(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover / Martin Handford / CBS / ITV)
Whether they welcome it or not, Guilford’s new wave quartet The Vapors stand as one of the UK’s best-loved one-hit wonders.
Leading 1980’s debut LP New Clear Days, ‘Turning Japanese’ rode high on the charts across the world with its infectiously hooky pop-punk attack and salacious lyrical interpretations. While songwriter and frontman David Fenton has stressed the song’s detailing of “…all the clichés about angst and youth and turning into something you didn’t expect”, ‘Turning Japanese’s’ presumed, and very un-PC, reference to the face pulled during the act of masturbation added to the single’s schoolyard popularity.
Try as they might, The Vapors would never see such chart success again. A sophomore record was managed with 1981’s Magnets, however, a fine album that prickles with a slightly darker thematic wander and flexes how sturdy their power pop chops really were. Promoted with the ‘Spiders’ and ‘Jimmie Jones’ singles—and featuring the excellent ‘Johnny’s in Love (Again)’—the title track’s exploration of both John F and Robert Kennedy’s assassinations inspired its rich and eye-popping illustrated cover.
At its centre lies the scene of an assassination surrounded by ambulances and security convoys amid a mob of panicked and morbidly fascinated onlookers, with the sniper planning his getaway on the top right edges above a giant billboard displaying the album’s title, having just fired his prized shot. When moving away from the crowded image, the visual of a human eye becomes apparent the further Magnets is held.
For anyone of a certain millennial age, Magnets’ rich overlay of busy characters and teeming scenarios may seem familiar. The artist is Martin Handford, the brains behind the Where’s Wally? franchise. A graduate of Kent’s University for the Creative Arts, the art director at Walker Books proposed a character to stand as a central focus amid his illustrated crowd pieces. Conceiving of the titular world traveller as a protagonist who can be spotted by his red and white striped woolly hat and jumper, Wally’s debut in 1987 would trigger a pop phenomenon that would dominate the 1990s.
Soon enough, a series of books saw Wally strolling through fantastical lands, different eras of history, and across the many backlots and film sets of Hollywood. Expanding the characters to include Wally’s friend Wenda, his dog Woof, a wizard, and a nemesis Odlaw—’Waldo’ spelled backwards, Wally’s name in North America—Handford’s creation would encompass video games, two cartoon shows, mountains of merchandise, and the weekly educational magazine Wally’s World! that only 1990s kids from the UK and Australia will remember. Selling over 70million books and published in over 50 countries, Handford’s stripey globetrotter has ticked him over very nicely.
Handford rarely gives interviews and has largely avoided the press across the nearly 40 years since Where’s Wally?’s launch onto children’s bookshelves, but he’s on record for stating one of his biggest regrets was not seriously starting a pop group. He also confessed to having been in a punk band during art college with a name too embarrassing to mention.
”We were quite obnoxious,” Handford told Entertainment Weekly in 1990, ”The thing was, every time we played, my role in the group diminished. The first concert, I was the lead singer. The second, I played bass. The third concert, we got a female lead singer in, and I was the backup singer to her. And at our last concert, I was the dancer—I wasn’t allowed to do anything musically.”
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