HOWARD JONES WORDS OF WISDOM, MOOS OF PEACE

HOWARD JONES WORDS OF WISDOM, MOOS OF PEACE

FEATURES

by

J. Kordosh

Howard Jones doesn t like to do interviews. He believes eating meat is the last remaining barbarism in Western society. And that the universe is perfect. He gets upset with people who feel his lyrics are fluff. Plus, he doesn’t mind if you smoke.

In other words, an ideal sort of guy to spend some time with.

Perhaps you first saw Howard Jones on the Grammy Awards show, where he appeared onstage with Thomas Dolby, Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock in a glitzy synth display. Perhaps you became a fan with last year’s Human’s Lib album, or Jones’s one-man band tour, opening for the Eurythmics. Maybe you waited until this year’s Dream Into Action.

Or maybe you think he’s a total goofball and, in fact, stopped reading after that line about the universe being perfect. That would be a shame, of course, for then you’d miss out on Jones’s novel approach to life and living, which he II describe momentarily. So if you actually did stop reading, it’d probably be a good idea to get back into the story now.

Good.

“I find interviews very, very draining,” Jones told me as we sat in the hot summer sun, at a picnic table. ‘‘And when I’m on tour, I want to keep my energy for the gigs. I find that doing an hour interview is more draining than doing an hour onstage. What you’re doing is explaining yourself in detail, which means that the process of self-analysis has to go almost into the extreme... at least when I do interviews, anyway.”

‘‘You’re getting a sunburn,” I pointed out, as is my wont when I notice such things.

‘‘Yeah, it’s getting brown, actually,” he replied. (He’s very fair-skinned, although his hair is naturally brown.) The oldest of four brothers from a family in Southampton, England, Jones is probably bestknown for his unusual, colorful hairstyle and unusually loquacious lyrics. Especially his lyrics. Look deep into Howard Jones and there they are, waiting to be examined. Come to think of it, look shallow into Howard Jones and the same is true. Why, we might rhetorically ask, is this?

‘‘I think extremely carefully about every line,” he said. ‘‘That’s why—I don’t mind any criticism of the music or the style of the music or the arrangements or anything to do with the music—I don’t mind that. But I do mind when people dismiss the lyrics as sort of not saying anything. Because they do, every line— and every line is very, very much felt.”

Felt to be what? Well, Jones exudes what might be termed "optimism tempered by responsibility.” For example, he describes his hit single, “Things Can Only Get Better” as “a general shotin-the-arm type song. Everyone gets down, everyone gets very, very depressed—if they’ve got any kind of enquiring minds these days. It’s no good wallowing in gloom and doom. Everyone needs encouragement (and) everyone should give out encouragement, if they can.”

Keep reading. I encourage you.

Many, if not most, of Jones’s fans are also intrigued by his lyrics. “I get a huge amount of letters and people talk about the lyrics,” he said. “And they talk about how certain lines in certain songs helped them out in these situations. It’s very common: mostly when people write, they mention the lyrics. So, as far as I’m concerned, I’m pleased—because that’s the main reason for me doing this.”

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Howard’s passion for his lyrics is rivaled, perhaps, only by his disenchantment with the way people are taught in school and his disgust at the slaughter of animals for human consumption. First things first: education. “I’m not a big fan of the system,” he said. “I think it tries to push everyone through the same mold.” (Jones says he did “pretty well” in school until he was about 14—“because my parents really pushed me.” Then, “I became a bit of a rebel at school and I just didn’t see the point”—and now the mother that pushed him “actually works in the fan club five days a week.”)

According to Jones, education isn’t ambiguously ineffective, but actively bad. “The way people are conditioned—” he began, his face reflecting some of that self-analytical pain, “—there’s so many things available, even in our society, and the people who are teaching you have never done any of them. All they’ve ever done is gone from school to school and back to school. They’ve never actually lived or experienced. They’ve never been able to think, ‘Well, why don’t you just set off down the road one day and see what happens to you?’ That’s just as good as any career.”

If that seems faintly ridiculous (not to mention low-paying), well, much about Howard Jones is somewhat Plutonian. His niceness, for example, is almost pathological. Consider the following exchange:

“I did enjoy the one-man band because of the sense of achievement, you know? And proving that it could be done, because they’d tell me I’d never get anywhere.”

“Did a lot of people tell you that?”

“Quite a few, yeah. Yes, quite a few.”

“If you ran into someone who’d told you earlier you were going down the wrong road, would you feel like saying, ‘Ha, I’ve shown you?”’

“Oh, no: no, no, no,” he said as I tried to count fast. “I never feel a sense of revenge.”

“You never feel it?”

“Naw.”

“Howard, that sounds inhuman.”

“Well, there may be a twinge of it in me,” he laughed. “But I just refuse to indulge in those kind of things. They’re so stupid—and a waste of energy. I mean, you should get enough satisfaction from doing what you do without getting revenge.”

Personal satisfaction is apparently the key to being Howard Jones. At one point in his life—when he was 20—he began doing something very strange. He continued at it for seven years, emerging as the Howard Jones we know today. And I’d like to tell you what it was.

But I’m not exactly sure.

“I spent those years going through a period of my life where I just completely stripped myself down,” he told me. “I just took away my whole personality.”

Well, obviously.

“I tried to—I tried to get rid of all the junk that had been stuffed into me since year one.” Back to education. “I said, ‘I really want to go for it. I don’t care if I don’t make it, but I’m gonna give it everything I’ve got.’ And, as time went by, I realized there are so many taboos that are spread by the educational system that actually hurt people so much.”

Jones denies any affiliation with organized religion, psychoanalysis or the always-popular est, but admits: “I met some people who were similar. And we sort of went through this together.”

You know, I’d like to meet them, too.

“Now there’s nothing that’s really gonna faze me/’ he continued. “That sounds very arrogant but I don’t mean it in an arrogant way.

I thought so much about so many things for so long. I’ve always wanted to be in a position where somebody couldn’t come along and blow me away with a few sentences. I don’t

think that’s right. You should know why you do everything. You should know the reason you’re here (and) be able to explain everything you do. I think you owe it to yourself to be like that.”

And Howard does seem to be like that. He doesn’t mind explaining his songs... by good fortune, I had the lyric sleeve from Dream Into Action with me at the picnic table, and Jones pointed to the songs as we spoke, clarifying their meanings. He pointed to “Hunger For The Flesh,” which I’d cited as a work that really raises a lot of questions—it’s about “souls who cannot leave this earth.”

“What I was trying to do,” he patiently explained, “is write a song that works in a few ways. I wanted to write a song that talks about a really different way of viewing things. Nonlogic. Lots of people think the idea of spirits existing on a different plane from us is a lot of rubbish, whereas I’m not concerned with whether it’s true or not. What I’m concerned with is that people are able to accept another way of thinking about things. You know, completely different, non-Western kinds of ways. I think it’s really important for your mind to be open to any kind of thing.

“I don’t really mind or care whether it’s true or not,” he added. “I probably veer toward thinking it is true, but I don’t really care.”

And who can blame him?

Stranger, perhaps, was our discussion of “Automaton” and “No One Is To Blame.” Of the former, Jones said he was writing “an analogy of the way we’re controlled—not by robots or alien beings—but by everything that happens to us.” Which also jells with “No One Is To Blame,” but does raise some troubling questions—particularly the irksome “Hitler Question,” i.e., was Adolf Hitler to blame for his actions?

“Obviously not,” Jones responded quickly. “Although he was responsible for the deaths of millions and millions... but did he have active control over how he turned out?”

Well, even if he didn’t, what a superb imitation he gave! I suggested to Jones that—if one had access to a time machine—it would be tempting to visit, say, 1932 and blow out Hitler’s brains.

“No,” he said. “Because that’s like trying to make the universe perfect and it is perfect already.”

“How do you know the universe is perfect?” i asked. Things like that are important to know.

“Well, you don’t know that. You just—you see—you have to accept that everything is— it’s a very—you can get—you see, it would also be perfect for you to have the desire to go back and put a bullet in his brain,” he concluded at last.

I think it’s safe to say you just couldn’t make a universe any more perfect than that.

Which brings us to ‘Hunger For The Flesh” and Jones’s vegetarianism. He described the song as “straightforward”; I characterized it as being about brutal murder. And he said: “Yeah, well that’s what I think eating meat is.”

Jones made it clear he doesn’t eschew tasty burgers for health reasons, as many vegetarians do: “I could give a damn about that. It’s completely a moral subject. The slaughtering of animals—the people who eat it, they don’t even associate it with that. It’s like I remember seeing this kids’ program and this kid says, ‘Where do McDonald’s hamburgers come from?’ And the kid says, ‘Oh, they grow on trees in America.’ No, no, actually that’s from a dead animal. You see these animals, you love them, but actually you’re eating them. But there’s not that association there.”

We kicked this around a bit, as you might expect. I pointed out that—not so long ago (and in many places today)—homo sapiens cheerfully beheaded chickens and ate them because they taste good. ”1 just wonder why you feel so strongly about the murder of a chicken,” I said. “Couldn’t we argue that that’s what chickens are there for?”

“Yes, we could,” Jones replied. “But again, that’s inhuman.”

“It’s inchicken.”

“I love animals,” he rejoined. “I have a dog; I couldn’t eat my dog. It’s just as simple as that: could I eat my dog? No way.”

No way. No way Howard Jones could eat his dog or his words. And, to be fair, something like that does sound indigestible. But I like a man who’s not afraid to say what he thinks.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to become a Howard Jones fan. I will join his fan club (P.O. Box 185, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, HP11 2E2, England) and learn a lot about him. Quite possibly, his mom will send me stuff. It will be a new era.

And then I’ll go back to 1932 to chew the fat with Hitler. ^