THINGS CAN ONLY GET BETTER Tour
Artists: Modern English, The English Beat, Wang Chung, Howard Jones
Venue: The Maverick Center
Date: July 29 2026
City: West Valley City, Utah
In a week already overloaded with 80s voltage and the kind of Utah heat that makes you question your life choices, the Totally Tubular festival had left most of us half-cooked and still buzzing. Three days earlier we’d roasted under the Red Butte sun while Tommy Tutone, Bow Wow Wow, Flock of Seagulls and the rest tried to melt us into the lawn. Then, on a rare Wednesday off, I found myself taking friends from the Australian Pink Floyd Show out to dinner in Salt Lake, still talking about the previous weekend’s chaos while the city tried to cool down. By Thursday evening another loaded bill had landed at the Maverick Center, and this one carried a different kind of promise. The “Things Can Only Get Better Tour,” named after that irrepressible Howard Jones hit, rolled into town with Modern English, Wang Chung, and the English Beat in tow. Indoor venue. Actual air conditioning. After the outdoor furnace of the previous weekend, that alone felt like a minor miracle.
Salt Lake in 1984 was a strange, healthy little petri dish of New Wave. Small town energy, big-city hunger. We had a dedicated radio station when most places our size were still stuck on classic rock or country, plus a handful of dance clubs that kept the culture breathing. WLIR in New York, KROQ in Los Angeles, one strong signal in DC—those were the giants. Salt Lake City? Really? Yet the music thrived here. Howard Jones came through that year opening for the Eurythmics and, by every account, stole the night. I wasn’t there, but the stories stuck: huge receptive crowd, a performer who somehow already felt like one of ours. From that point on he became one of Salt Lake’s favorite adopted sons. He still comes through Utah even when the routing makes no sense, because he knows the room will be full of people who never stopped caring. The radio stations played him daily in the peak years—sometimes one song way, way too much—and the loyalty ran deeper than airplay. In 1993 he even took his kids trick-or-treating on Halloween with one of the local DJs. That kind of small, human detail lodges in a city’s memory. So when this tour hit the Maverick Center, it wasn’t just another retro package. It was Howard coming home again.
On paper the bill looked a lot like those “Retro Rewind” or “Lost 80s” packages we’ve seen before. In fact, the English Beat and Wang Chung had both been on that Maverick Center show three years earlier. That night the house PA—designed for hockey games and high-school graduations—had done them no favors. This time the expectations were higher. We were still recovering from the heat of Totally Tubular, but at least we were hoping for sound that didn’t feel like it was fighting the building. Indoor AC. Proper system. Nuff said.
MODERN ENGLISH
I was home sick from school one day in early 1988, fourteen years old and restless. I decided to dig into the full albums After the Snow and Ricochet Days after years of knowing only “I Melt with You” from the radio. That day quietly rearranged my internal furniture. The rest of the catalog was far more sophisticated, denser, more interesting than the single that made them famous. The complexity pulled me under. Modern English became one of my all-time favorite bands. I’ve collected most of the catalog since—including the debut Mesh & Lace, which stands toe-to-toe with Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures in its bleak intensity, plus the raw follow-up EP Gathering Dust. I didn’t stop at the albums. I hunted the 12-inch singles of “Melt” and others, got them signed over the years, and now the framed “I Melt with You” single lives in my daughter’s bedroom because it is her favorite song of all time. Cool-dad points fully claimed.
Having seen them several times already, I walked in ready. They opened the evening and their set with “Gathering Dust,” and I was right there in the pit singing every note while shooting, falling backward through years of playing that song at maximum volume when no one was home—standing on my bed with an unplugged guitar, pretending I was the one on stage. Or blasting it in the car for friends who would turn and demand, “WHAT IS THIS?” The anxiety and urgency in that track still hits a nerve every single time. Live it sharpened the whole room. They followed with “Long in the Tooth” from the newer album 1 2 3 4, true to their sound. The original guitarist Gary McDowell has had health issues in recent years and wasn’t on this run; he was always the visual personality of the band—tattoos, piercings, wild dreadlocks, the unmistakable icon. His absence was felt. The new guitarist held the parts down, but the old chemistry was different. Robbie Grey remained as articulate and present as ever, talking to the crowd between songs with that calm, intelligent ease.
They dropped “Someone’s Calling” from After the Snow, a genuine album-track gem in a short festival-style set. Choosing deep cuts from a record where almost every song can stand alone is no small feat. Halfway through, Robbie invited the entire room to travel with him: “Come with me, close your eyes and greet what meets you there. Reaching out, stretch your hands across the sea.” That was “Hands Across the Sea,” the one real hit from Ricochet Days—still one of the most criminally underrated albums of the entire era.
Then he hit us with something I never expected to hear live. “This one goes back to 1977,” he said. “It’s called ‘Swans on Glass.’” Instant euphoria. I’d only ever known it from a 1982 bootleg. A crowning track from Mesh & Lace resurrected right in front of us, bleak and beautiful and completely unexpected. After that, what do you even say? Robbie bantered about the movie Valley Girl, pointing out how many times “I Melt with You” appears in it. The whole crowd sang the chorus a cappella for several measures before Mick Conroy on bass and Robbie on guitar kicked back in and finished the song. The place was fully awake and hungry for more.
THE ENGLISH BEAT
Ten minutes later Dave Wakeling’s English Beat were plugged in and ready. The improved sound system immediately made the difference. I spotted the sax player Wes and said a quick hello, Antonee the toaster and Wayne on bass took their places. Full lineup: guitar, bass, two keyboards, sax, drums.
Pure ska time. They opened with the Staple Singers cover “I’ll Take You There” and the floor was on its feet skanking on command from Dave and Antonee. Dave looked out over the room and said, “I ask myself, where is the Tenderness, and I can honestly say I have found it here in Salt Lake City.”
Then they launched into the General Public anthem “Tenderness.” They gave us “Save It for Later”—still iconic, still the song even Pete Townshend covered—and closed the set by flowing “Ranking Full Stop” straight into the eternal “Mirror in the Bathroom.” After something like eighteen English Beat shows in my personal history, they still manage to reconnect you to the exact moment you first fell for them. For me that moment was in sub-zero temperatures on a snowboard, carving a makeshift halfpipe while their records spun in my head. Some things never leave the body.
WANG CHUNG
Early spring of 1983 I first clocked “Dance Hall Days” and the scattered early work of Jack Hues and Nick Feldman. Then came the Breakfast Club placement, the To Live and Die in L.A. soundtrack, and the late-’86 / early-’87 hit “Everybody Have Fun Tonight”—one of the rare times an 80s band cheerfully jammed its own name into the chorus. The last time I saw them in Salt Lake was that Lost 80s tour three years ago, and the sound that night was rough enough that if you based the entire live experience on it you might have sworn off them forever. This evening the tour name proved prophetic. Things could only get better, and they did.
Wang Chung walked out with a proper PA behind them. Jack Hues announced a track from the To Live and Die in L.A. soundtrack—recently re-released on vinyl, available at the merch table—and from the first notes it was clear these were working musicians who still knew exactly how to deliver. You would never have guessed they had ever slipped off anyone’s radar. They killed it.
“Let’s Go” had the whole room singing along even if half the crowd only half-remembered the verses. Wes from the English Beat returned to the stage and added sax to “Dance Hall Days,” shifting from ska tones into something smoother and equally locked-in. By then the venue was packed and moving.
Then came the night’s purest spontaneous joy. Nick Feldman started singing “You’ve got to let me know” while Jack tore into the unforgettable guitar line from The Clash. The entire arena immediately answered with “Should I stay or should I go?” The singalong mutated, laughing, into “Should I stay or should I Chung?” before they pivoted seamlessly into “Everybody Have Fun Tonight.” Wes shredded the sax lines. The whole thing was tight, joyful, and completely in command. They finally gave us the live show we should have gotten three years earlier, burying every low expectation in the process. Everybody got their Wang Chung on that night.
Throughout the evening Richard Blade held the stage during changeovers, firing trivia questions and spinning the top five New Wave songs of each year from 1980 forward—Devo, Missing Persons, The Cure, and everything in between. It kept the energy from ever fully dropping and made the transitions feel like part of the show instead of dead air.
HOWARD JONES
The lights went down and Howard walked on in what looked like a direct descendant of Roy Batty’s trenchcoat from Blade Runner, complete with funky glasses that threw little laser dots across the audience. It was almost comedic in its excess, but excess was always part of the synth-era contract. Howard has spent four decades taking the stage in sci-fi-forward fashion; why stop now? He opened with “Stand Up,” still wearing the pink trenchcoat and goggles, looking like he had stepped out of a reimagined 80s fever dream. Even with the air conditioning running I’m sure he was cooking inside that coat. After the first song someone came out, removed the trenchcoat, and helped him into a white shirt. He turned, welcomed the crowd, thanked Richard Blade and the supporting acts, and without missing a beat the opening synth line of “New Song” bloomed through the arena. Seven thousand people singing “OOOH OOH OOOH” in unison is its own kind of church. You are simply in the right place.
He introduced the band with a quick jab at the other synth player—“He’s my nephew”—and I noticed Nick Beggs from Kajagoogoo wasn’t on this run. Then came “Like to Get to Know You Well” from Dream into Action, another pure KGQ-era dance-floor weapon. He moved from “The Prisoner” (1989’s Cross That Line) straight into “The One to Love You” from 2019’s Transform, collapsing thirty years into a single seamless breath. The sequencing was smart and confident. No one saw “Everlasting Love” coming, and he ran it straight into “Twist and Shout” with the inevitable Ferris Bueller reference. When Howard Jones asks you to sing, you sing. It’s HoJo. That’s the only reason required. He talked about recording “No One Is to Blame” with Phil Collins on drums and a full band, then played the single version. It felt contemporary rather than archival—exactly the way he seems to want these songs to live now.
“Life in One Day” began with him at the keyboard in a reworked, almost Caribbean arrangement complete with 12-string guitar. By the second half he was walking the stage, pulling howls and sway out of the crowd. He closed the first half of the set with “You Know I Love You… Don’t You?” After a short break he returned in the funkiest jacket I have ever seen in person—covered in mirrored scales like some kind of dragon armor.
He talked about the simple philosophy behind “Things Can Only Get Better,” assured us we could handle the chorus with a collective “Whoa whoa whoooooah,” and then the song hit harder and brighter than the version I’ve carried around for forty years. The mirrored jacket caught every light as he pulled the big “WHOA WHOOOOAH” out of the entire room. This was the creative mind of Howard Jones operating at full voltage, the same restless, optimistic intelligence he’s brought us for four decades.
By the time the night ended, four hours had somehow vanished. Modern English had claimed new converts and rewarded the longtime obsessives. The English Beat had the floor skanking and smiling. Wang Chung had rewritten their local live reputation in a single set. And Howard Jones had once again proven why Salt Lake keeps showing up for him. If things can only get better from here, I would genuinely love to see the next chapter. Thanks, all of you. It was a night that will stay parked in the memory for a very long time.
Catch one of these remaining dates if you can.