Turned Japanese: Beyond The Vapors' Lone Hit Record

The Vapors’ 1980 ear worm regularly makes it onto “Where are they now?” lists, but that hardly does the band justice. In an age of nuclear dread they saw what I saw, and it gave me hope.

In 1980, just as I started to round the corner into adolescence, my parents sent me to Boston for a weekend to hang out with my half-sister. Eighteen years older than me, swinging and cool and living in a one-bedroom on Brookline Avenue, she was my gateway to adulthood: rock & roll and Thai food and staying up late. (Oh, also drugs, though come to think of it that part didn’t work out so well.)

That first visit, she showed me an album she’d picked up on a trip to Amsterdam: New Clear Days. “Wait’ll you hear the single,” she told me. “It’s a hit in England and it’s gonna be huge over here.”

Excited by the prospect of knowing something before anyone else—a vanishingly rare occurrence then and now, trust me—I studied the record jacket. The Vapors? Never heard of ‘em. But I was transfixed by the image: A TV weatherman mottled by what appeared to be blotches of radiation. Behind him, a map of England dotted with symbols for rain, wind, and fallout.

Nuclear dread permeated my childhood. Growing up in Washington, D.C., it felt like there were giant crosshairs painted over the city. During the Cuban missile crisis—less than a decade before my birth—a battery of anti-aircraft missiles was stationed behind the hospital a few blocks from my home. And yet no one seemed to see how insane it all was. Even my wise and sober father was caught up in it: We just had to stand up to the Soviets, or next thing we knew they’d be tramping through the Rose Garden.

It felt like I was being swept further and further out to sea. What I realize now is that I probably suffered from a low-level—okay, maybe mid-level—anxiety disorder. Music helped, but the rock bands on the posters hanging in the record store—all unbuttoned shirts and come-on eyes—clearly had nothing to offer me. But The Vapors—depicted on the harsh and clipped-looking back jacket photos—looked like were bracing themselves against, in their own words:

“…All these cowboys and punkers and creeps.”

I had to know more.

The Catchy Sound of Dread

My sister was wrong. “Turning Japanese” only made it to #36 in the States. But that song—and no, it’s not about what you think it is—isn’t the highlight anyway, not for me. “Turning Japanese” is a perfect slice of new wave power pop, all charging guitars and a hokey ear worm of a riff. But the songs that stopped me in my tracks were very different. Even the titles seemed steeped in dread—“Bunkers,” “Sixty Second Interval,” “Trains.” The first time I heard “Cold War”—its frigid, distant-sounding guitars ringing out over an irradiated landscape—I felt something click into place. Finally: someone who saw what I saw, heard what I heard. I didn’t feel quite so alone any more.

The sound was a finger puzzle, the guitars locking into each other to form a steel-stringed web underneath songwriter Dave Fenton’s anxious and urgent lyrics. I hadn’t even touched a bass guitar yet, but the sinuous clang of Steve Smith’s Rickenbacker stirred something deep inside me. It’s the heart of the band’s sound, and to my ears the single best recorded example of the iconic (and notoriously hard-to-capture) instrument.

As I’d learn, The Vapors had links with other music I’d come to love. The muscular sound of Steve Smith’s Rickenbacker was thanks in part to producer Vic Coppersmith-Heaven, whose other main client at the time was The Jam. It was Coppersmith-Heaven who helped transform, in the words of

Tony Fletcher

, the “monochrome” feel of The Jam’s debut In the City into the punchy, detailed sound that defined their best recordings. And as with The Vapors, it was achieved via a notably forward-thinking approach. As Coppersmith-Heaven explained in a 2007 interview, the tracks recorded live with the full band, and then every instrument save the drums was meticulously rerecorded for maximum clarity and impact. The Jam’s sonic assault—combined with Paul Weller’s indelible underdog lyrics—hooked me from the start. The moment I heard them, I knew I’d finally found my heroes.

But The Vapors’ ties with the more successful band went far deeper. The Vapors were “discovered” by the bassist of The Jam, Bruce Foxton, at a rural pub in 1979. Soon he and John Weller—Paul’s father and The Jam’s manager—had signed on to co-manage the band. 

Unfortunately, this would in large part be The Vapors’ undoing. As “Turning Japanese” rose up the charts in England (where it went #3), Australia (#1) and elsewhere, John Weller recognized that The Jam required more of his time and energy. Left without a manager and with nothing comparable to “Turning Japanese” in the can—turns out a song about recently deceased cult leader Jim Jones wasn’t exactly a recipe for commercial success—the group split soon afterwards.

The Vapors had one other link to music I loved, though it’d take decades for me to unearth it. In 1980, a group of teenaged ‘60s fanatics in suburban England were so taken by The Vapors debut single “Prisoners” that they named their own fledgling band after it. Today, after a several-decade hiatus, The Prisoners are back at it, and rightly hailed as one of the greatest of the “eighties-sixties” bands.

When you’re young—maybe always—it’s hard to recognize the doors that are opening right before your eyes. New Clear Days played an outsized role in shaping my musical landscape, and revisiting it today is tender. I’m no longer the anxious kid I was—I’m an anxious middle-aged man, thank you very much—even as villains of today make my childhood nemesis, Ronald Reagan, seem almost quaint by comparison. But I still recall the quiet dread I felt watching television over my father’s shoulder during the election of 1980, the seas of white faces cheering Reagan’s get-tough stance on the Soviets. They were the “values voters,” and they terrified me. They wanted Reagan, and Reagan wanted nukes.

Listening to The Vapors helped. So whatever you do, please don’t call them one-hit wonders. The ’80s may have been a decade of disposable music, but The Vapors’ transmission reached me at the right moment, just as I was sinking beneath the waves. I heard it, pulled myself to shore, and started walking towards something more hopeful.