Look At Me Now!

Not many artists can claim to have had a hit song quoted by Frasier Crane on the classic sitcom Cheers, scored Hollywood movies, made an album with Tony Banks, played jazz alongside Syd Arthur, and won a Prog Award (in the Outer Limits category). But Jack Hues – (real name Jeremy Ryder; his pseudonym puns on the French “J’accuse”) – has had an unorthodox, convention-defying career. Frasier beaming as he declared: “Everybody Wang Chung tonight!” was just one step on the journey towards what is, surprisingly, Hues’ first solo record. Primitif, a double album rich with genre ignoring twists and turns, is “as close as I’ve got to what I wanted a record to be”.

The thoughtful, soft-spoken Canterbury resident, who recently turned 65, muses, “I guess this makes me a late starter, in a sense. But I was 30 when Dance Hall Days was a hit and made Wang Chung visible on an international level. The band gave us a level of success that enabled me to carry on making music for many years to come.”

Some history, then, is necessary before on the radio, “I had a distinct sense of thinking: ‘Ah, this is music!’” He learned guitar, encouraged by his parents to study music “properly”, undergoing classical training at Goldsmiths.