The Rah Band – “It showed what you could do with this machine”

From Beatles arranger to Tik Tok sensation, the weird and wonderful history of The Rah Band

“Conjunctivitis,” says Richard A Hewson, in the broad accent of his County Durham roots.  But fret not, his eyes are fine. “Conjunctivitis,” he repeats, before switching back to something more neutral. “That’s the word I need to say to get my North East accent back.”

Hewson’s normal RP tones are much more in keeping with his current location in West Sussex  – and it’s a long time since he left that corner of the country to serve in the Merchant Navy.  Fearing he might get bored at sea, he took a guitar with him, teaching himself as an attempt to play to fill the empty hours.

It was the start of a lifelong love affair with music that has ultimately been responsible for some of the best loved and most individual sounding records ever made.  Under the name The Rah Band, Hewson’s kept up a ridiculously prolific output from his first hit in 1977, ‘The Crunch’, right up to the present day.  In recent years, alongside an increasing number of re-releases to meet a new found demand, he’s found time to create numerous new tracks like the dramatic, r&b-inflected ‘Silly Questions’ (ft. Nina Schofield) and the thumping house stormer ‘I Wanna Thank You’ as well as playing live and recording a Rah Band podcast.

Not bad for someone who’ll be turning 80 this year, but at the time of life when many of his contemporaries would be content with a game of bowls or an amble round the garden centre, Hewson has kept a grasp of modern dancefloor sensibilities more in keeping with someone a quarter of his age, let alone half.  How does he keep his finger on the pulse of what’s happening?

“I listen to the radio a lot,” he says, pretty logically.  “I don’t really like guitar bands so I tend to listen to Kiss FM in the afternoon and early evening, I usually find there’s some pretty good stuff on there.”

Working his way out of an initial self-confessed “jazz snob” phase, back on dry land he gained admittance to the world famous Guildhall School of Music in London to study orchestration.  The now multi-instrumentalist Hewson’s first professional jobs in music were arranging and conducting orchestras, working on The Beatles’ ‘Long and Winding Road’ and tracks by Herbie Hancock, Supertramp, The Bee Gees, Fleetwood Mac and many others in the late 60s and first half of the 70s.  “It was a quiet life,” he laughs, “you just wave your arms around and they play – and you get all the credit.”

Getting to know the ins and outs of the music industry as he went along, he slowly figured out that despite its ‘quiet life’ advantages, there was little future in arranging, because arrangers got paid a flat fee rather than receiving royalties.  Time to get writing himself he figured.

What came up with is ‘The Crunch’, an idiosyncratic but addictive instrumental that would slay dancefloors everywhere and reached number six in the UK singles chart at a time -1977 – when singles would sell literally by the million.  It’s not only pop gold, but it’s a record that bridges a gap from glam rock – the beat has more than a touch of Glitter Band stomp about it – of the early 70s to the techno-slanted synth pop that the pop scene was headed inexorably towards.

Except, and get this, there are no synths on it.  None.

Just as Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke On The Water’ starts with the most famous guitar riff of all time – but not played on a guitar, but rather on the keyboard of Jon Lord – so the otherworldy electronic noises at the start of ‘The Crunch’ were generated not by a synth but by an old fashioned electric piano routed through all the guitar pedals he could gather together.  Add guitar and bass, again played by Hewson, and the brutalist stomp of the drum machine, and you’ve got one of the all time slices of pop genius.

‘The Crunch’ arrived in February 1977.  In July of the same year, ‘I Feel Love’, Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s psychedelic synthesiser tour de force, was storming the charts. Already a fan of Kraftwerk at the time, Hewson remembers ‘I Feel Love’ pointed the way to the future.  “It showed what you could do with this machine,” he says.  “Luckily, Roland gave me an SH5 synth after ‘The Crunch’ was a hit.  It’s still great – I’m looking at it now.”

Using his jazz skills in his arrangements, as well as a love of disco and funk, The Rah Band name would become associated with two further smash hits, both in 1983.  ‘‘Messages From The Stars’ has remained a classic ever since, nodding at disco but treading very much its own path, featuring as recently as last year on Horse Meat Disco’s Back To Mine session and, rather inexplicably, becoming a Tik Tok sensation of late in sped up form, racking up 10 million plus views on YouTube and 12.5 million on Spotify.

‘Clouds Across The Moon’, meanwhile, a heart rending tale of futuristic alienation set within a phone call from a wife to her intergalactic spaceship-flying husband, complete with desolate sign off line “I’ll try again next year”.  It got him a Top of The Pops appearance and remains much loved by many – cult beatmeister Luke Vibert namechecked it in a recent interview – as well as giving its name to a second volume of Rah Band rarities, nuggets and alternative mixes just released by Cherry Red’s pop offshoot Cherry Pop.

Clouds Across The Moon: The Rah Band Story Vol 2 is a monolithic five CD box set, and follows hot on the heels of Messages From The Stars: The Rah Band Story Volume 1, another five CD set which came out in October 2022.  Both are huge, incredible testaments to one of the longest careers in pop,  with volume two offering alternate versions and mixes of hits like ‘The Crunch’, but also huge swathes of underexposed tracks spanning huge areas of the genre map from the post-baggy pop of ‘Big Love Turnaround’ to the early 80s jazz-funk underground vibes of ‘Jammin’ On The Byte’ and the exhilarating house of ‘Turn My Love Around’.

With the competition clocking in at 75 tracks, researching it and assembling it must have been quite a job, let alone making the music itself.  Lucky for Hewson, then, that the energy and knowledge of massive Rah Band superfan Dean Verdin was at his disposal.  Hewson admits that the collections would never have happened without his help.

“We first met virtually about ten years again,” he says. “He was running an unofficial Rah Band website.  He’s incredible – he can find tracks you didn’t even realise had been made yet.  He keeps finding new things too – I think there’ll be another one.”  Hewson’s also collected his master tapes and keeps them in pride of place in his home studio, where work continues pretty much as ever.  In a rare moment of pride, though, he happily declares: “After more than 40 years’ work, it does look pretty good.”

We have to agree, although we’d also point out one thing. It sounds even better than it looks.

Click here to buy Clouds Across The Moon: The Rah Band Story Vol 2