And it was Nicolas Cage's sort of breakthrough role, too. We were watching it, going, ‘Wow, the song is in it three times!’ It was in the credits. “And he stuck a VHS tape - remember those? - into the tour bus TV. “We were going ‘round and ‘round America like clockwork bunnies, and then we pulled over to the side of the road and our tour manager said, ‘You've gotta see this!’” Grey recalls. through Southern California, specifically, not far from the San Fernando Valley itself - that Grey and his bandmates realized just how mainstream they’d become, when they got a private tour-bus screening of Valley Girl. The first gig we played in America, we got off the plane at Daytona Beach to play a spring break festival! We were still wearing our overcoats, and it was bloody 90 degrees outside. One minute, we're playing dark clubs and sort of art concerts, and the next, we're signing autographs at record stores and doing big radio interviews. In America, we were mainstream, which we didn't expect at all. In England, we're much more underground, independent, still very kind of left-field. “It's a kind of a bit of a different culture thing in England,” Grey explains. Counter-clockwise from left: guitarist Gary McDowell, singer Robbie Grey, keyboard player Stepehn Walker, drummer Richard Brown, bassist Michael Conroy. But thanks to the Valley Girl placement and heavy airplay on early MTV for “I Melt With You’s” charmingly lo-fi video (the entire shoot cost $1,000, and that not-so-special-effect flame closeup was created with a Bunsen burner), Modern English became unlikely Stateside pop stars.
I MELT WITH YOU HOW TO
Grey says the song, from Modern English breakthrough sophomore album After the Snow, “confused” British fans who “didn't know how to take it” surprisingly, the album didn’t garner many positive reviews and or sell well in the U.K. It even played during the post-prom end credits of one of the era’s most beloved teen rom-coms, Valley Girl. But the track was so deceptively upbeat and romantic that its nuclear message went over most listeners’ heads - so much so that it became an unexpected prom song of the 1980s. The doomsday lyrics, which Grey says were written in three minutes (“When you can do that, you know pretty much that you're onto something good”), weren’t necessarily a departure for the moody, post-punk Essex band.
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