it more rocky with a big snare drum sound.” Now that was exactly the opposite of what we were trying to achieve. We were going for a very light touch.

Virgin, on the other hand, were offering less money over a shorter period, but John Wooler, the AAndR guy who signed us, understood what we were trying to do. He trusted us to make the records the way we wanted. We would just go off, make the records, send them to Virgin and say, ‘”That’s the next single.”

Then Clark came in one day and said, “I’ve written a Johnny Hates Jazz song.” He played us Shattered Dreams and as soon as we heard it, we knew it was a hit. He’d already made records as a solo artist, but he lacked direction. I think Johnny Hates Jazz gave him a direction. We were a completely self-contained unit. We had the skills to write, play and produce our music from start to finish. It was one of those magic combinations where, if you take any one piece out, it just won’t work any more.

One of the great things about Clark was that he trusted us completely as producers. He would write the songs, and leave the production side up to us.

In 1988 when Clark left, all I could think was that he was sabotaging my career. We had become hugely successful and he was walking away from it all. I was very angry. Now, I look back and I can understand what he was going through. He loved making the music but he hated the travelling, doing the publicity, making the videos, doing the promotional trips. It wasn’t why he’d got into music. It wasn’t why I’d got into it either, but I could cope with it.

Very quickly after we became successful, Clark started to change from being an outgoing, witty guy, into being this introspective, withdrawn, very serious person. By the time of the third single, Turn Back The Clock, he was talking about leaving. We had to fight with him to get him to finish the track.

I could see all our success disintegrating because Clark wasn’t prepared to go for it. I thought he’d gone crazy.

The last thing we did together was the Montreux Jazz festival in 1988. We sat down by the lake and talked about our future, because it was becoming obvious that we couldn’t go on working together. It was Clark who suggested then that we should bring in Phil Thornalley as his replacement. Phil had written stuff for us before, and we’d done production work with him too, so we knew we got along well. He was the logical replacement. At the end, it was very symbolic because there were two paths leading up the hill away from the lake. Clark walked off up one to his limo, and we walked away up the other.

Phil Thornalley was enormously talented, but I think he felt he was just filling in someone else’s shoes. It was good, but it wasn’t they way it had been.

Anyway, there was a new MD at Virgin, John Webster, and he signed us to another deal, and we set to work making the second album. We got off to what we all thought was a good start but when we played him Turn The Tide, the track we thought was the next single, he said, ‘I’m very disappointed. It sounds very Johnny Hates Jazz.” My initial reaction was to laugh. After all we’d just had two American No1 singles and an album that sold over 3m copies by sounding like Johnny Hates Jazz. What had he expected?

But then, when we got back into the studio, I began to wonder if we had done the wrong thing. Maybe we shouldn’t sound so much like us. After that, we completely lost direction, and the sessions started to drag on. There’s an element of being in the studio that means you can’t fail. As long as we stayed in the studio, our last record was a huge hit.

As things turned out, we never had the opportunity to find out if we were doing the right thing or not. Just before the album, Tall Stories, was due to come out, on 17 June 1991, Phil and I went off to do a BBC local radio interview in Hull. A girl who worked for Virgin was driving, but she didn’t know how to get to the station. So she’s doing 100mph on the motorway, taking directions on her mobile phone. She dropped the phone, bent down to pick it up and the car went screaming across the lanes, and smashed into an articulated lorry. We flipped over and went careering down the tarmac upside down until we hit a road sign which stopped us.

My shoulder was totally smashed. The ball socket at the joint was crushed. When I got to the hospital they said they’d have to amputate it. I somehow had enough presence of mind not to let them do that.

Phil rang John Webster at Virgin and told him what had happened, and said we needed an ambulance right away to get me to a specialist in London. Webster said, “We’re a record company, not a hospital.” Pretty rich, considering it was a Virgin employee who’d been driving the car.

It took five hours to get an ambulance, and then it took a month to find a surgeon who was capable of rebuilding my shoulder. I remember lying in bed in hospital waiting for my operation to save my arm, and reading in a newspaper that I’d been in a car crash but I had now left the hospital, as if everything was fine. My x-rays are now quite famous in medical circles. Being in a state like that though really altered my perception of things. Mid-week sales figures and chart placing suddenly meant nothing. All that mattered was that I was alive.

The surgeon was wonderful, he performed near miracles, pinning me back together with metal pins. They call it shish-kebabbing.

Not long before this, I’d met the girl who later became my wife. She lived in Los Angeles but she flew over to be with me in the hospital. She said I should come out to recuperate in Los Angeles, and she would look after me, which is exactly what happened. I was in a body cast for a year, couldn’t even wash properly, and I’m a two showers a day man.

She already had two children from a previous marriage, so I landed up in a ready-made family. We also had a son of our own five years ago, Alex.

A week after I got out of the body cast, I broke the arm again swimming, so I was back in the cast again for six months more. Then I had months and months of intensive physio-therapy. It was 1995 before I was properly recovered. I can play piano again, and drums, and it hasn’t impaired my performing, although I do feel it painful sometimes, and I’ve been left with a huge scar.


In a way the worst thing was that I’d lost all my self-confidence. It was Paul Simon’s producer, Phil Ramone, who got me back into shape. He invited me to come and work with him at his studio in New York. I virtually lived and worked with him for two years, and gradually got back into production and writing.

I’ve been living in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles for almost ten years. I’m coming back to London to work with Phil Thornalley, writing and producing.


So in the last couple of years I’ve been doing some freelance production, and buying and selling properties. I’ve also been working with an English songwriter called Danny Saxon who Phil Ramone introduced me to. I feel ready to start working again and Phil Thornalley has invited me to come and work with him in London, so that’s my next project.

Clark Datchler : Johnny Hates Jazz was a marvellous experience but I found myself in a perpetual state of compromise. The three of us had very different opinions. I think I felt that, as the writer of the JHJ songs, I resented anyone else moulding the songs to their own interpretations. I viewed the whole progression going horribly wrong, and there was nothing I could do to put it right.

Calvin Hayes : About six months before the end of the band, we’d gone to Holland to do a tv show, and Clark fell for the presenter, a very hip Dutch girl called Simone. When he left the band, he moved to Holland to be with her, and they’ve had a couple of kids. He stayed in Holland a couple of years and made a solo album (Raindance, 1990) using lots of top session guys, but it didn’t sell.”

Then he had a band called Medicine Wheel (1992), and developed an interest in druidism and the ecology.

He then moved to Bath. He had become friendly with Peter Gabriel, this was about 1998, and he was working in the writing room at Real World studios. He has since moved to a place about 100 miles north of San Francisco and is still writing and recording but hasn’t released anything lately.

Mike Nocito has had a lot of success as a producer. He did the Katrina And The Waves song which was in Eurovision, and he did the Hepburn hit, I Quit, which was written by Phil Thornalley. I think he’s still based in the UK.