The Vapors, The Hope And Anchor, London

The Vapors
The Hope And Anchor, London
23rd March 2025

The Vapors, whose hit Turning Japanese must be a staple at every Eighties-themed club night in the country, are back with a new record and something to say. Simon Reed drops into Islington’s historic Hope And Anchor to hear what it is.

‘One Hit Wonder’ is an appendage that no artist wants on their resume. For some, it’s an entirely justified postscript to a career that should never have started. Nobody really needed to hear St Winifred’s School Choir singing about their collective bloody grandmas in 1980 and Steve Brookstein probably wishes someone else had won The X Factor in 2005.

For others, only getting one crack at the big time seems really unjust. Toploader had the world at their feet when they dropped their debut album Onka’s Big Moka in 1999. Their take on Sherman Kelly’s Dancing In The Moonlight was a five times platinum selling hit in 2000 but the band never troubled the top of the singles chart again. It probably didn’t help that the song was appropriated by TV chef Jamie Oliver whilst he expected us to believe that he whizzed about town on a Vespa picking up ingredients for impromptu dinner parties. Oliver would go on to help banish turkey twizzlers and become a national treasure, leaving Toploader to sink without a trace.

And so we come to The Vapors, whose song Turning Japanese was their only major hit in a mainstream career that burned brightly but all too briefly at the turn of the 1980s. The tight and insanely catchy new wave sound captured on their two albums of the time, New Clear Days and Magnets, really deserved more attention before the band split in 1982.

The band were dormant for 34 long years before appearing in 2016 at the famous Half Moon in Putney, where they performed Turning Japanese before abruptly leaving the stage. It was another page from the ‘bright but brief’ playbook, but did lead to further gigs and eventually, in 2020, to the release of Together, their third album. It arrived a mere 38 years and five months after Magnets; one of the longest gaps between album releases in the history of contemporary music.

And now the band are back again with Wasp In A Jar, a new album laden with further earworms and hooks. Funded by their adoring fanbase, the record has been met with universally positive reviews, including one from our very own Nathan Whittle here. I crowbar myself into the tight confines of the historic Hope And Anchor basement in Islington to catch a rejuvenated Vapors promoting the album and find them revelling in their new material.

This is a fabulous place to see a band. It’s incredibly intimate, but when it’s full (and it is) it can still accommodate a decent crowd. It retains an honest vibe from its ’70s/’80s heyday, but has refurbished lights, a brand-new PA and a great sound. You’re stood in a room that hosted the likes of U2, The Clash and Dire Straits before anybody knew who they were and you can feel that legacy dripping off the walls.

Dave Fenton still fronts the band and he’s still wearing a black and white striped top just like he did in 1980’s press photos. Stage right and playing a beautiful left-handed Rickenbacker bass is Steve Smith. Smith is also an original member of the band. There’s not much space on this stage and I’m nervous every time the Ricky, with its implausibly long neck, comes into very close proximity with the walls.

Occupying the drummer’s seat since the reboot in 2016 is Michael Bowes. At the end of the night, he will be introduced as “The happiest man in rock ‘n’ roll” and he affirms this status with a broad grin that starts at the first power chord and remains present beyond his final cymbal crash.

Completing the lineup stage left is another Fenton, Dave’s son Danny. He’s a fine guitarist with boundless energy and a fantastic stage presence. He could hold his own in any band, so it’s kind of nice that he wants to play with his dad. Danny too has been with The Vapors since 2016. He’d have a job being an original member as when Turning Japanese was doing the rounds he didn’t exist.

So that’s the band, but what of the crowd? Well, it’s rammed in here and there’s a genuine warmth and affection between the audience (a number of whom obviously know each other well) and the band. A few people are wearing tee shirts with ‘I helped put a wasp in the jar’ written on the front. I assume these are a reward from the album crowdfund, but they have the added benefit of being one of the weirdest out of context items of couture on earth.

Some people have travelled a long way to be here too. Occupying a space at the very front with cameras, I’m acutely aware I’m an inconvenience to the fanbase so I apologise to a lady behind me and assure her I won’t be there long. She looks at me blankly and says: “Deutschland” and I realise I’ve finally found a German person who doesn’t speak English. After a few songs, I gravitate to the back and meet Janne, who has made the trip from Malmö, Sweden. Conversation with Janne is much easier. He speaks far better English than I do. Janne plays bass and is excited to meet Steve Smith, one of his bass playing heroes.

The setlist has a generous 17 songs on it, hewn from all four albums but with an understandable leaning towards Wasp In A Jar. They start with Hit The Ground Running, the first track from the new record and it does what it says on the tin. The crowd are into it immediately. We bathe in the sweet waters of nostalgia and are reminded that this band really did deserve more than they got during their time in the light.

Trains, with its staccato guitars and walking bassline, is a joy. Jimmie Jones recalls the 1978 Jonestown Massacre through shimmering guitars and vocals and must surely be the jolliest song about mass murder that’s ever been committed to tape. It’s a great tune to bounce along to, though you do feel a little dirty doing it. Daylight Titans is another with shimmering guitars and is another highlight.

The new stuff doesn’t disappoint either. Forever & Ever has a four to the floor beat which elicits an even bigger smile from Michael Bowes behind the kit. It also has a brilliant singalong chorus. The audience duly obliges. Decompression is a slightly heavier sounding tune with some great interplay between the two guitarists.

There’s great interplay with the crowd too. This mainly comes from Danny, who has clearly inherited his father’s frontman genes. He gently teases the band’s work ethic: “Four albums in 45 years!” and reveals that he’s just been issued a fixed penalty notice for £150 for dropping a fag butt on the pavement outside. That’s Islington for you. He uses the experience as an opportunity to direct us towards the merch table.

Whilst Danny is a moth around a lightbulb, his dad and Steve Smith are understandably a little more static. Dave has a music stand with the lyrics on it, but hey – if that’s good enough for Shaun Ryder and John Lydon these days, it’s good enough for anyone. And unlike Ryder and Lydon, Dave doesn’t spend the entire performance glued to the lyrics whilst seemingly forgetting there’s an audience to play to at all.

A really fun hour or so passes, and with a couple of numbers left in the main set, we come to that tune. There’s zero pre-emptive fanfare from the band and an almost complete absence of mobile phones suddenly springing into the air from the fanbase. The Vapors clearly don’t view themselves as defined by their biggest song and the audience are intent on enjoying this moment the same as they’ve enjoyed every second of everything else played tonight.

There’s been a long-standing urban myth that Turning Japanese is a song about masturbation. Way back when, Dave Fenton always stated this wasn’t the case, whilst admitting he didn’t mind at all if the salaciousness of the rumour helped shift a few more units. These days he’s more sanguine. At the Wasp In A Jar album launch event a couple of weeks ago, he got asked for about the 10,000th time to explain what it actually meant to be ‘turning Japanese’. His answer: “It’s about whatever you want it to be about, you wankers!” Touché.

It starts with the ‘Oriental riff’, a Western motif that was composed for the original Aladdin stage show in the late 1800s. A Western composition designed to represent China being used to convey Japanese culture might give the entertainment officer at a right-on Student Union social the collywobbles in 2025, but cultural appropriation wasn’t really a thing in 1980. In that kind of era, you really needed to be singing about outrageous things like gay sex or The Queen having untold wealth whilst children were growing up in poverty to get banned on the radio.

Turning Japanese gets a massive cheer and the band closes out the main set with Letter From Hiro and News At Ten, both from New Clear Days. At the end, Steve Smith explains that under normal circumstances the band would leave the stage, return to the dressing room and come back for an encore. Except there isn’t a dressing room, so we just get the encore. The band play The Human Race, another one of the standout tunes from Wasp In A Jar and finish the show with Here Comes The Judge: it was the B-side to Turning Japanese and is a long-standing fan favourite.

As the band take a bow, applause is ringing in their ears and they must be excited by this rejuvenation and the reception they’ve received. Who knows, maybe there is a fifth album around the corner? Just don’t leave it so long this time guys.

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You can find The Vapors on their website and on Instagram, Facebook and X.

All words and photographs by Simon Reed. His website Musical Pictures is here and you can visit his author profile for Louder Than War here. He tweets as @musicalpix and is on Instagram at musicalpictures.co.uk