TOTALLY TUBULAR
There are nights when the universe finally settles the tab on every teenage fantasy you ever scribbled in the margins of a spiral notebook during fifth-period study hall. The bands that never came through your dusty mountain town. The ones that split up two years before you got a driver’s license. The ones pure dumb luck and geography kept just out of reach while you were stuck listening to scratched cassettes in a beat-up Civic with no air conditioning. Then one day a festival called Totally Tubular gets announced, and suddenly the bill looks like it was stolen straight out of your high-school daydreams. You are making up for lost time. You are finally standing in the same air as the songs that raised you.
Totally Tubular is that bill. The night I caught it at Red Butte Gardens the lineup ran Tommy Tutone, Escape Club, Animotion, The Producers, Bow Wow Wow, A Flock of Seagulls, and Thomas Dolby. Enough pure 80s voltage to fill an evening with the kind of nostalgia that refuses to die quietly. Men Without Hats rotated onto some of the later dates. The Motels had been on the early posters until Martha Davis hit medical issues and had to sit this one out. But what we got was still a dream made flesh under a Utah sky that wanted us dead.
The heat was a living, breathing bastard. Unbearable. The kind of dry, high-altitude furnace that turns the back of your neck into a science experiment. A couple of cold beers were a polite fiction. Gatorade became sacrament. Water was the only real religion left. You drank and prayed and tried not to melt into the amphitheater seats while the sun hammered down like it had a personal score to settle with New Wave. By the time the gates opened the air already felt thick enough to chew.
Tommy Tutone walked out first and immediately reminded everyone why rock & roll used to feel like stolen freedom. Classics, easy laughs, the kind of banter that makes a crowd of grown adults grin like they’re still sixteen and sneaking beers behind the gym. He slid through a Cat Stevens cover of “Wild World,” then “Which Man Are You?” Then he needled every high-school guy who ever chased a cheap date on a Friday night with more hope than money. When the screens behind him lit up with the full cultural afterlife of “867-5309/Jenny”—old cartoons, SNL skits, Family Guy cutaways—the whole place erupted in the particular joy that only comes from recognizing your own youth reflected back at you in absurd pop-culture fragments. If there was a right way to crack open a night like this, Tommy Tutone was the man holding the crowbar.
Later, after his set, I found him at the merch table doing exactly what the best of these survivors still do: standing there for the long haul, signing everything that got shoved in front of him, making damn sure every last person who wanted a moment actually got one. No rush. No handlers hustling him away. Just Tommy, patient and grinning, working the line like it mattered. When my turn came I joked with him about the weird modern resurgence of the song, the way it keeps mutating and popping back up in memes and TikToks and random cultural leftovers. I told him they’d twisted the number into “8647-5309” these days and the whole thing still refused to die. He laughed that big, easy laugh and signed my stuff like we’d known each other for years. That small exchange felt like the entire point of the night distilled into sixty seconds: the music never really left, and neither did the people who made it.
Escape Club came next, the band that ambushed Salt Lake’s airwaves in late ’88 and early ’89 when KJQ still ruled the New Wave roost and a rival “disco” station tried to muscle in on the dance tracks. They were getting constant play for a stretch. I even remember them turning up at a neighboring middle school that had won some radio contest. In short, they were more than welcome in 2026. They opened with “Shake for the Sheik” and the crowd stood and danced anyway, heat be damned. Trevor Steel thanked us for the warm reception in even warmer temperatures, then dedicated “I’ll Be There” to anyone who’d ever lost someone. That song still carries the ghost of morning bus rides and—swear on whatever’s left of my childhood—an LDS seminary slideshow about Jesus. We got The Escape Club during seminary. The universe has a deeply strange sense of humor. They closed with “Wild, Wild West,” the track that kept them breathing in America even as the UK mostly shrugged and moved on. Ill-fated in their homeland, still electric here.
Quick changeover. Bill Wadhams and the still-radiant Astrid Plane stepped into the light. Second time seeing Animotion live for me, and my inner twelve-year-old still lost his entire mind. They opened with “Let Him Go,” Bill on guitar and vocals right beside the woman who somehow still looks like she walked out of a 1985 dream sequence. Tight as ever. Bill told the story of Astrid arriving from England with ten dollars and a hitchhiker’s thumb, landing in Los Angeles just as everyone and their cousin was forming a band.
She fell into this one. “I Engineer” hit like a time capsule cracked open—old local TV memories of Palladium Dance Party flooded back hard, kids from the scene lip-syncing New Wave hits on a now-defunct dance-club stage. My late best friend Bren Boren did that song with two other girls. Hearing it live felt like briefly getting him back for three and a half minutes. Then came “Obsession.” That song is pure 80s carnal electricity. The butterflies, the demand, the heat of it. Forty years later it still walks into the room like it owns the deed to the building. Naughty. Sexually charged. Still dangerous.
The Producers followed. I’ll confess I only half-remembered “What’s He Got?” before the set. Didn’t matter. They sounded sharp as hell, the kind of tight, melodic power-pop that makes you wonder how they ever slipped through the cracks of permanent radio rotation. Mid-set I ducked over to say hello to Trevor from Escape Club and Bill Wadhams again. Both gracious. Both happy to talk. Photos arranged. The kind of easy, human interactions that make these festivals feel less like nostalgia machines and more like reunions. Then the heat finally started winning the war. Hat soaked in cold water. Jersey doused until it clung to me like a second, colder skin. Still felt like the sun was trying to cook me from the inside out. I had to retreat to whatever shade I could find and just breathe for a few minutes.
Bow Wow Wow. I’ve played their records on repeat for my daughters since the day each of them was born. Seeing Annabella Lwin in the flesh was pure new-wave and punk royalty walking into the frame. High heels, tall hat, a smile that could make Malcolm McLaren blush from beyond the grave. She got the whole crowd clapping in lockstep with the drums the second she hit the stage.
I stood there in actual awe. She led us through “W.O.R.K.” and then the gorgeous, aching “Do You Wanna Hold Me”—a song loaded with more personal memories than I could list if I tried. Still sounded like it had been released yesterday. First time in Salt Lake for her, from what I understand, and the love rolling off the crowd was thick enough to taste. She grinned and said she knew we all remembered the next one even though it was a cover, that they’d made it completely their own. Then they closed the short set with “I Want Candy.” Criminal that it was short. They are welcome back any time to play two full hours. Annabella can have the whole damn night if she wants it.
A Flock of Seagulls hit as the sun finally started thinking about mercy. Heat stroke was circling like a vulture. My usual front-row tribe was there—special thanks to Stacie for the life-saving Gatorade, Steve from the New Wave Podcast, Front Row Jenn. They let me park it in a chair for a few critical minutes while the world stopped spinning quite so hard. Mike Score, Pando, Gordon, Kevin walked out and fired straight into “The More You Live, The More You Love.” Instantly familiar. “Say You Love Me” followed. Then the one that always cuts deepest for me: “Space Age Love Song.” That track still carries the working-title mythology—they never got around to giving it a proper name while recording, and somehow the temporary label stuck and became permanent magic.
“Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)” floated in like an old friend you forgot how much you missed until the first chord hit. Mike still sequences a set like a surgeon who knows exactly where to cut. He introduced the band with the easy authority of a man who’s kept this thing alive through decades of changing fashion. They closed with “I Ran.” Somewhere around show number eleven for me with these guys. Afterward Kevin came out and made a point of fist-bumping every kid in the vicinity, prioritizing the young ones, making sure the next generation got the photo and the moment. They’re all just good humans.
Then Thomas Dolby. The Salvador Dalí of New Wave. The man who played keys for Bowie at Live Aid, once served as president of the Flat Earth Society, and still looks like he might invent a new primary color mid-set just for the hell of it. He walked out in the funkiest suit on the planet and opened with “Send Me an Angel.” The band looked almost as eccentric as he did. I knew immediately this was going to be special.
“Europa and the Pirate Twins” followed. Then the story: the last time he performed The Aliens Ate My Buick front-to-back was opening for OMD and Depeche Mode at the Pasadena Rose Bowl—the very show that became the legendary 101 live album. He reunited The Lost Toy People for this run. And then he gave us “The Key to Her Ferrari.” One of my favorite songs of all time. One of the many 12-inch singles I’ve worn damn near translucent over the years. I was shooting photos and pantomiming the whole three-act comedy of 80s materialism and mother issues at the same time. When the line about thinking of his mother landed, the comedic timing was still perfect. Nothing else that night touched the pure joy of finally hearing that song live after decades of spinning the vinyl alone in rooms that no longer exist.
“Airhead” arrived with every ounce of its original sarcastic, politically incorrect bite. The trombone player looked like he probably wasn’t even born when the record first dropped, which only made the whole thing funnier and somehow more perfect. That’s when I realized how much trombone actually lives inside Dolby’s catalog. “Pop Culture,” “My Brain Is Like a Sieve,” “May the Cube Be With You” finished the Aliens portion of the set. Then the inevitable: “She Blinded Me with Science,” that sampled voice still jumping out of the speakers every time he hit the button on the synth like a ghost that refused to clock out.
From The Flat Earth he closed the night with “Hyperactive!”—trombone leading the charge while the whole crowd sang the overloaded-brain science-fiction nursery rhyme like it was still 1984 and none of us had ever grown up.
I would’ve killed for a couple tracks from the criminally underrated Astronauts & Heretics from 1992, but what we got was more than enough. The night moved faster than most festivals have any right to. No dead air. No nonsense. Just a dream bill finally made real under a Utah sun that tried its best to stop us and failed. Kudos to every last one of them for keeping the machine running, for showing up, for still sounding like the future even while playing the past.
We refuse to let this music go. For one sweltering, perfect night at Red Butte Gardens, it refused to let us go either. And somewhere in the middle of it all, Tommy Tutone was still at the merch table, making sure nobody left without their moment, laughing about a phone number that somehow keeps changing and somehow never dies.
Here is the poster, look for dates near you
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