Category: Uncategorized

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