 |
| Ah, the glory days... |
You remember this one because you have never been allowed to forget it.
The Hit
“The lyrics, I sat down on the floor in London in my house and I wrote those lyrics in 20 minutes. I was stoned, I had a joint, sat down on the carpet, and I just wrote them all out in about 10 to 20 minutes.”
- Robbie Grey, to The Big Takeover, 2020
That’s probably the best story about Modern English’s “I Melt With You,” a single that achieved a level of pop culture ubiquity rare for a one-hit wonder. Wikipedia tells me it never climbed higher than No. 76 in the States – something I find completely unbelievable, if only because I still remember every edit in that original video.
The song appeared on their second album, which meant it came out of nowhere in more ways than one. After self-producing a very different debut album, the band called in a professional producer named Hugh Jones, who Grey (the only guy you really hear from) credits for teaching them the songwriting craft. It paid off gloriously, both at the time – the driving rhythm at the open with an frantic acoustic rhythm over, how that gives way to that clean plucked melody and those memorable double thwaps on the drum – and for the rest of the band’s long, (once) ongoing career.
People of a certain age will recall them re-releasing the “I Melt With You” in 1990, with very different look and sound, but they released it again in 2020 to give people a happy breathe of nostalgia during the pandemic.
At any rate, they released the song on the 4AD label in the UK on 1982’s After the Snow. Sire Records carried it States-side and it just got picked up one radio station at a time until it smothered the airwaves and then slipped into the Valley Girl soundtrack (which featured a couple by Sparks too; and had The Plimsouls as a house band at the wimpiest punk bar in Los Angeles). It was big. And it changed their world over night...
The Hit
“The lyrics, I sat down on the floor in London in my house and I wrote those lyrics in 20 minutes. I was stoned, I had a joint, sat down on the carpet, and I just wrote them all out in about 10 to 20 minutes.”
- Robbie Grey, to The Big Takeover, 2020
That’s probably the best story about Modern English’s “I Melt With You,” a single that achieved a level of pop culture ubiquity rare for a one-hit wonder. Wikipedia tells me it never climbed higher than No. 76 in the States – something I find completely unbelievable, if only because I still remember every edit in that original video.
The song appeared on their second album, which meant it came out of nowhere in more ways than one. After self-producing a very different debut album, the band called in a professional producer named Hugh Jones, who Grey (the only guy you really hear from) credits for teaching them the songwriting craft. It paid off gloriously, both at the time – the driving rhythm at the open with an frantic acoustic rhythm over, how that gives way to that clean plucked melody and those memorable double thwaps on the drum – and for the rest of the band’s long, (once) ongoing career.
People of a certain age will recall them re-releasing the “I Melt With You” in 1990, with very different look and sound, but they released it again in 2020 to give people a happy breathe of nostalgia during the pandemic.
At any rate, they released the song on the 4AD label in the UK on 1982’s After the Snow. Sire Records carried it States-side and it just got picked up one radio station at a time until it smothered the airwaves and then slipped into the Valley Girl soundtrack (which featured a couple by Sparks too; and had The Plimsouls as a house band at the wimpiest punk bar in Los Angeles). It was big. And it changed their world over night...
The Rest of the Story
“We didn’t know what to expect, when we arrived at spring break one year in the early ’80s in Daytona Beach, Fl, we were wearing long coats when we got off the plane, that’s how little we knew about America. It was bloody warm and we were wearing coats! When we got to the venue, the guy said, ‘Look, there’s a chance there could be 10,000 people there tonight’ and we were like, ‘What are you talking about?’ We were used to playing to 200 people in England. He said, ‘If you play outside tonight there will be more than 5,000 people, if you play inside we can cram 5,000 people in.’ We had never played outdoors before. Being scared of that, we said, ‘Let’s play indoors.’ That night, when we played ‘I Melt with You,’ everybody knew all the words. They were singing the words, we had never had anything like that before.”
- Robbie Grey, to Cryptic Rock, 2017
Modern English didn’t quite form on accident, but the choice to form a band wasn’t more complicated than a bunch of friends who knew each other from the pubs of Colchester, Essex, England deciding they wanted to make music. None of them really knew how to play – a brief description of how they decided who did what; “Nobody could play. We just picked up instruments: ‘You’re the guitarist, you’re the singer, you’re the drummer!’” – but they figured if the punk bands they all loved could do it, why couldn’t they? And so they stole some equipment and got to it.
The original core of the band started as an outfit called The Lepers, which included Grey on vocals, Gary McDowell on guitar, and Michael Conroy on bass; they became Modern English with the arrival of drummer Richard Brown and keyboardist Stephen Walker. The music scene had shifted to post-punk by then and, not being well-schooled musicians, they leaned heavily into sound, taking advantage of effects pedals for the guitars and the unconventional synth sounds that floated around at the time. They took those sounds and literally pieced them together using glue – they even called them “song pieces” – and threw them onto their 1981 debut album, Mesh & Lace. They took their lead from Joy Division then...but they changed with the times. And Hugh Jones.
A couple sources noted that After the Snow sounded more like Simple Minds and Duran Duran – a sound one source (can’t remember which) dubbed New Romanticism (which also featured Visage and Spandau Ballet) – but, after a little resistance (“God, we’ll never make a pop record. We’re artists!”), they went all-in and things took off from there. Wikipedia found two delightfully different reviews that are too good not to share:
“A dreamy, creamy celebration of love and lust, which deserves to be showcased on as 12" single all by itself, with no B-side.”
- John Waller, Sounds
“suburban amateurism at its most unrewarding”
Tony Mitchell, also Sounds
I’m sure that, at some point early the project, someone said something along the lines of, “fuck it, it worked.” And so they kept going.
The rest is about a band putting out records and touring – and quite a bit – from there, if with a couple line-up changes that would only interest the die-hards; moreover, after a couple years of Grey carrying the band, the entire original line-up but the drummer started playing as Modern English again. As for albums, they released a couple more on Sire – Ricochet Days (1984) and Stop Start (1986) – before breaking up for the first time. Grey, McDowell and Conroy spent some time in a project called This Mortal Coil (didn’t listen to them), but Grey pulled together a new Modern English to get out the album that backed the re-release of “I Melt With You,” 1990’s Pillow Lips (which sounded different from video release). Even that didn’t last long, due to issues with their label (TVT). Grey started a band called Engine, which morphed into the version of Modern English that toured on either side of 2000. And material from that eventually made it into a 2010 album titled Soundtrack. The one defining thing that carried them through it all:
“...we’ve been lucky because ‘Melt with You’ pays all the bills so we don’t have to formulate our music in anyway.”
They’d been touring regularly, if off-and-on, all the way up the to pandemic. I’d be surprised if they didn’t pick up again afterwards. And when they do play, Modern English still likes to mix it up, playing some of their “edgier stuff,” and from both their earliest days (Grey made a point of singling out “Swans on Glass,” because it was one of their first singles) and their later ones – not a nostalgia tour, in other words. In every interview I read, Grey makes the whole thing sound like a lot of fun. No hurt feelings, no financial squabbles, no wounded ex-bandmate aching to tell the true story, at least not one that I found. The guys who decided to form a band for no better reason than they thought they could wound up making a career out of it.
Sources
Wikipedia – Modern English
Big Takeover interview with Robbie Grey (2020)
The Know Magazine interview with Robbie Grey (2017)
RAD Cyberzine interview with Robbie Grey (1996?)
Cryptic Rock interview with, again, Robbie Grey (2017)
About the Sampler
“We were always going to write original material, it was just the style we were going to write in- Gary has such a distinctive guitar sounds and Steve’s keyboards are really noisy and interesting.”
Whether by a good, grounded sensibility or their limits as musicians (Grey kept bringing it up), Modern English has that knack of putting out music that, regardless of tone, sounds like them. The idiom is strong with these guys...
I’ve already linked to three versions of the hit above, plus...at least one more, but the rest of the sampler comes from all over their catalog – even if the additions from Take Me to the Trees (2016, aka, the album I forgot to mention; the songs, “You’re Corrupt” and “Sweet Revenge”) got tacked on at the very end. There’s no question the songs from their middle period – e.g., “Dawn Chorus,” “Carry Me Down,” and “Face of Wood” (After the Snow); “Ricochet Days,” “Hands Across the Sea” and, a song that sounds a bit too much like “I Melt With You” (wait for the chorus), “Blue Waves” (Ricochet Days); and “Ink and Paper” (another minor hit) and “Love Breaks Down” (Stop Start) – have a poppier sound than the rest, but I chose the songs I did from all of those to support the argument for continuity. Except the Start Stop tracks, which I included as examples of the embrace.
Their earliest stuff, along with their latest, has the harder edges. I chose the songs I did from Mesh & Lace – the title track, “Gathering Dust” and “Black Houses” – and from Soundtrack – “Bomb” and “The Lowdown” – with an eye to having those represent that from both eras.
I plan on giving the sampler one more spin to see if anything sticks, but they’re the kind of band you can take, or leave, by phase. And these are the kinds of one-hit wonders I most respect – or at least the ones with better odds for happy surprises. It wasn’t all one gimmick they dry-humped (or dry-hump, present tense) for all its worth, basically. Even if “I Melt With You” still pays the bills.
“We didn’t know what to expect, when we arrived at spring break one year in the early ’80s in Daytona Beach, Fl, we were wearing long coats when we got off the plane, that’s how little we knew about America. It was bloody warm and we were wearing coats! When we got to the venue, the guy said, ‘Look, there’s a chance there could be 10,000 people there tonight’ and we were like, ‘What are you talking about?’ We were used to playing to 200 people in England. He said, ‘If you play outside tonight there will be more than 5,000 people, if you play inside we can cram 5,000 people in.’ We had never played outdoors before. Being scared of that, we said, ‘Let’s play indoors.’ That night, when we played ‘I Melt with You,’ everybody knew all the words. They were singing the words, we had never had anything like that before.”
- Robbie Grey, to Cryptic Rock, 2017
 |
| And yet not so far removed. |
The original core of the band started as an outfit called The Lepers, which included Grey on vocals, Gary McDowell on guitar, and Michael Conroy on bass; they became Modern English with the arrival of drummer Richard Brown and keyboardist Stephen Walker. The music scene had shifted to post-punk by then and, not being well-schooled musicians, they leaned heavily into sound, taking advantage of effects pedals for the guitars and the unconventional synth sounds that floated around at the time. They took those sounds and literally pieced them together using glue – they even called them “song pieces” – and threw them onto their 1981 debut album, Mesh & Lace. They took their lead from Joy Division then...but they changed with the times. And Hugh Jones.
A couple sources noted that After the Snow sounded more like Simple Minds and Duran Duran – a sound one source (can’t remember which) dubbed New Romanticism (which also featured Visage and Spandau Ballet) – but, after a little resistance (“God, we’ll never make a pop record. We’re artists!”), they went all-in and things took off from there. Wikipedia found two delightfully different reviews that are too good not to share:
“A dreamy, creamy celebration of love and lust, which deserves to be showcased on as 12" single all by itself, with no B-side.”
- John Waller, Sounds
“suburban amateurism at its most unrewarding”
Tony Mitchell, also Sounds
I’m sure that, at some point early the project, someone said something along the lines of, “fuck it, it worked.” And so they kept going.
The rest is about a band putting out records and touring – and quite a bit – from there, if with a couple line-up changes that would only interest the die-hards; moreover, after a couple years of Grey carrying the band, the entire original line-up but the drummer started playing as Modern English again. As for albums, they released a couple more on Sire – Ricochet Days (1984) and Stop Start (1986) – before breaking up for the first time. Grey, McDowell and Conroy spent some time in a project called This Mortal Coil (didn’t listen to them), but Grey pulled together a new Modern English to get out the album that backed the re-release of “I Melt With You,” 1990’s Pillow Lips (which sounded different from video release). Even that didn’t last long, due to issues with their label (TVT). Grey started a band called Engine, which morphed into the version of Modern English that toured on either side of 2000. And material from that eventually made it into a 2010 album titled Soundtrack. The one defining thing that carried them through it all:
“...we’ve been lucky because ‘Melt with You’ pays all the bills so we don’t have to formulate our music in anyway.”
They’d been touring regularly, if off-and-on, all the way up the to pandemic. I’d be surprised if they didn’t pick up again afterwards. And when they do play, Modern English still likes to mix it up, playing some of their “edgier stuff,” and from both their earliest days (Grey made a point of singling out “Swans on Glass,” because it was one of their first singles) and their later ones – not a nostalgia tour, in other words. In every interview I read, Grey makes the whole thing sound like a lot of fun. No hurt feelings, no financial squabbles, no wounded ex-bandmate aching to tell the true story, at least not one that I found. The guys who decided to form a band for no better reason than they thought they could wound up making a career out of it.
Sources
Wikipedia – Modern English
Big Takeover interview with Robbie Grey (2020)
The Know Magazine interview with Robbie Grey (2017)
RAD Cyberzine interview with Robbie Grey (1996?)
Cryptic Rock interview with, again, Robbie Grey (2017)
About the Sampler
“We were always going to write original material, it was just the style we were going to write in- Gary has such a distinctive guitar sounds and Steve’s keyboards are really noisy and interesting.”
Whether by a good, grounded sensibility or their limits as musicians (Grey kept bringing it up), Modern English has that knack of putting out music that, regardless of tone, sounds like them. The idiom is strong with these guys...
I’ve already linked to three versions of the hit above, plus...at least one more, but the rest of the sampler comes from all over their catalog – even if the additions from Take Me to the Trees (2016, aka, the album I forgot to mention; the songs, “You’re Corrupt” and “Sweet Revenge”) got tacked on at the very end. There’s no question the songs from their middle period – e.g., “Dawn Chorus,” “Carry Me Down,” and “Face of Wood” (After the Snow); “Ricochet Days,” “Hands Across the Sea” and, a song that sounds a bit too much like “I Melt With You” (wait for the chorus), “Blue Waves” (Ricochet Days); and “Ink and Paper” (another minor hit) and “Love Breaks Down” (Stop Start) – have a poppier sound than the rest, but I chose the songs I did from all of those to support the argument for continuity. Except the Start Stop tracks, which I included as examples of the embrace.
Their earliest stuff, along with their latest, has the harder edges. I chose the songs I did from Mesh & Lace – the title track, “Gathering Dust” and “Black Houses” – and from Soundtrack – “Bomb” and “The Lowdown” – with an eye to having those represent that from both eras.
I plan on giving the sampler one more spin to see if anything sticks, but they’re the kind of band you can take, or leave, by phase. And these are the kinds of one-hit wonders I most respect – or at least the ones with better odds for happy surprises. It wasn’t all one gimmick they dry-humped (or dry-hump, present tense) for all its worth, basically. Even if “I Melt With You” still pays the bills.
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