This year, British band Jesus Jones kicked off their first full U.S. tour in two decades. Thirty-five years ago, when the band was just breaking through, global geopolitics were changing at bewildering speed, with repressive regimes crumbling and promising new liberal democracies taking their place. It was just at that point in time that the band wrote a song that captured not just that historic moment, but also the ears and hearts of many Americans.
When Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev announced plans in 1988 to hugely reduce the Soviet military presence in Eastern Europe, he effectively removed the threat to dissident movements throughout the Bloc. The less draconian regimes of Poland and Hungary responded proactively to these changing circumstances, negotiating with opposition groups and proposing new constitutional arrangements that would grant some representation to other parties while retaining their state’s socialist character.
Yet the communists were unable to dictate the pace and scale of change. After a far stronger than expected showing in the April 1989 parliamentary elections, the recently legalized Solidarity Party ousted the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party, leading to Poland’s first government since the 1940s not dominated by communists. Hungary’s first free elections, which took place in March 1990, saw the once all-powerful Hungarian Socialist Party routed.
Elsewhere, however, it took the shock of the reopening of the Berlin border in November 1989 to shatter the illusion of potency and durability communist regimes had once maintained. This was especially the case in Romania, where Nicolae Ceauşescu’s repressive regime had overseen increasing economic stagnation. The following month, rioting spread across the country to the capital, Bucharest, with the Army backing a new provisional government. Ceauşescu and his wife were captured and summarily tried and executed on Christmas Day.
In the wake of the Revolution, a Romanian concert promoter appealed, via the British Broadcasting Corporation’s youth culture TV show, Reportage, for bands to visit the country and sate the pent-up demand for British music. The British Council stepped in and organized British Rock for Romania, a tour by three bands: Crazyhead, Skin Games, and Jesus Jones. Backed by local musical acts, they performed in Timişoara, Budapest, and the Transylvanian city of Braşov.
Jesus Jones comprised vocalist, guitarist, and main songwriter Mike Edwards, guitarist Jerry De Borg, bassist Al Doughty, keyboardist Iain Baker, and drummer Simon “Gen” Matthews. They had formed in London in 1988, their name originating as an in-joke from when three of its members were on holiday in Spain and dubbed themselves as the “Joneses” surrounded by men named “Jesus.” They captured the British music press’s attention with their blending of rock and dance music on their debut single “Info Freako” and album Liquidizer, both released in 1989, as well as with Edwards’s unapologetic ambition and eminent quotability.
Edwards was especially moved by the Romanian experience, particularly the perfectly observed minute’s silence to commemorate those who had lost their lives in the Revolution just two months earlier. The three bands concluded the Braşov concert by all taking to the stage for a rendition of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” to a rapturous response from the crowd. Edwards noted the irony in its reception, telling British newspaper The Times, “It’s meant to be a condemnation of capitalism and the West, but here they imagine it is about liberty and a time for rejoicing. And who are we to tell them otherwise?”
Jesus Jones’s star continued to rise in their native Britain over the next twelve months. “Real Real Real” was released in March 1990 and gave them their first UK top twenty single. Slightly less successful, at least initially, was “Right Here, Right Now,” released in September. Edwards had built the song around a sample of Prince’s “Sign o’ the Times,” released two years earlier; it would remain a lyrical touchstone for him even after the sample was removed.
Yet whereas “Sign o’ the Times” had offered a state-of-the-nation commentary addressing many of the social and political problems of the mid-1980s, including the AIDS crisis, gun crime, drugs, and poverty, Edwards wanted instead to capture the zeitgeist of his current moment, watching communist regimes fall across Eastern Europe – an incentive heightened by the band’s direct experience of that transition during their Romanian tour.
The song’s title captured Edwards’s sense of being present at, and a personal witness to, a moment of grand historical transformation, having “…seen the decade in, when it seemed the world could change, at the blink of an eye” – a message driven home by the accompanying video, in which projections of contemporary news footage wash over him. The chorus’s refrain about “watching the world wake up from history,” meanwhile, echoed the argument made by the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, in his 1989 essay, “The End of History?,” that the historical process of different ideologies battling for dominance was over; there was no genuine competitor to liberal democracy and market economies as a model for organizing human affairs.
Uploaded to YouTube by Jesus Jones
“Right Here, Right Now” did not break the UK top 30, but follow-up “International Bright Thing” gave Jesus Jones their first UK top ten single in January 1991. All three songs were included on their second album, Doubt, which topped the UK album charts that same month.
Jesus Jones had already played several American gigs in 1990. In 1991, they embarked upon a global tour, playing an extensive number of concerts across North America. Meanwhile, their American label SBK saw the potential in “Right Here, Right Now,” which was released in the U.S. in March 1991, investing time and resources in ensuring it was picked up by alternative record stores and local radio stations, although some balked at the band’s potentially blasphemous name. Aided by MTV playing the video, the song gradually climbed the Billboard charts, eventually reaching No. 2 and selling over a million copies in total. It was the most played song on College Radio in 1991 and earned Jesus Jones an MTV award for best video.
Yet global politics continued to move fast, and the context in which “Right Here, Right Now” was received was not quite the same as the one in which it was made. In August 1990, Iraq had invaded and occupied neighboring Kuwait, a move influenced in part by dictator Saddam Hussein’s concern about American dominance in the region. The invasion was universally condemned, and a U.S.-led military coalition rapidly drove Iraqi forces out of the country by the end of February 1991.
“Right Here, Right Now” tapped into the mood of post-Gulf War optimism that swept the U.S. in 1991. One news program there played it over footage of American troops landing in their initial staging area in Saudi Arabia, which displeased Edwards; he supported the Coalition, but did not want the song to be reinterpreted as a nationalistic, pro-war anthem. Yet he also recognized, as he had done in Romania, that fans took music they liked to articulate their feelings in ways quite different from the intentions of its creators. Speaking to British music magazine Rage in 1991, he explained:
For better or worse people reinterpret pop music for their own uses. I know that people are doing what they want with my music – but that’s important. I want them to. When I wrote that song, I was trying to get a feeling of optimism, a feel for the times. The end of the 80s was a fantastic time to be alive and the world really did look like it was changing for the better. Very naive, I agree.
Edwards attributed the ecstatic American response to the Gulf War to their apprehension about repeating the long and costly experience of Vietnam. He was particularly touched, he said, by one girl who had come up to him after a concert and said the song had brought her comfort and hope at a time when friends of hers were serving in the Middle East. Edwards said:
For most people I don’t believe that lyrics in rock music matter a damn, but if “Right Here, Right Now” makes people feel good – and the Americans I spoke to weren’t the ones who went and murdered people – or they see it as bringing them confidence and optimism then that’s not a bad achievement.
The song remained open to reinterpretation in the years that followed. Bill Clinton used it in his victorious 1992 presidential election campaign; his wife Hillary would do the same in her unsuccessful 2007 campaign for the Democratic presidential candidacy. On the other side of the political aisle, John J. Miller ranked it 14th in his list of “The 50 Greatest Conservative Rock Songs” for National Review in 2006, explaining, “The words are vague, but they’re also about the fall of Communism and the end of the Cold War.”
As for Jesus Jones, the band would never quite hit those commercial heights again. They suffered in part from the turn in their native Britain away from the genre-spanning, globally minded type of alternative rock that they epitomized towards a more insular, traditionally British brand of pop that propelled groups like their labelmates Blur to the top of the UK charts in the mid-1990s. Nonetheless, the original line-up of Jesus Jones continues to perform to a dedicated fanbase to this day.
They do so, however, at a point in time when the feel-good factor of the post-Cold War period seems a distant memory. The sort of international and moral political leadership the U.S. was capable of exercising in the Gulf War has long dissipated in the wake of the global war on terror, its thawed relations with Russia and China now back on deep freeze. Wars continue to rage in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and elsewhere. In Romania, right-wing authoritarians have seized upon the disappointments of the post-communist era, with independent extreme nationalist candidate Calin Georgescu taking a shocking lead in the first round of the country’s presidential elections last month – only for the country’s Constitutional Court to annul the result amid accusations of Russian interference.
Despite these shifts, transatlantic popular music continues to connect to politics. After President Joe Biden announced in July that he would not be seeking reelection, and with Vice President Kamala Harris widely anticipated to replace him as the Democratic nominee, British singer Charli XCX had her say on the matter, tweeting “kamala IS brat.” This referenced the title of her hugely popular latest album, which had entered the Billboard Charts at No. 3 the month before. It created something of a media storm, with the Harris campaign responding by borrowing its iconic green cover and lower-case font for their own brand.
The episode demonstrated an apparent momentum behind the campaign, an ability to capture the cultural moment, that Taylor Swift’s endorsement in September also seemed to confirm. The fact that this did not ultimately come to fruition is a reminder of the limits of the abilities of pop stars and politicians alike to shape and define present reality and public sentiment.
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