Shalamar’s Howard Hewett shares a treasured snapshot

Howard, 63, recalls working on The Tube alongside Boy George when his soul band was top of the charts

“THIS is what I’d call an ‘iconic situation’ since it’s me with Boy George on

The Tube in 1983. I don’t know who that is in the middle, probably a competition winner, but it sums up a magical time for Shalamar when so much great stuff was happening, especially in the UK. We’d had huge successes in the British charts with A Night To Remember and I Can Make You Feel Good and the Friends album the previous year and the single that I’m holding up, Dead Giveaway from the follow-up album The Look, had just gone top 10.

I got to meet all these icons like George Michael from Wham! and I remember Boy George being a really nice guy. He was bigger than I’d expected, a really tall guy, and not someone you’d mess with, but he was a cool cat.

Britain really embraced us after they saw Jeffrey Daniel doing the moonwalk, or the backslide as it was called back then, on Top Of The Pops when we first performed A Night To Remember on the show. He’d been doing his body-popping thing for a couple of years in our live shows, where Jody Watley and I would pull this imaginary rope and he’d glide across the stage, but you guys had never seen anything like it before and the next day the single’s sales went through the roof.

I’d been singing since I was 10 years old. I had one nine-to-five when I first moved from Ohio to LA, working in the women’s shoes section of a department store, but I always wanted to perform. I was in a group touring Europe and

Asia, then I was kicking around for a few months before I got the offer to join Shalamar.

Jeffrey, who I’d met at a club a couple of years earlier, called up to say the lead singer had quit the band in the middle of a promotional tour and they wanted me to take his place. That was on a Friday, I flew out to New Jersey on the Sunday to rehearse the lip-sync and choreography for Take That To The Bank, and the next day I was performing with them on a local TV show.

There have been so many highlights since then, like the time we did two sold-out shows a night across four nights at the Dominion in London then added another show at Wembley Arena. Or when I got to do backing vocals for Barbra Streisand on an album she did with Quincy Jones and also for Donna Summer on State Of Independence.

When Jeffrey and Jody left the band for various reasons after the release of The Look, I was still under contract so I did another album with a new line-up and it was fun. But Jeffrey and Jody were like my family so I was thrilled when Jeffrey and I were reunited in 1999. Jody wasn’t keen on coming back, but now we have Carolyn Griffey as a permanent vocalist and the fans love her.

Thirty-six years since this picture was taken I still feel like the same guy, still really happy to be performing, but I’m holding on to the last strand of hair. And I joke with Jeffrey that I’ve taken up body-popping because every morning I wake up and my body pops into place.” ●S Shalamar Gold is out now as a three-cd set and single-disc vinyl.