Hall and Oates: From pop geniuses to guilty pleasures and back again
Back in 1988, Daryl Hall and John Oates released their first album after a four-year recording break. As they had released an album per year since the early 70s, this was a well-deserved hiatus. However, it was to be their last platinum seller in the US and didn’t sell particularly well anywhere.
I was 17 when ‘Ooh Yeah’ was released and I asked my older brother, who was working in a record store at the time, to bring me home a copy. That evening, he came home and handed me the vinyl LP with its horribly dated graphics. Seriously, it was one ugly record sleeve.
“Jeez, that was embarrassing. Everybody at work took the piss and spent the whole day singing ‘Maneater’ at me”.
What did I care. I’d first heard Hall and Oates as a kid in the early 80s but it wasn’t until about 1986 that I started listening to their albums. My parents had introduced me to Motown and were pretty impressed when I played my ‘Live at the Apollo’ video in which Daryl and John sang with David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks, the lead singers of legendary soul group ‘The Temptations’.
The record sleeve of that LP is almost as ugly as ‘Ooh Yeah’ by the way.
In the 90s, I moved away from Hall and Oates and listened to contemporary stuff; everything from REM to Spiritualized to Massive Attack. Nobody listened to Hall and Oates in the 90s. They were like the Bee Gees in the 80s, everything about them, their hair, their clothes, their songs, reeked of cheese. Hall and Oates themselves virtually disappeared. Daryl Hall released a couple of poor-selling soul albums and John Oates shaved off his mustache.
Curiously, Daryl Hall had the chance to race back to the top of the charts in 1994 when he sang the official song for the 1994 World Cup. But the song, which was cheesy, flopped.
Hall and Oates were destined to be forgotten. These once mighty pop colossi just faded away and nobody seemed to care…..
The rebirth
Ten years after ‘Ooh Yeah’, I heard a song on the radio called ‘You always get what you give’ by the New Radicals. It became a huge hit and it sounded new and familiar; reviewers talked about echoes of Hall and Oates. Listening closely, I realised they were right. Something about those heavy-handed piano chords marking the rhythm. I started hearing Hall and Oates everywhere.
A few years later, Hall and Oates were featured on the show ‘Behind the Music’. There was a new album, which included a couple of big adult contemporary hits. Daryl and John started appearing on TV shows; their songs were used in films, and hipsters started talking about Yacht rock.
Then, several things happened together. Daryl Hall launched one of the world’s first internet music shows ‘Live from Daryl’s House’, young musicians such as Brandon Flowers from the Killers and Travis McCoy from Gym Class Heroes extolled the virtues of Hall and Oates, and the song ‘You make my dreams’ was used in a dance scene in the hit movie ‘500 days of summer’. Heck, Daryl Hall even appeared in a cameo in an episode of ‘The Flight of the Conchords’.
Cheesy 80s has-beens Hall and Oates were moving from guilty pleasures to legendary hitmaker status.
Which is where they have always belonged.
If you haven’t heard Hall and Oates for a while, spend an hour or so in the company. Is there a more ecstatically bittersweet break-up song than ‘She’s Gone’? Is Brandon Flowers right that ‘Rich Girl’ is the most instructive pop song ever written? It’s actually about a rich boy though. Did Michael Jackson really steal the groove from ‘I can’t go for that’ to write ‘Billie Jean’? According to Daryl Hall, that’s what he confessed during the recording of ‘We Are the World’.
I’ve barely scratched the surface of their musical archive. Dig deep and you’ll come across their humble beginnings with those architects of Philadelphia soul Gamble and Huff, their time as David Bowie’s supporting act on his first US tour, Daryl’s solo album with progressive rock idol Robert Fripp, George Harrison playing on one of the late 70’s albums, working with Diana Ross and Mick Jagger, sharing production work with Arthur Baker, being sampled by DeLaSoul and Kayne West and so on and so on.
Don’t feel guilty. Don’t feel shame. Go down the Hall and Oates rabbit hole. You never know what you might find.