HOWARD JONES’S CHAIN OF COMMAND

September 22, 1983: Howard Jones – New Song

Literal interpretations of lyrics were a standby of ‘Top Of The Pops’ in the ‘70s, when Legs & Co would wag a finger at Golden Retrievers as Gilbert O’Sullivan sang ‘You’re a bad dog, baby’.

And they made a triumphant return in 1983, when Howard Jones made his ‘TOTP’ debut.

As the cockatiel-haired keyboardist sang of throwing off your mental chains, a shirtless mime pranced about to his left – face painted white, with three black lines suggestive of prison bars; chains running from a collar to both wrists.

This wasn’t the idea of the producer, or a flack at label WEA, but came about organically. Jed Hoile (Jeremy to his mum) had been part of Jones’ live set-up for a couple of years, as he took his one-man show around pubs in High Wycombe. The two became friends after meeting in a record shop. Later, Hoile acted as a sort of roadie at early gigs, setting up the equipment. Then he started to interpret the music.

“The philosophical content of Howard’s songs touched me and I’d just spontaneously danced along in support,” Hoile told the Bucks Free Press in 2003. This caught the singer’s eye during a gig at a pub called the Fleur de Lys. “I just couldn’t stop watching him,” Jones told the paper. “I thought, ‘He shouldn’t be down there, he should be up here on stage.’”

The act then developed an alternative cabaret element. “We had showroom dummies on the stage and Jed would dress in chains,” Jones told Stereogum in 2022. “Sometimes he’d be a lizard, and sometimes he’d be a businessman, or a punk, or a robot.”

“In one song, Howard would ‘die’ and come back as a ghost,” Hoile told The Guardian in 2022. “In another I used to come out of the audience and ‘shoot’ him with a gun.”

So when the call came from the BBC, Jed went too. “It was really enjoyable,” he told the documentary, ‘The Story Of Top Of The Pops: 1983’. “It was a fascinating experience working in about six inches of space, because the studio was tiny.”

Hoile also accompanied his friend on other TV appearances – supplementing the chains with silver tinsel for a Christmas ‘TOTP’! Though his interpretative skills were not always understood... as he revealed to

The Guardian: “When we did ‘Saturday Superstore’ they wouldn’t let me wear the chains, because they thought it was some sort of weird fetish thing!”

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