- HOWARD JONES Like To Get To Know You Well (WEA)
- Week Ending 18th August 1984
- 1 week at #1
The height of summer 1984. Human’s Lib had been around for less than 6 months, but already four hits had been lifted from it, three of them before the album even came out. How to keep the momentum going?
Answer: release a new song.
The new song was actually a bit like New Song, with its breezy upbeat charm and somewhat simplistic message. Critics of a certain age, old enough to remember the late 1970s, commented on its similarity to Dreadlock Holiday by 10cc (much as they reckoned New Song owed more than a little to Peter Gabriel’s Solsbury Hill). Those of us who just lapped up everything Howard Jones served up at the time really didn’t notice, or if we did we didn’t care. I don’t like HoJo’s music, I love it!
Like To Get To Know You Well’s reggae-lite arrangement and perky production could be excused as perfect for the summer; the video – where HoJo bounced around London shaking hands with everyone in sight – suited the everybody-love-each-other vibe of the lyrics. The sleeve was a masterpiece of eye-catching design; the song title spelt out in a variety of languages from all corners of the globe. Okay, so it wasn’t quite up to the standards of Human’s Lib, but it shared some DNA with several of the tracks from that album. There was also enough goodwill from the public at large to send the single very quickly into the UK Top 5, thus continuing his impressive run of chart success.
At the time I wasn’t to know, but this single flagged up the direction Howard was to take with his music on the next few albums, away from the darker, moodier tendencies of Human’s Lib’s finest moments.
Amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes 