New Song

In the early autumn of 1983, synth-pop was already well established on radio waves across Europe, but Howard Jones arrived with a very different proposition. Balancing grueling day shifts in a plastic film factory with evening pub gigs, he refused to hide behind moody, detached posturing. Instead, he treated his debut single as an uncompromising personal manifesto about ditching fear, thinking independently, and having the courage to pursue what you actually believe in.

Jones arrived with serious classical chops from the Royal Northern College of Music, which he promptly channeled into a buzzing, self-engineered sonic universe. Rather than putting a conventional four-piece band together, he built a one-man electronic setup where drum machines sent trigger pulses into synths like the Roland Juno-60 and Moog Memorymoog, essentially conducting a live orchestra single-handed. The UK Musicians' Union was so rattled by the lack of hired acoustic players that they even tried to ban him from playing live venues.

When it came time to record the debut single with producer Colin Thurston, capturing that spontaneous kinetic spark was tricky. Jones still regards the live version from his Kid Jensen BBC radio session as the benchmark, but the finished studio cut bounced with unmistakable vitality. In promo appearances and live sets, he was famously joined by mime artist Jed Hoile, who danced draped in literal cardboard chains to act out the song's plea to break free from self-imposed mental limits.

Released across Scandinavia on WEA in late 1983, the seven-inch single immediately resonated with Swedish record buyers, climbing straight into the top ten well ahead of its eventual breakthrough across the Atlantic. Local curiosity ran deep enough that Swedish act Digital Dandy even cut a local cover on Cotton Club the following year.

By the time Kaj Kindvall kicked off Trackslistan in the autumn of 1984, Jones had firmly established himself as a household name across Sweden, proving that a spiky-haired keyboard wizard singing about philosophical self-determination could hold his own against the slickest transatlantic pop machines. Dropping the needle on that 1983 pressing today, you hear an infectious burst of early digital optimism that still refuses to play by anyone else’s rules.