Singer Tells The Story of 1987's New Wave Power Ballad That’s Even Bigger Today | Professor of Rock

this pseudo new wave rock power ballad seemed to come out of nowhere in 1987. was armed with an emotional lead vocal and the song is so haunting it's almost supernatural which drove it to number one all over the world the story is told next by its singer and songwriter including an acoustic performance this is a can't miss next on professor of rock hey music junkies professor of rock always here to celebrate the greatest artists and the greatest songs of all time i'm telling you if you used to watch mtv and vh1 non-stop you know all those music videos back when they actually played music videos you're gonna love this channel make sure that you subscribe below right now click the bell so that you never miss out on our daily features these are the stories of the song straight from the legends things you won't find anywhere else and also take a look at our patreon i know i say that a lot but we have exclusive videos there that you won't find here and i think you'll really dig it 1987 was a grand year for music you know you had def leppard a white snake guns and roses releasing landmark albums on the harder side of rock [Music] george michael whitney houston michael jackson they dominated the charts with their latest releases with blockbuster albums filled with hit singles that were non-stop u2 and rem were taking college rock to the masses you know the joshua tree and document [Applause] it was just an amazing time to be young and embracing all of this music as the soundtrack of our lives still is in the middle of all of this a band that formed in london in 1985 named cutting crew they released a single the haunted listeners and they leapfrogged over all of the previous acts that i mentioned they hit number one on the billboard hot 100. i just died in your arms tonight tonight man it was a game changer for sure it also flew to number one in canada norway and finland that reached the top five in the uk south africa sweden switzerland it's still attracting new listeners it's one of those go-to songs you know for other cultural mediums when trying to create that perfect aura and that feeling of the 1980s [Music] it was used in season three of stranger things in an iconic moment in that episode it was used in the lego batman movie my kids loved it it's just potently nostalgic it's a song that puts you in a trance [Music] it's one of those songs also that's a mystery you know many wanted to know at the time and now what the lyrics mean well i was fortunate to spend some time with cutting crew lead singer and songwriter nick van eed who not only gives us insight into the mystery he also solve it but he also shares how he created it with his acoustic guitar he gives us an exclusive breakdown performance this one is awesome i'm telling you you're going to want to see it as we go into this interview i want to thank our sponsors zeni eyewear these are the frames that i swear by i just got this new pair they're blue horn rimmed and you know they send you so many extras a beautiful case here i got sunglasses to go with it i also put blocks on it to protect my eyes from digital blue light and anti-glare anti-fog and the mirror feature helped me to see how i looked before i bought them you got to treat yourself design your own pair at zany.com for less than the price of a vinyl record go check it out here's the story of i just died in your arms tonight i just died in your arms tonight we got to talk about that that is um the song that really lit a fire for so many people well it's actually the first u.s hit for virgin right now produced by terry brown who rush mixed by tim palmer i wanted to ask you about that because as a kid i always tried to figure out what does this song mean i'd split up from my girlfriend we got back together for one night and you know had the fun and the next morning i literally did write down those words you can make the story sexier by saying that i wrote the song that day but of course i didn't but he just hung around that lyric for a while yeah the story is so unimportant to everything else it's that title and titles are everything some of the great songs ever have have great titles and i'm not a titleist but i got lucky there it's even got brackets for christ's sake you know i just in brackets you know i know i don't know i i obviously did that so that's how important it felt to me but that that title means so much you know it's it's about sex it's about love it's about death it's about it means anything to so many people and i think one of the most enduring things about it is apart from thankfully the music side of it is if you get that absolute extra bit of cream on the top which is the lyric like i want to know what love is [Music] one of the greatest songs ever written for me what the hell does that mean i still can't find what i'm looking for you know you too [Music] those wonderful titles where you kind of spend the rest of your life going what is he looking for i don't know what love is i just died right it's one of those things i don't mean to put myself in the echelon but it's that title where people japanese men would write to me and go this is the most beautiful song i've ever written because this means and then a guy from idaho would go what it just means about me and the girl in the back you know yeah you know what i'm saying so if you can pull that off accidentally totally accidentally you're cooking the whole lyric is so special i mean i spoke to bobby kimball from toto about this with africa and lyrics like that [Music] you set the scene you paste it in and then you have fun with the lyric and just let them run with it i love the lyric about the diary sits by the bedside table cats in the cradle what a great line i love it i don't know i mean that's what we're going back to when you just spit stuff out um the melody came really quickly died your arms came really quickly all the verse stuff was kind of sketches i have um we have a painting in the in the in the room we're recording imagine that twice the size since i was 18 i have all my best titles all my best lyric ideas written there and over the years the best picture is that of the ones that have been crossed out and you'll see them through all the other songs but at that stage in 1985 there were a lot up there and i wrote this song on keyboards and i'm a guitarist ish so i read it on keyboards and so i was looking up diary in citizen looking up bedside table so i'm sorry but i can't give you too many posh answers the next one you asked me might be really special to my heart and whatever but some of them are just rhyming fun and i'm being bold enough to just be romanian you know yeah i use that expression sorry romania but you have to go on the line and then you end up there so if that's a weird answer it's an honest thought oh i love it you can't you can't be brilliant on every line you can't no you can't she's loving by proxy is my favorite line [Music] cause i've been through to fantasy one too many times well that's heartbreak i mean that is absolutely you know teenage boy that's bringing up all that stuff he went through some boys never owned up to it some boys were the heartbreakers i broke a few i guess but i can think of two or three now that broke my heart so yeah so it was just being honest about it [Music] well the harmony you guys were so great at guitar harmony you'd hear the guitar the straight line and then you'd hear the higher harmony part with it and it would just grab you [Music] or kevin um it's all kevin but i i wrote this song about and i demoed it on my own yeah i had a i think it was a six track you know six and a half track or something some horrible piece of equipment and i wrote it and then played guitar and then i thought well now i'll do this bit now i do this bit so when he came over and we we finally put the band together he said so what do you want to do i said well i got this song and it was eight tracks of guitar well mostly in the chorus and he went okay i think i can slow that out and so he put that into one part yeah so the basic body of the guitar he took my noodlings and made it brilliant everything else all of those motifs that solo was everything terry brown was the producer of the drivers who are my previous band to cutting crew we're out in canada and terry you know as you know uh i sold 20 million 30 million albums i don't know did all the first seven rush albums he's one of those great producers that lets the band have their head and just goes no no no no no no no that's good that no no no that makes it sound fantastic so i had the idea kevin was this beautiful genius and terry brown suddenly came in [Music] [Applause] so that solo was um kevin playing along and i said well just go kev this is your moment and kevin hardly ever used whammy at that point there was a lot of dingo yeah he was just you know he was pumped up i was and terry was just brutal with him terry would go like okay can we just try and we can turn back let me just try one more [Laughter] kevin if you got one more in you you know yeah another pack of cigarettes for kevin please yeah yeah he just kept banging at it so yeah nobody nobody will ever lie to you and say these solos are the first ones but mostly it was and the keyboard part got to ask you about that yeah that's crucial okay so you can you can meet your wife you can have two children you can buy the nice car you can have the perfect house and then you go what's missing and what's missing is what would it be i don't know the spa but right feet of jumbotesty was our spa i mean we had everything it lined up the keyboard parts were written i mean all of that was written by me um and it sounded like a pub band as good as the part is and then this man came in this little scotsman about this high who was had been in jethro tull um he was the prodigies of jethro and and just done any uh eurythmics and uh he was in go west he was he was hot and he cost me a fortune and he had this bank of keyboard modules like we had in the 80s all a word that you may not have heard before folks midi oh basically things plugged in the back you know so this triggered this trick this triggered this trigger this so that he had like 85 sounds going on at once you see he was smoking i'm not sure what you think about this actually it's got that's my scottish accent actually but you might like this so let's have a listen and go go go that's pretty damn good so he that was 18 sounds all lined up [Music] and it's kind of cool because we fashioned our sounds whereas now we have anything we have everything we do we still fashion ourselves but it's very lazy now we can kind of go i'll take that 80s cutting crew pad you know when you don't have everything at your fingertips it almost forces you to be a little more creative well yeah so i've told you the story about donald trump which was which was electronic creative but totally terry was absolutely mad on that side taking a snare so we'd play he'd have another snare being triggered in the courtyard outside with it and and he'd probably go at the end of a day go nice but but it may just have been brilliant uh we got clever have you heard some of the great covers that people have done of just uh in your arms bastille did one yeah last year was very good for us because they're a young british band so the hip factor was great yeah put that one on facebook it went pratush jason donovan yeah my favorite cover is the northern kings just astonishing [Music] and also how it's been used in pop culture tv movies never been kissed hot rods adam hey but also rock band and grand theft auto grand theft can i tell you the grand theft auto oh gosh so this is way back and i have a an email on my wall in my studio that says hey nick uh sony acv publishing here from london and i you know we've had a request from some game thing called grand theft auto i want to use died in your arms and i was like yeah great you can make a lot of money from this sort of stuff you know i was thinking so i remember writing about so i have the the the thread on my wall and it goes okay cool but just just i don't want to get involved in anything too violent okay because there's a lot of stuff around and they wrote back nothing violent here and then my thread is okay go for it [Laughter] oh my gosh oh i know wow that's cool that's a good story i mean i i guess i could have written back and gone i re you know but i didn't know until three honestly but we were pop band you know we're on the road so two years later people are phoning out going like love hearing your song with a guy getting his head blown what i love about your songs the syncopation of the words there's no force word i love how your space in your songs in the syncopation it's like nothing's forced it just falls right into line and that goes back to that thing about you know sitting at the keyboard or the guitar and just letting it flow out you just reflect back and these words come out i'm not religious at all i'm very very spiritual person and i totally believe in the muse i think there is a thing where you get touched every now and again it may happen once a month it may happen once a year it may happen six times a day i don't know you've got to tune into it and i firmly believe that when you get lucky that way or you open all your things to let it bring in it comes in but then it's your responsibility to go i recognize that that's pretty good because most times we're too busy we're on i remember writing down words sometimes and i think oh my god where did those words go that was the muse again and i it's gone forever but we've died in your arms and been in love before and maybe five or six other songs i've written in my life that was came from nowhere and you have a responsibility then to go i'm gonna get this down and i don't know how many other people told you that in interviews but i'm an older i'm 58 now and i'm an older man and looking back i totally see that you get this and if you're a fool if you don't take those [Music] very recently the song was re-recorded and reissued as an orchestral incarnation as well as in several other versions as the lead single for the second cutting crew compilation album ransomed healed restored forgiven with a new music video and we'll link to that the new release for the hit has been through an 8-track ep leave us a comment about this 1987 classical what are your thoughts on cutting crew and this song what are your memories more importantly what are their 80s classic songs should we cover here let us know in the comments you can get the new version of this song by clicking on our amazon links if you like our content we do invite you to join our community right now by subscribing and also you can become an honorary patron to help us keep the music alive see the link in our description until next time three chords and the truth my friends stay safe out there [Music] you

Channel: Professor of Rock

Views: 251,364

Keywords: 80s vinyl, 80s new wave, vinyl community, professor of rock, 80s, cutting crew, 1987, 1987 music hits, smash hit, hit, music community, music junkies, vinyl, 80s community, 1980s, 80s rock, 80s music, 80s hits, rock, music history, classic rock, music, pop fix, rock community, 80s songs, story, new wave, professor, video essay, vinyl collection, new wave songs, I just died in your arms, lyrics meaning, lyrics explained, professor rock, vinyl junkie, interview

Id: j6o4yu_TdqA

Length: 18min 48sec (1128 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021