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Nick Feldman is best known as the other half of the 80s pop group Wang Chung.  But he is a lot more than that.  Before forming Wang Chung with Jack Hues in 1977, he signed Adam and the Ants to DJM Live Music Agency.  After Wang Chung had their success in the 80s, the band broke up and Feldman formed another band with Jon Moss from Culture Club.  In the 2000s Feldman worked as an A and R man for Warner Brother and then later Sony Music.

 

Today, Wang Chung is back to touring and they are a part of the I Want My 80s Tour along with Rick Springfield, John Waite and Paul Young.  The tour will be making a stop at the Youngstown Foundation Amphitheatre on June 28.

 

We had the chance to speak with Nick to discuss the tour and his career and his future plans.

 

Greg Drugan:  Hey Nick!  Thanks for taking some time with me today.  How has the I Want My 80s Tour been going so far?

 

Nick Feldman:  It’s been going really, really good.  We’ve never worked or played with John Waite or Rick Springfield.  It’s been really nice meeting those guys and watching them.  They are both really good live. There’s a mutual appreciation going on between us. The audience has been very responsive so it’s great.  We are playing to an audience which some of them may not have seen us before and we’ve been getting a good reaction from the audiences. I think it’s a good blend of bands. 

 

GD: I saw that John Cafferty is on the bill sometimes too.  Is he and Paul Young switching on and off?

 

NF:  John Cafferty has been on all the shows so far, but the next show he’s not on and Paul Young takes over. John Cafferty is a really good guy and it’s been fun hanging with him. Paul Young we’ve known for many, many years.  We’re both from the U.K. and we’ve worked with him before. It will be nice to see him again and will be a good addition to the tour. 

 

GD:  I saw you guys on last years Totally Tubular Festival and thought you stole the show!  You were the most fun and had the best set.  How was that tour for you?

 

NF:  Well, thank you! Actually that was very good.  We know Tom Bailey and of course Thomas Dolby.  It was good. We didn’t do the whole tour, we did about a month. It was great.  The guy that put it all together seemed to like what we were doing and we may work with him again next year. It was a good experience for us. 

 

GD:  Very good.  When you played “Fire In the Twilight" from The Breakfast Club the crowd went nuts.  I don’t think they realized that Wang Chung sang that song.  Is it in the setlist this year?

 

NF:  Yes, we’ve been doing that.  We have quite a few songs in the rotation.  We’ve been playing that quite a lot and it gets a good response. On this tour we’ve got back shot videos that go along with each song and that’s one of them.  That kinda adds another dimension to what we are doing, a visual one as well as a musical one.  We enjoy playing that.  Some people don’t quite realize that it was us, as you’ve said. (laughs) It’s become, over the years a very important song and we were very lucky to get involved with that film.

 

GD:  For sure, it’s such an iconic movie.  Now that tour ended in Cleveland and everyone came out at the end of Thomas Dolby’s set to sing “Hot Sauce.”  That seemed like a lot of fun.  Do you guys normally do that at the end of a festival tour like that?

 

NF: That sometimes happens.  I think we did that a couple of times on that tour. You get a nice feeling amongst everybody.  Through the passage of time, I think those feelings of competitiveness have disappeared and you have a feeling of community instead.  So it’s a nice thing to do, yeah. 

 

GD:  Looking back on your career, when did you know you wanted to get into music?  You have been on both sides of it, as a musician and as an executive. When did you realize that music was something that you really wanted to do?

 

NF:  When I was a kid, ten or eleven years old, I saw an electric guitar in the window of a shop.  It was red, and I don’t know what model it was. I thought, “wow, this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”  Then I had a general kind of obsession with The Beatles at that time. I think those two things really sowed the seed of music for me.  I then went to University and had some sense that I wanted to go into psychology but I quickly realized that my heart was being a musician. Life doesn’t exactly turn out the way you planned it. Like John Lennon said, “life is what happens when you're busy making other plans.” 

 

When I found Jack (Hues), through an audition when I put an advert in Melody Maker, I think that’s when things started to really ramp up. We wrote really well together and I think I was pretty clear with what I wanted to do. I got thrown out of University, I spent two years there but my heart wasn’t in it. I got a job as a kind of booking agent with a small agency called Dick James Music. I discovered Adam and the Ants and I used to get The Clash gigs.  Being in London at that time was, musically, kind of inspired me to do it myself and get a band together and to perform.  That’s what I really wanted to do. 

 

GD:  After going through a couple of lineup changes, you finally found success with “Dance Hall Days” which was a staple on MTV.  What was it like to be a part of the MTV era.

 

NF:  I think we were lucky in a sense. We were working for a few years playing gigs around the UK. We had a small following and were getting some good reviews.  We were considered quite cool initially.  With “Dance Hall Days” we were quite lucky MTV was exploding itself.  MTV was playing a lot of UK bands because they had a more visual approach to videos in general. For us, it was amazing! To be on this nation-wide or world-wide thing called MTV, we’d be traveling around the country and people would recognize us in the most obscure places.  How do people know who we are?  MTV wasn’t quite a thing in the UK at the time, so for us it was kind of mind blowing. It opened up everything for us.

 

GD:  Right after that you had success with two soundtracks with To Live and Die in LA and The Breakfast Club soundtracks.  How did you get involved with those movies?

 

NF:  The Breakfast Club came about because John Hughes, the director, liked Wang Chung. The producer of Billy Idol was pushing the whole soundtrack of the Breakfast Club and he liked what we were doing as well. He had a half started song with us in mind for it.  So we got involved with that and collaborated and finished the song which was to become “Fire In The Twilight.”  It was a new experience for us, it was interesting to collaborate.  

 

Then with To Live and Die In LA it was just incredible luck.  William Friedkin, the director who was one of the Hollywood bigs.  He directed The Exorcist, The French Connection, he was amazing. He was using a song track from the Points On A Curve album called “Wait.”  It has a quite intense rhythm to it and he wanted that feeling in the movie for the soundtrack.  It’s amazing, so he thought “why not ask the guys in Wang Chung to do it?”  So he contacted us.  He spoke to Jack and said what he wanted and suggested we go into the studio.  He wanted forty-five minutes of instrumental music, so we did that.  He didn’t want songs.  But Jack woke up one day and wrote “To Live and Die In LA” even though that’s not what he wanted.  We sent it off to him and he absolutely loved it. He actually filmed a whole sequence in the movie for that song. That gave us the idea to make some more songs and make that into our next Wang Chung album. 

 

GD: Believe it or not but It’s the 40th Anniversary of To Live and Die in LA, do you have anything planned to celebrate?

 

NF:  We do, very much so.  We want to re-release the soundtrack with additional songs.  About eight years ago, we had a deal to do a spin-off TV show of To Live and Die in LA so they asked us to do some music for that.  It never happened in the end, but we wrote a bunch of music that we still feel good about.  We want to release some of that music plus some unreleased stuff and some collectable stuff, plus we want to do a special show where we can do the whole soundtrack.  That’s the plan!  If we can’t put it together this year, we will do it next year.  It’s something we are very motivated to do. 

 

GD:  For the next album you had “Everybody Have Fun Tonight.” What was it like working with Godly and Cream on that video?  It was fantastic and nobody had ever seen anything like that with all the quick edits. 

 

NF:  It was great working with them.  Of course they were both in the band 10cc, which was a band I was a fan of and I admired their work.  They had made some interesting videos at the time, they were at the top of the profession.  When they heard “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” they were very keen to do it.  They came at it with a different angle.  Their instruction to us was “don’t look happy when you are performing.  Look miserable.” That’s why we look slightly miserable singing a song called “Everybody Have Fun Tonight.” The editing gave it a neurotic feel to it.  The setting of the song is juxtaposed with what you are seeing and I think it works really well.  It’s one of our favorite videos. 

 

GD:  For sure! You also had the opportunity to open up for Tina Turner.  What was that experience like?

 

NF:  Fantastic!  We were big admirers of Tina Turner.  She put on an amazing show.  We had very big admiration for her.  She was very nice to us, she loved our song called “Hypnotize Me.”  It was wonderful, we got to play Madison Square Garden and that’s a pretty cool thing to do. She was very receptive and it was a great experience. 

 

GD:  Wang Chung took part in this year's Record Store Day, putting out a three song EP.  What made you decide to participate this year?  I bought it by the way!

 

NF:  Thank you!  We were putting out a greatest hits and we were looking back on our career and we wanted to put a capsule together for our fans. The thing with Record Store Day came about from someone from our record company. It appealed to us and it went very well.  It seemed very appropriate to do something like that. 

 

GD:  Like you said, you did release a new greatest hits album last month.  It’s available on both CD and vinyl, why do you think vinyl has made such a comeback?

 

NF:  Good question.  I think it’s something that you can hold in your had.  You have a physical artifact to collect and look at and hold. I think the sound you get off vinyl, the quality and warmth maybe hard to find digitally.  I think a lot of people like to collect as much stuff as they can so that appeals to them as well.  It’s just different, there’s a physicality to it.

 

GD:  I totally agree.  When we were kids you would buy the album and read the linernotes and get all the information you could and you can’t get that with streaming and downloading.   Do you have plans to release any new music?

 

NF:  Both Jack and I have been writing our asses off! I’ve got a lot of songs that I’m excited about.  Jack has been releasing solo albums for a few years now as well. There’s more stuff than we have time to record. There’s some of it I would like to record with him as Wang Chung, I think that would be appropriate.  We’ve got a live album coming out later this year that we recorded last year in Toronto. We’re real excited about that album.  One of the tracks on that album is a new song that we’ve never done before called “I Love You, You Idiot.” It went really well.  I’d love to record that. 

 

GD:  You will be playing at the Youngstown Foundation Amphitheatre at the end of the month, what can fans expect from the show?

 

NF:  I think they will enjoy the mix of acts, I think it works really well.  It will be a lot of fun for the audience.  You will hear a lot of hits from all the acts and a few deeper cuts as well.  You will see some good live, entertaining shows. We’re in the process of making America Wang Chung Again! 

 

GD: (laughs)  We love Wang Chung and we need to Wang Chung again!  Thanks for taking some time with me today,  I wish you the best of luck, safe travels and I will see you at the end of the month!

 

NF: Good to talk to you.  Lovely, thanks Greg! 

 

Be sure to catch the I Want My 80s Tour with Wang Chung, Rick Springfield, John Waite and Paul Young on June 28 at the Youngstown Foundation Amphitheatre.

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Tickets start at $30 and can be purchased here.