Author: Jeremy Hinks

Concert Review

ARTIST: Eihwar

DATE: September 14 2026

VENUE: The Complex

SUPPORTING ACT: FRAYLE

CITY: Salt Lake City, Utah

There are sounds that don’t just enter your ears. They hit the soft machinery behind your ribs like a round from a large-caliber rifle stopped by a Kevlar plate. The vest does its job. You’re still standing. But the kinetic force spreads out in a perfect, ugly bloom across your chest and you feel every cracked rib and every bruised organ screaming that something ancient just tried to kill you and failed. That is Viking folk music when it is done right. Not the cleaned-up festival version. The real thing. The kind that smells like wet leather, woodsmoke, and blood under the fingernails.

I used to chase that feeling with bagpipes. Nothing else in my youth could open the vein of pure, useless melancholy the way a lone piper could. Then the show Vikings happened, and Wardruna, and Heilung, and Eivør, and suddenly the old northern gods had a new frequency. The pipes still work, but the northern sound hits different. It doesn’t ask permission. It just arrives, plants its feet in the center of your sternum, and starts rearranging the furniture.

Months ago an email landed about a French duo called Eihwar. The reply came back cold: they don’t do interviews in English. I kept them on the radar anyway. Then the tour dates arrived, and a live clip, and I watched this woman named Asruun speaking to a crowd in a language that felt older than the country she was standing in. French. Of course they were French. The northern spirit has never been particularly interested in national borders. I told the promoter I’d cover the show and that I’d interview them in French if they’d have me. The whole night already felt charged, like the air before a summer storm that knows exactly where it’s going to land.

The venue was still holding the last heat of the day when I walked in. Outside the air had finally cooled, but inside it was thick and close. I passed the merch table and felt that familiar small grief of not being made of money. Beautiful death-metal fonts on the vinyl, black shirts that looked like they could stop a blade, CDs that promised rituals. The crowd was already half-transformed. Leather strip skirts. Braided beards thick enough to hide small animals. Face paint that looked like it had been applied with fingers instead of brushes. Bones hanging from belts. These people hadn’t come to watch. They had come to participate.

FRAYLE

The stage was dressed in low chandelier light, the kind that makes everything look like it’s happening underwater. A guitarist appeared in a heavy hood that erased his face. A drummer took position. A woman on bass with her face painted the color of wet ash. And the singer, veiled like a Nordic witch, wearing a crown that glowed with its own private electricity. I knew before the first note that this was not going to be polite.

They opened with a minor-key assault that would have made Megadeth check their watches. The bass and guitar hit like fists through drywall. The singer’s voice cut through it clean and sharp, no theatrical growling, no cheap theatrics. Just pure, controlled darkness. One minute and thirty-five seconds into the first song I already belonged to them.

They moved through their set like people who understood the assignment. “Treacle & Revenge” arrived as a dark Disney nursery rhyme that had gone feral in the woods and come back with blood on its teeth. Then “Summertime Sadness,” delivered with the slow, dangerous flirtation of someone who knows exactly how much damage they can do with a smile. The whole set was short, but it never once diluted itself. No compromise. No drift into the tired theatrics that have infected so much dark metal these last years. Just pure delivery of pain and beauty in equal measure.

Afterward I found the bassist at the merch table. Scottish, living in Cleveland because that’s where the band lives. I told her I was sorry about Cleveland and that we were kindred in the old blood. She laughed like someone who has heard that joke before and still finds it true. I told the singer they were the best dark metal band out of Cleveland, better than Nine Inch Nails, better than Slipknot, and I meant every word. She took the compliment the way people take a blade when they know it’s not pointed at them.

EIHWAR

Then the lights died.

When they came back up, the stage belonged to something older. Marc stood there in a helmet that completely erased his face, a silhouette carved out of shadow and iron. Asruun wore a wolf skull over her head like a crown that still remembered the kill. The parts of her face not covered by bone were painted into something beautiful and dangerous at the same time. Animal bones hung from her belt and clicked softly against each other every time she moved. The air in the room changed. You could feel the temperature drop half a degree just from the silence they carried with them.

They opened with “Heill Óðinn.” Marc began a low, ritual chant that sounded like it had been dragged up from the bottom of a well. Asruun answered with her drum and her voice, and every person in the room who had brought their own skin drum answered with them. The sound was immediate and physical. It wasn’t music anymore. It was a summons. The room filled with the sound of hands striking hide, and for a moment it felt like the walls themselves were trying to answer.

Then “Skjaldmö.” Marc barked the words in that old, bursty style that sits halfway between speech and animal. Asruun’s voice rode over it like smoke over fire. The crowd’s drums never stopped. People were already moving, not dancing so much as being moved. The energy was primeval, barely human, the kind of urge that lives in the spine and doesn’t care what your conscious mind thinks about it.

While Asruun was dancing and beating her drum, and singing in an angelic tone, the kind you think you would hear in battle as the angles arrive to take you into whatever afterlife you believe in, Marc lead a drum circle from the stage, beating his skins and leading us all in chants “WHOOO!!! HAAAAAAA” as if he was the taskmaster keeping sync and we were all the warriors rowing the tribe ships across the cold waters. Yeah, it felt just like that, not cosplay, we were really doing all of this together.

Somewhere in the middle of “Viking War Trance” I realized I could hear the bones on Asruun’s belt striking each other in time with the music. That small, dry clicking became part of the rhythm. Her voice stayed impossibly clear through all of it, calm and terrifying in the same breath, carrying the old northern songs into a room full of modern bodies that had temporarily forgotten what century they belonged to.

When “Ragnarök” hit, the entire room locked into the same pulse. I watched a woman named Emily, dressed almost identically to Asruun, lead a chaotic pagan dance circle in the middle of the floor. It looked completely unplanned and completely inevitable. Asruun herself was moving with a pair of swords, the blades catching the low light as she turned. Emily later told me she was part of a local pagan dance troupe. That explained the circle. It didn’t explain how natural it felt, like the room had been waiting for exactly this shape of movement.

They barely paused for breath. Marc shouted “Hugrheim!” and the drums dropped low enough for Asruun’s voice to take the whole space. There was something almost joyful in the way she sang it, pure expression without apology. In the spaces between the words I only half-understood, the room felt like it had slipped sideways into some older ritual. We weren’t an audience anymore. We were the congregation.

“The Forge” arrived with an electronic pulse underneath the ancient chanting. Marc had found that deep throat technique the Tibetan monks use, and he used it like a weapon. The combination of electronic groove, bone drums, and that low, vibrating chant made the entire room feel like a single organism sweating around a fire that existed only in the collective nervous system. When the song ended, people looked at each other like they had just survived something together.

By the time they reached “Ljósgarðr” the lyrics had become secondary. I stopped trying to track the language. It didn’t matter. The meaning was already in the body.

Before the last song Asruun spoke to the crowd. The drum she had been playing would be for sale. She had a short interview right after the set and then she would come to the merch table. Then they closed with “Berserkr,” the song about men who put on the skin and skull of the bear, took the old hallucinogens, and stepped into a state where the animal and the human stopped being separate things. The term “berserk” comes from exactly that practice. True story. The room knew it. You could feel it in the way people moved.

After the final note I walked with them toward the green room, speaking French, joking with Marc and the manager. I may or may not have seen Marc’s face without the helmet. Some mysteries are better left intact. We did a short interview in French (the subtitled version is linked elsewhere). I got the poster signed. The whole exchange felt like the natural aftermath of the ritual rather than a separate professional obligation.

My brother and a handful of friends who chase this kind of music have always said the best of these shows feel like church. Not the polite, Sunday version. The older kind. The kind where the gods are not metaphors and the body is the only altar that matters. Tonight was one of those nights. If Eihwar comes through your city, go. If you can find leather and braids and face paint, wear them. The music will meet you halfway, but it meets you harder if you arrive already half-transformed.

Some experiences don’t ask to be reviewed. They ask to be survived and then reported from the other side with the bruises still visible. This was one of them.

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#eihwar #nordicmusic #vikingmusic #frayletheband #paganfolk #paganbeats

CONCERT REVIEW

ARTIST: Squeeze

Date: 9 September 2026

Supporting Act: ADAM ANT

VENUE: Capitol Theater

CITY: Sale Lake City, UT

Sitting in the backseat of my brother’s Camaro on the long, sun-bleached ride home from a river trip, I got my first real dose of Adam Ant. Until that afternoon he had been nothing more than the sharp-dressed oddball in the Honda Scooters commercial with Grace Jones—cool, sure, but distant. Then Strip started pouring out of the speakers. An eleven-year-old kid is not usually handed an album that opens with the cheerful observation that people get naked and then asks what comes next, but the rest of the record was pure voltage. “Puss ’N’ Boots” especially hit like a secret transmission: clever, sneering, melodic, and cooler than anything else in my small suburban world. The lyrics were sharp, the grooves were sly, and the whole thing felt like it belonged to a more dangerous, more stylish planet than the one I lived on.

A few months later, ritual Saturday evening in front of WDCA 20, Solid Gold came on and Stevie Wonder introduced Adam Ant doing “Vive Le Rock.” Marco Pirroni and the band built a guitar archway right there on the television stage. Adam strode through it like he owned the decade, launched into the song, and moved in ways that had nothing to do with Michael Jackson. The theatrics were ridiculous and perfect. Years later I learned that Jackson had lifted the French field-commander jacket image from Adam. That still feels like one of the purest proofs of how far ahead Ant was running in those early years—cool enough that the biggest star on the planet borrowed the look and somehow made it less interesting.

I met him properly in 1990 at a record-store signing appearance. I was sixteen, vibrating with nerves, and handed him my copy of Manners & Physique. He signed it. That small square of cardboard still lives in the collection like a relic. I saw him once more in the late ’90s. The performance was as unhinged as the old videos had promised, even if the stage clothes had calmed down from the full historical-pirate-Napoleonic fever dream of the early days. The songs still carried the same charge. I left that night thinking the catalog was immortal and the man delivering it still had the necessary spark.

Squeeze was a longer, more complicated courtship. In 1988 I almost bought a ticket when 10,000 Maniacs were listed as openers. I went down to the box office and found a notice that the Maniacs had canceled for the Salt Lake date because they were doing Saturday Night Live that week. I decided one band wasn’t worth the money and walked away. Two years later Squeeze came through again and absolutely demolished the room. I stood there realizing I had made a genuine mistake in 1988. After that night I understood exactly what they were capable of when everything locked in.

So when the announcement came that Adam Ant would be opening for Squeeze (with Haircut 100 also on the bill), it felt like a pure 1980s transmission aimed directly at people like me. I had seen Nick Heyward a couple of years earlier and knew he was still more than capable of stealing a night if given the chance. Then the day-of email arrived: Haircut 100 were out. Something about altitude sickness. In their place, Leon Tilbrook—Glenn’s son—would open the show. I was told he was a serious musician in his own right. That remained to be seen.

Leon walked out into the early evening light and for the first couple of minutes we could only hear him from the pit; the PA was still asleep. He stood there good-naturedly while the crew scrambled, then leaned into the mic and said he hadn’t been booked for stand-up and didn’t have that much material ready. Once the guitar was finally live he tore into his own songs with real enthusiasm. One of them, he explained, he had written at eleven years old about being in love with a girl at school and the quiet sadness of it never happening. His father had liked the music so much that he took the tune, wrote new lyrics, and put it on one of his solo records. Leon told the story with a mixture of pride and mild familial betrayal that made the whole room laugh. He danced all over the frets, clearly enjoying himself, and made every unfamiliar song sound worth hearing. He closed the set by saying, “This is one you might know,” and picked out the opening guitar line of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain.” The entire venue recognized it within three notes and sang the rest with him. It was a perfect, generous hand-off. He would be back later in the evening with the family business.

Five minutes after Leon left the stage, two drummers appeared and sat down behind kits that were already miked and ready. One bass drum face read ADAM. The other read ANT. They started playing in tight unison. Adam Ant has always understood the power of two drummers when the material calls for it. One of the drummers was dressed in a full Versailles ballgown with Marie Antoinette hair; the other looked like he had simply shown up to work. They opened with “Dog Eat Dog” from Kings of the Wild Frontier, going all the way back to the beginning, and for a moment the years collapsed. The song still sounded feral. Then you started noticing the physical reality of the night.

Adam looked stiff. He was already winded after the first song. Salt Lake’s altitude is unforgiving if your body hasn’t adjusted, and it was clear he was fighting it. He thanked the crowd, then barked “Bang bang, you’re dead!” and the room answered without any prompting: “Did not! Did too!” They launched into “Vive Le Rock” and most of us had been waiting for that moment for years. The old dance moves were attempted more than they were executed. The body that once snapped through those angular, theatrical gestures was now negotiating with gravity and thin air. When I arrived at the venue the photo rules had been made very clear: no photographs of Adam Ant. I respected it. His manager apparently did not believe anyone would. He came at me hard during the set, repeatedly accusing me of shooting, demanding my name and credentials even after I told him multiple times I had not taken a single frame. By the fifth confrontation I told him he was simply being an asshole harassing a punter and asked him to go away. He reminded me one last time about the policy and finally left. The whole ugly little episode put a dent in the rest of the performance that never quite smoothed out.

Adam’s wardrobe was pure historical collage: straw gaucho hat, black bandanna, the old Civil War-style cross-belt jacket, a wide pirate leather belt with another Ant scarf tied to it, leather pants, and the signature knee-high boots. Half privateer, half Napoleonic ghost. It still looked right even if the man inside it was working harder than the clothes suggested. “Prince Charming” got people on their feet and dancing in place. “Desperate But Not Serious” still functioned because the audience knew every pause and filled them instinctively. But the voice was in trouble. It was frequently off-key. It was often buried in the mix. It was obvious he was fighting the monitors for most of the night. “Goody Two Shoes” and “Stand and Deliver” landed softer than they should have. The songs themselves remain bulletproof. The live instrument delivering them has simply changed. When the guitarist and bassist moved back to the drum risers and joined the two kits for “Kings of the Wild Frontier,” the sound became massive again and the song felt as timeless as it ever did. That moment worked. Large stretches of the set did not. I have loved Adam Ant’s music for decades. The records still hit. Seeing them delivered live in 2026 was a reminder that time is undefeated. You can honor the work completely and still admit that the voice could no longer keep up with the material for a full set. The charisma flickered. The catalog carried what it could. The night made the limitation impossible to ignore.

Ten minutes after Adam left the stage the drum risers were rolled off with impressive efficiency. A long platform was pushed into place carrying keyboards, guitar stands, a mandolin, a drum kit, and a series of small bar lamps glowing on velvet cloths beside each musician’s drink of choice. Squeeze walked out nine strong. They looked like the best house band the 1960s never quite managed to assemble—sharp zoot-suit variations, shiny threads, open-collar white shirts. Owen on bass wore baby blue. Danica Dora wore a tie. Everyone else looked like they had stepped out of a very stylish late-night residency. Glenn Tilbrook stepped to the microphone, said “Hello Salt Lake City,” and the band detonated “Pulling Mussels (From the Shell).” The sound was immediate, balanced, and locked. They played like people who had been living inside these songs for most of their lives and still found new corners to explore.

They took us through “Up the Junction,” “Another Nail in My Heart,” and “Is That Love” with the kind of precision that only comes from decades of muscle memory and genuine affection for the material. These songs are now forty-six years old. They do not sound like museum pieces. They sound like they are still being written in real time by people who understand exactly where the hooks live. Then the neon sign above the stage lit up with the word Trixies and they played the entire album front to back. If you have not spent time with that record, fix it. It is classic Squeeze DNA—irresistible melodies, sharp writing, rhythmic slyness—proving that the core ideas never needed Jools Holland or Paul Carrack to remain potent. Midway through one of the tracks Leon wandered over to his father’s pedalboard and began stomping on effects changes while both of them laughed. With nine people locked in that tightly there is room for joyful sabotage. The song never lost its footing. It simply grew a new texture for a few bars and then settled back into the pocket.

When I was shooting from stage right, Chris Difford, seventy-one years old, leaned forward with a full rock-star grin and gave me the look. Age is clearly just a number when the songs still fit and the band still means it. They finished the Trixies run with both parts of the title track, took a short breath, and Glenn announced they would play “some from the old catalog.” Instead of the saxophone that usually opens “Hourglass,” Chris played the line on guitar and the room dropped straight back into Babylon and On territory. That song owned Utah new-wave radio for a reason. The video still looks like it was directed by a caffeinated Salvador Dalí, and the chorus remains a loyalty test. If you never shouted along to it, you were never fully converted.

“Black Coffee in Bed” was enormous. After twenty-five-plus musicians have passed through the band over the decades, the current lineup still nailed every turn and every harmonic shift. “Cool for Cats” had Chris Difford on lead vocals; his voice has always sat in the same neighborhood as Carl Marsh from Shriekback, and tonight the resemblance felt especially strong. The whole venue moved with him. Glenn took “Tempted” and sang it with the authority of someone who has lived alongside that song long enough to make it his own even though it will forever be associated with Paul Carrack. Just when it seemed the set might be winding down they launched “Take Me I’m Yours” and turned it into a fifteen-minute celebration. Glenn introduced every member of the band while the music kept rolling. Each player took a solo. Owen grabbed an accordion and charged around the stage dancing from the ankles. When they got to Danica she delivered a sharp, sincere “Coat of Many Colors” that the room answered with real volume. I hope she heard how much it landed. The whole extended version felt loose and precise at the same time—the sound of a band that trusts itself completely. They hit the final downbeat one minute past Salt Lake’s weeknight curfew. That explained the near-absence of space between songs all night. They had twenty-one songs to deliver and no intention of leaving any of them behind.

Squeeze did not simply play Salt Lake City that night. They reminded everyone in the building why these songs lasted, why the writing still feels elastic, and how much pure fun remains available when the right people are driving the machine. The contrast with the earlier set was impossible to miss. One artist was fighting the limitations of time and altitude and monitors. The other was still discovering how much life the old material contained. Both catalogs deserve respect. Only one of them felt fully alive in the room.

If Squeeze roll through your town, put on the thin tie and the white socks and go. Dance like you know you shouldn’t. You will carry the night around with you for a long time afterward. Some performances settle into the memory as pleasant. This one settled in as necessary.

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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.

http://www.howardjones.com/tour_dates.html

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