Clouds Across The Moon, RAH Band (1985)

If there is a system for playing music in the Oxfam bookshop where I work a couple of mornings each week, it’s not detailed in the procedures manual. Indeed, if there is a procedures manual, I’ve never seen it. But the system is this: we open up the shop, one of us puts a CD on, after that one’s finished, whoever is on the shopfloor at the time puts on another, repeat to fade.

The difficulty is, we’re restricted in our choice of background music to the donations that are made (and haven’t yet been sold). Don’t get me wrong, we get a lot of really good donations. I’m not an expert but it seems to me that our shop is an Aladdin’s Cave for the classical music aficionado. But with popular music - not that classical music isn’t popular - it’s a mixed bag, or more likely, a mixed damp cardboard box.

The worst of it isn’t the Michael Bublé or Enya albums (although we do get quite a lot of those and in three years I’ve never sold one) but the seemingly endless sad-sack soundtrack and compilation CDs. The selection of music for the film of Bridget Jones’s Diary, for example, was pretty good - Aretha Franklin, Andy Williams, Chaka Khan, Diana Ross & Marvin Gaye, The Pretenders. But why anyone on seeing the film would then have thought “I must have hard copy of the soundtrack on CD” is beyond me. £12.99 first time around from HMV, £2.99 from Oxfam now if you’re interested.

It was from this limited musical gene pool that I came across a compilation, The Essential 80s. Well, one third of what comprised The Essential 80s, as two of the three CD set were missing, which at least saved us from hearing Bruce Willis murder Under The Boardwalk at the end of CD 1. The CD that remained was all familiar fare from the decade that dare not speak its name: Lionel Richie “Dancing On The Ceiling”, Junior “Mama Used To Say”, Cameo “Word Up”, etc. But there was one track that didn’t initially register, “Clouds Across The Moon” by the RAH Band. If I had heard it before, it had passed me by.

The RAH Band weren’t a band as such but the recording name of Richard Anthony Hewson. Hewson had started his career in the 1960s as an arranger and worked with the Beatles, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Fleetwood Mac, among others. However, as he explains in an interview for Electronic Sound magazine in April 2021:

I did that for a few years, and it’s the same old story that you must have heard a thousand times – arrangers don’t get royalties. You get a one-off fee for every job. I did [the strings on] ‘The Long And Winding Road’ and ‘I Me Mine’ for The Beatles, and got £40 apiece! I was thinking ‘I’m never going to get out of this unless I start doing my own writing and producing.’ And I could play the guitar, bass and keyboards – so what about trying to make a record myself?

And that’s what he did. Initially recording in his bedroom, he came up with the instrumental track The Crunch which was released by RCA in 1977, reaching Number Six in the UK charts. The Crunch is unique, an effortless mash up of the glam rock and disco genres. It still sounds great.

Clouds Across The Moon came eight years later by which time Hewson had ditched the guitars and electric piano used on The Crunch in order to fully embrace the new world of synthesisers (a Roland SH-5 on this track). The other-worldly sound he created is appropriate for the heartbreaking tale of the woman trying to contact her husband who is currently on a mission to Mars. We only hear her half of the conversation:

Hi, darlin', how are you doing?
Hey, baby, where're you sleeping?
Oh, I'm sorry, but I've been really missing you.
Hi, darlin', how's the weather?

But these sweet nothings hide the pressure that this intergalactic separation is putting on their relationship (“Since you went away, there's nothing goin' right, I just can't sleep alone at night.”) Worse is to come though when the conversation is interrupted by the telephone operator who announces that - despite the clarity of the communication link up until this point - “I'm afraid we have lost contact with Mars 247 at this time." Surprisingly, the woman takes this very well, and calmly says she’ll try again next year!!! Think on that next time your internet connection goes down for a couple of hours or you are reduced to a 3G mobile signal.

The vocals were performed by Hewson’s wife Liz. The video involves a lot of Bacofoil and is high camp. I love this song, the laidback bassline, the door bell sound used by the intergalactic telephone operator to interrupt calls, the weird space noises, the Bacofoil, everything about it. Just as David Bowie had done with Space Oddity and, later, Elton John with Rocket Man, the song addresses our fears of alienation and, in every sense, it is out of this world.

Hewson turned 80 last year. He’s still recording music, still gigging. There’s someone who has system for playing music.

Now, when I look at the clouds across the moon
Here in the night, I just hope and pray that soon
Oh, baby, you'll hurry home to me