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| Probably what you remember. |
What was the most “’80s’ sound” of the 1980s? If it was new wave...
The Hit
David Fenton remembers the inspiration for his famous song – i.e., sitting in a flat in Guildford, UK, thinking about holding the photograph that’s all you have left in a relationship – and he recalled having the melody, but struggling with the lyrics. One night, he woke with the phrase “turning Japanese” in his head. He wrote down the words and, over the following days, pushed the song as close to final as he could before passing it off to his bandmates for polishing.
As it turns out, the phrase “turning Japanese” didn’t mean anything in particular. As Fenton put it in a recent interview with Songwriting, “It could have been anything! It could have ended up as Turning Portuguese.”
The Vapors’ famously frenetic 1980 hit, “Turning Japanese,” never meant anything, as it turns out. According to some annotated lyrics, the song kicks around themes of obsessive behavior and separation...which doesn't offer an obvious connectoin to becoming “Japanese” apparent, so I kept thinking. As I listened to the song several times over the past week, I thought the connection might follow from old ‘80s stereotypes about Japanese tourists – i.e., the joke went they took pictures of everything, a trope you can see in movies from the early to mid-1980s – but no one mentioned that, so I’m moving off that one, and with relief.
The other rumor swirled around the song’s lyrics, particularly here in the States, held that alluded to masturbation. From that same interview:
“It was weird when people started saying it was about masturbation. I can’t claim that one! That happened when we went to America – for some reason they thought it was an English phrase for masturbation. I thought that was quite interesting, and it made people talk about the song and created more interest, so it didn’t hurt I don’t think, but that wasn’t the intention.”
Reading that knocked loose some dim memories of that old rumor. And, hey-oh, the internet names the exact, cringe-inducing rumor and debunks it in a single post. Hallelujah. Turns out it’s about nothing more than things turning out in a way one didn’t expect.
The Rest of the Story
The original story of The Vapors doesn’t take long to tell. Fenton (leading vocals/rhythm guitar), along with some other lads from Guildford - Howard Smith (drums), Edward Bazalgette (lead guitar), Steve Smith (bass) – formed a band called The Vapours and started knocking around Surrey’s regional pub-rock scene. Fenton had recently qualified to work as a solicitor, but decided to give himself one year in the music business to see how it went. One night, The Jam’s Bruce Foxton spotted them playing at a venue called The Three Lions Pub in Farmcombe and asked if they’d like to open for his band a couple times. The audition (or whatever one calls that) took off, The Jam invited them to come along as openers for their 1979 Setting Sons tour and Foxton and John Weller (father to the Jam’s Paul Weller) offered to manage them.
The Vapours signed with United Artists, dropped the “u” to become The Vapors with an eye to the American market and started dropping singles. The first, “Prisoners,” came out in late 1979 and kind of petered out without anyone noticing. The second was “Turning Japanese." As Fenton recalled to the UK site pennyblackmusic, he’d already experienced a form of culture shock when The Vapors started playing with The Jam – i.e., “going overnight from playing pubs with twenty people in to 2,000 seaters” – but the shock of writing a UK No. 3 took the shock inside his home:
“When ‘Turning Japanese’ came out, I was woken up by my radio alarm playing my own song.”
Once the single made The Vapors famous, management and label called them in to record the album that became their debut, 1980’s New Clear Days. The album did reasonable traffic in the UK (No. 44), and most English-speaking markets (Australian listeners lifted it to No. 24, New Zealand’s to No. 25), and it gave the band its one and only U.S. hit at No. 36 (the album didn’t fare nearly as well). A couple modest UK hits followed – “News at Ten,” followed by “Jimmie Jones,” a song from 1981’s Magnets about the infamous Reverend Jim Jones – but The Vapors project had already started to unravel by then.
Two things caused the break. First, EMI bought United Artists and chucked all the things that made it a great label for the newer, odder bands – e.g., along with The Vapors, bands like The Buzzcocks, Gang of Four and even Dr. Feelgood. From pennyblackmusic:
“You could walk through the front door and talk to the Managing Director. There was an open door policy. It was really nice. EMI bought them out, and all the people that signed us up were made redundant, and there was nobody at EMI who liked us. They were much more interested in Duran Duran and Kate Bush and all the people they had signed.”
The Jam’s good fortune kicked out the other leg. From the same interview:
“Secondly John and Bruce said, 'Sorry, we can’t manage you anymore.' When we were at no. 3 with ‘Turning Japanese’ they were at no. 1 with ‘Going Underground’ and when they were touring Europe they were touring America. We hardly ever saw John or Bruce. So, they held their hands up and said, 'We have taken off more than we expected,' so we lost our record label, we lost our management company and then we went into EMI on the day that the follow-up to ‘Turning Japanese’ was due out, which was called ‘News at Ten’ and they had no idea when we talked to their chief A&R guy that it was out. They just weren’t interested.”
The Vapors disbanded and went their separate ways. Fenton started in the legal profession, eventually becoming the in-house solicitor for the UK’s Musicians’ Union. One of the Smith brothers (Steve) landed with a band called Shoot!Dispute and later collaborated with Foxton, one in the “rap/rock band 1ST,” while the other (Howard) opened a record shop in Guildford called People’s Records. Bazalgette, meanwhile, moved on to the movies and directing where he worked on projects like Dr. Who (a couple episodes) and documentary about Genghis Khan (he’s still going too, having recently worked on projects like Versailles, The Last Kingdom and The Witcher).
The Hit
David Fenton remembers the inspiration for his famous song – i.e., sitting in a flat in Guildford, UK, thinking about holding the photograph that’s all you have left in a relationship – and he recalled having the melody, but struggling with the lyrics. One night, he woke with the phrase “turning Japanese” in his head. He wrote down the words and, over the following days, pushed the song as close to final as he could before passing it off to his bandmates for polishing.
As it turns out, the phrase “turning Japanese” didn’t mean anything in particular. As Fenton put it in a recent interview with Songwriting, “It could have been anything! It could have ended up as Turning Portuguese.”
The Vapors’ famously frenetic 1980 hit, “Turning Japanese,” never meant anything, as it turns out. According to some annotated lyrics, the song kicks around themes of obsessive behavior and separation...which doesn't offer an obvious connectoin to becoming “Japanese” apparent, so I kept thinking. As I listened to the song several times over the past week, I thought the connection might follow from old ‘80s stereotypes about Japanese tourists – i.e., the joke went they took pictures of everything, a trope you can see in movies from the early to mid-1980s – but no one mentioned that, so I’m moving off that one, and with relief.
The other rumor swirled around the song’s lyrics, particularly here in the States, held that alluded to masturbation. From that same interview:
“It was weird when people started saying it was about masturbation. I can’t claim that one! That happened when we went to America – for some reason they thought it was an English phrase for masturbation. I thought that was quite interesting, and it made people talk about the song and created more interest, so it didn’t hurt I don’t think, but that wasn’t the intention.”
Reading that knocked loose some dim memories of that old rumor. And, hey-oh, the internet names the exact, cringe-inducing rumor and debunks it in a single post. Hallelujah. Turns out it’s about nothing more than things turning out in a way one didn’t expect.
The Rest of the Story
The original story of The Vapors doesn’t take long to tell. Fenton (leading vocals/rhythm guitar), along with some other lads from Guildford - Howard Smith (drums), Edward Bazalgette (lead guitar), Steve Smith (bass) – formed a band called The Vapours and started knocking around Surrey’s regional pub-rock scene. Fenton had recently qualified to work as a solicitor, but decided to give himself one year in the music business to see how it went. One night, The Jam’s Bruce Foxton spotted them playing at a venue called The Three Lions Pub in Farmcombe and asked if they’d like to open for his band a couple times. The audition (or whatever one calls that) took off, The Jam invited them to come along as openers for their 1979 Setting Sons tour and Foxton and John Weller (father to the Jam’s Paul Weller) offered to manage them.
The Vapours signed with United Artists, dropped the “u” to become The Vapors with an eye to the American market and started dropping singles. The first, “Prisoners,” came out in late 1979 and kind of petered out without anyone noticing. The second was “Turning Japanese." As Fenton recalled to the UK site pennyblackmusic, he’d already experienced a form of culture shock when The Vapors started playing with The Jam – i.e., “going overnight from playing pubs with twenty people in to 2,000 seaters” – but the shock of writing a UK No. 3 took the shock inside his home:
“When ‘Turning Japanese’ came out, I was woken up by my radio alarm playing my own song.”
Once the single made The Vapors famous, management and label called them in to record the album that became their debut, 1980’s New Clear Days. The album did reasonable traffic in the UK (No. 44), and most English-speaking markets (Australian listeners lifted it to No. 24, New Zealand’s to No. 25), and it gave the band its one and only U.S. hit at No. 36 (the album didn’t fare nearly as well). A couple modest UK hits followed – “News at Ten,” followed by “Jimmie Jones,” a song from 1981’s Magnets about the infamous Reverend Jim Jones – but The Vapors project had already started to unravel by then.
Two things caused the break. First, EMI bought United Artists and chucked all the things that made it a great label for the newer, odder bands – e.g., along with The Vapors, bands like The Buzzcocks, Gang of Four and even Dr. Feelgood. From pennyblackmusic:
“You could walk through the front door and talk to the Managing Director. There was an open door policy. It was really nice. EMI bought them out, and all the people that signed us up were made redundant, and there was nobody at EMI who liked us. They were much more interested in Duran Duran and Kate Bush and all the people they had signed.”
The Jam’s good fortune kicked out the other leg. From the same interview:
“Secondly John and Bruce said, 'Sorry, we can’t manage you anymore.' When we were at no. 3 with ‘Turning Japanese’ they were at no. 1 with ‘Going Underground’ and when they were touring Europe they were touring America. We hardly ever saw John or Bruce. So, they held their hands up and said, 'We have taken off more than we expected,' so we lost our record label, we lost our management company and then we went into EMI on the day that the follow-up to ‘Turning Japanese’ was due out, which was called ‘News at Ten’ and they had no idea when we talked to their chief A&R guy that it was out. They just weren’t interested.”
The Vapors disbanded and went their separate ways. Fenton started in the legal profession, eventually becoming the in-house solicitor for the UK’s Musicians’ Union. One of the Smith brothers (Steve) landed with a band called Shoot!Dispute and later collaborated with Foxton, one in the “rap/rock band 1ST,” while the other (Howard) opened a record shop in Guildford called People’s Records. Bazalgette, meanwhile, moved on to the movies and directing where he worked on projects like Dr. Who (a couple episodes) and documentary about Genghis Khan (he’s still going too, having recently worked on projects like Versailles, The Last Kingdom and The Witcher).
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| New look/line-up. |
The story of The Vapors has one more coda. When he retired from the law in 2016, Fenton reached out to his former bandmates and asked if they’d like to play again. He got Bazalgette and Steven Smith, had another drummer cover for Howard Smith, and they got on stage to perform a one-off of “Turning Japanese” in Polyfest, "an annual memorial gig for Poly Styrene," hosted by Putney’s Half Moon. After playing a couple shows annually – with Fenton’s son, Dan, coming along when Bazalgette’s directing day-job kept him from making it - and reconnecting with The Jam for a 40th-anniversary Setting Sons reunion tour, The Vapors released an album of entirely new material in 2020 titled Together. It’s an older, mellower sound, definitely more -world weary. It also came out 38 years and five months after Magnets, making for one of the biggest gaps between studio albums for any band (not even close to first, fwiw). For anyone wondering whether the new connected to the old in anyway, the answer comes in Together’s “Letter to Hiro [No. 11],” which responds to “Letter From Hiro” from New Clear Days...and I just now picked up on the pun. Slow AF MF...
About the Sampler
It’s a tidy 15-song sampler this time, including The Vapors’ big hit. Big picture, most of the songs on New Clear Days sound like variations on “Turning Japanese” (or Jam songs), while you get a lot more sound and tonal variety on Magnets. I’m not sure how many will hear what Wikipedia described as “a power pop sound and darker lyrics” (that was the flavor of my week, btw; yours?), but it’s definitely a different album.
I linked to several of the songs above already, but here’s an album-by-album breakdown of the rest:
New Clear Days: “Sixty Second Interval,” “Trains,” and “Spring Collection” (the Jam-iest of the bunch, no question)
Magnets: “Lenina,” “Civic Hall,” “Live at the Marquee” (also, Jam-y), “Can’t Talk Anymore,” and the moody title track, “Magnets.” Had I wrote the Wiki on The Vapors, I would have run with other adjectives for the shift in the sound – e.g., “more varied,” “less poppy” (by tone and structure) maybe even “better.”
Together: I might have over-represented this one, but screw it. There’s a fair amount of slower and older, fewer hard edges, and so on, but Fenton et. al. put out a batch of good, fitting material. I went with “Real Time,” an ode to the marbles falling out of your head called “I Don’t Remember,” and a super-melancholy number titled “Girl from the Factory.”
That’s it for this one, which was a solid mix of expected and unexpected – i.e., the reason I got into this project to start with. Till the next one...
About the Sampler
It’s a tidy 15-song sampler this time, including The Vapors’ big hit. Big picture, most of the songs on New Clear Days sound like variations on “Turning Japanese” (or Jam songs), while you get a lot more sound and tonal variety on Magnets. I’m not sure how many will hear what Wikipedia described as “a power pop sound and darker lyrics” (that was the flavor of my week, btw; yours?), but it’s definitely a different album.
I linked to several of the songs above already, but here’s an album-by-album breakdown of the rest:
New Clear Days: “Sixty Second Interval,” “Trains,” and “Spring Collection” (the Jam-iest of the bunch, no question)
Magnets: “Lenina,” “Civic Hall,” “Live at the Marquee” (also, Jam-y), “Can’t Talk Anymore,” and the moody title track, “Magnets.” Had I wrote the Wiki on The Vapors, I would have run with other adjectives for the shift in the sound – e.g., “more varied,” “less poppy” (by tone and structure) maybe even “better.”
Together: I might have over-represented this one, but screw it. There’s a fair amount of slower and older, fewer hard edges, and so on, but Fenton et. al. put out a batch of good, fitting material. I went with “Real Time,” an ode to the marbles falling out of your head called “I Don’t Remember,” and a super-melancholy number titled “Girl from the Factory.”
That’s it for this one, which was a solid mix of expected and unexpected – i.e., the reason I got into this project to start with. Till the next one...
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