Forty years ago, something totally awesome happened at the 27th Annual Grammy Awards — something that changed not only television, but the public’s perception of electronic music. That fateful evening, onstage at Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium, elder-statesmen keyboard icons Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock joined new-school new-wavers Thomas Dolby and the performance’s newest-to-the-scene participant, Howard Jones. Resplendent in billowing yellow satin while brandishing a keytar, Jones and his fellow synth pioneers delivered a futureshocking performance that has come to be known as the Great Synthesizer Showdown of ‘85.

“I think it was a very significant moment, because it suddenly changed the view of all this new technology that people were using,” says Jones. “It was like, ‘OK, these instruments are electronic, but it is just another instrument. There’s nothing to be worried about. They’re not going to take over your world and steal your children. It is just another way of working.’ And full stop, that thinking was dead after that show. … So yeah, it was a moment for me, and a moment for keyboard players and electronic musicians around the world.”

Jones went on to have a very good 1985 — racking up four top 40 U.S. hits, including two that made the top 10; playing Live Aid; and going platinum with his sophomore album, Dream Into Action, for which he wrote all of the songs and played most of the instruments. And yet, he was still dismissed by the so-called “cool press” as a manufactured (or simply too-cheerful) pop sensation. But four decades later, now it’s Jones who is an elder statesmen of electronic music — and any doubts about his abilities or talents have long vanished. He has continued to push himself creatively, be it with 2015’s ambitious multimedia ENGAGE! Project; 2019’s Transform LP (which featured three collaborations with logical successor BT); the pandemic-era song cycle Dialogue; or his new concert album, Live From the O2.

Below, the synth legend chats about his humble beginnings, the power of positivity, shattering stereotypes… and how he just might have accidentally invented the keytar.

LYNDSANITY: I’ve interviewed you before about your 1985 Grammy performance. It blew my mind when I first saw that. It was basically four frontmen — solo stars who also played keyboards — and that was unusual back then. Do you realize that was pioneering? Even now, there aren’t many synthesizer players that are up in the foreground, like you or Thomas Dolby were.

HOWARD JONES: That’s a good question. My big hero when I was growing up was Keith Emerson, and he was a frontman and keyboard player. He was like the Jimi Hendrix of keyboards, sticking knives in the keys and rolling over the stage with a Hammond on top of him — I mean, absolutely outrageous, but the most exciting thing ever. That’s where I got my biggest early influence, a keyboard player, that you can be the frontman and play keyboards. And I developed that idea with portable keyboards. They hadn’t made them at that time, but I strapped Moog Prodigy’s around my neck and played them. I had wires coming out and roadies used to feed them out to me! It was a way to not be that the guy with the glasses at the back of the stage that you never notice that plays keyboards. I did not want to be that. That wasn’t going to be me.

So, you invented the keytar, basically?

[laughs] They may have existed, but I wasn’t aware of it. But I knew I wanted to have keyboard and travel around the stage, so I just strapped it around my neck. And it was great. Then I could put it back on the stand when I’m done with it and play it normally. When they finally did come out with [real] ones, I jumped on that, and [keytars] have been with me ever since.

Photo courtesy of Howard Jones

If there are any pictures out there of you with a Moog strapped around your neck like a necklace, I’d love to see them! So, I don’t if the right word is “unfashionable,” but it was not really in vogue at the time to be the front keyboard person in the early ‘80s. Didn’t you have to put on your own record label showcase in London to get a deal? How did that go over?

Yeah, that’s right. It was very hard. … We organized to do a residency every Monday night for four weeks and invited all the record companies down, all the publishers down, to see me. … We weren’t based in London, we were outside in High Wycombe, which is a very ordinary town, with no cool scene going on there. You had to create your own. And [the music industry people] all came down and none of them got it. “One guy with a load of keyboards around him and a dancer? We can’t relate that to anything that we know has been successful in the past!” The typical thing of not being able to spot anything that’s original — until one guy did. But that was back in my hometown at the time. He came to a show and did get it and got the songs. His quote was, “We missed out on Depeche Mode. We’re not going to miss out on this guy.”

Related to the topic having difficulty getting record labels to understand what you were doing, I’ve read that you think you weren’t considered “edgy” enough then. A lot of songs from the new wave/post-punk era were kind of dark and miserable, but most of your material was anthemic or positive. I’d love your thoughts on that — why is being dark or miserable or depressed considered “chic,” but declaring that things could only get better or that you want an everlasting love isn’t?

Oh, I don’t where to start with that! I mean, it’s not that I didn’t like any of those [darker] bands or even the style of their writing, but it wasn’t who I was. And I didn’t even want to write love songs or anything. I wanted to write songs that were about philosophy. How do you deal with life and how do you be a successful human being? It seems ridiculously hard to do that. So, I wanted to write songs about that. And I wanted to be a cheerleader rather than a sort of sympathizer, if you know what I mean. We all go through pain and agony and stuff like that, but my thing was, “Don’t crack up. Bend your brain. See both sides. Throw off your mental chains. Let’s do it.” I had no problem at all with people who weren’t doing that, but that was just me. I liked songs where people were encouraging me as a young person: “You can do this, you can do this, you can do this.” And that’s where I wanted to come from with my music. Of course, that wasn’t considered “cool” at the time, so I was portrayed as a manufactured pop star in the “cool” press. What? Excuse me— I’m playing all the instruments myself on the record. I’m singing. I wrote the songs myself. I did the whole look myself. And you are saying I’m manufactured? But the great thing is that gives you such a good, strong spine, because you need to have that in this business. People will have a go at you at any opportunity… there’s people who want to knock you down, so you’ve got to be tough to keep going and stick to what you want to do.

But what about two of your biggest hits, “What is Love?” and “No One Is to Blame”? There is hope in those songs, but there’s a lot of melancholy too. They aren’t super-cheerful.

Yes, that’s true. But it’s still coming from that point of view. “No One Is to Blame” really, at the end of the day, is about how it’s really difficult being a human being, with all these things you have to cope with in your head, all the influences and all the pressures. And if you don’t have a view on it, you’ll go down a dark road. But yeah, I agree with you.

Do you consider yourself a generally positive, happy person?

I often think that, no — it’s almost like the opposite. I was very familiar with cynicism in my mind… and I didn’t want to be like that. I didn’t want to be a cynic. I wanted to be somebody who just fractionally is on the positive side — realistic, but with a hopeful attitude about getting out of it. Otherwise, you may as well just give up and forget it. But I didn’t want to do that. But I was very familiar with the cynical. I think maybe it’s part of British culture to be like that, which is maybe a bit of a problem that we have. That’s why I wanted to counteract it with what I was singing about.

You just mentioned how you wrote and played everything yourself. There were certain artists of your era where that was hyped by the press — Prince being the most obvious example — but then there were other cases, like with you and with George Michael in his early days, where that wasn’t really emphasized. And I wonder why that is. Do you think it was just the ‘80s vibe — the videos, the bright colors, the satin outfits, the keytar — that caused you to be taken less seriously at first? Like, if you’d just been sitting at a grand piano, would you have been received differently by critics?

Yeah, I often reflect on how those initial reviews and stories that are written about you, how they get embedded in the culture, and it’s so hard to break out of them. You have to spend the rest of your life trying to put the record straight. But maybe that’s a good thing, because I’m still doing it and I’m still very passionate about what I do to this day. Maybe I would’ve just sat back if people were going, “Oh, wow, he plays everything himself. He writes all his own songs. He’s doing things that nobody’s ever done before onstage.” If there hadn’t been that pushback, maybe I wouldn’t have had the impetus to keep going. And really, it’s important to carry on — that’s what it says in my lyrics, so I’ve got to be that!

Obviously I grew up in America, and you were huge here. You had nine top 40 hits in the States and were on MTV all the time. Were you bigger in the U.S. or England?

I was definitely bigger in America. Which was and is still unusual.

Do you think that because your hopeful lyrics resonated more with American listeners?

I think that’s a big part of it, and I love that. I’m very so pleased about that, that it was taken in a genuinely positive way.

But when you did Live Aid in 1985, you played the U.K. show, at Wembley in London. What memories do you have of that?

I don’t where to start, really! It was incredible day. Just literally flying in on a helicopter with Brian May from Queen was pretty epic. I hung out with Paul McCartney and Linda McCartney — not just saying hello, but for half an hour! I met David Bowie, who had been following my whole career. He was saying things about me that I just couldn’t believe, and that was massive for me. And then doing the song, you know who we were talking about me being the “synthesizer guy”? Well, I played piano, so people were going, “Oh my God, he’s going to play piano! This is going to be a disaster!” But I’d been playing the piano since I was 7; it was the most natural thing. And I did “Hide and Seek,” which was not one of my big hits. It was a song that I thought would be appropriate for the occasion. But the audience joined in with me on the chorus, and it was sublime. It was a sublime feeling that I still remember now, because it’s still there embedded with all the adrenaline that was going on.

I mentioned the “Synthesizer Showdown,” and I know you chuckled when I said that, but seriously, that’s my favorite Grammy moment of all time. No one had never seen anything like that. It must’ve been so exciting for you to be onstage with Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock and Thomas Dolby, making history at the Grammys.

It was absolutely great. I think it was a very significant moment because it suddenly changed the view of all this new technology that people were using. Me and Tom were pioneering, but those guys [Wonder and Hancock] were using [that tech] as well. Stevie was known for his embracing of new keyboards and new technology and stuff. So, it was like, “OK, these instruments are electronic, but it is just another instrument. There’s nothing to be worried about. They’re not going to take over your world and steal your children. It is just another way of working.” I mean, on a Queen record, they said “no synthesizers were used in the making of this record,” all that stuff. It was pathetic. And full stop, that thinking was dead after that [Grammy] show.

And I got to hang out with Stevie in his studio and jam with him — just me and him. What an amazing thing to be able to say that you did. We were just trading riffs back and forth and jamming on various keyboards that he had around the studio. I’ll never, ever forget that. And Herbie is an amazing man as well. So yeah, was a moment for me, and a moment for keyboard players and electronic musicians around the world. I think it was a really significant moment. … [We] were bringing those instruments to the public and showing how they could be used, so I felt certain pride about that.

Herbie Hancock, Thomas Dolby, Stevie Wonder, and Howard Jones at the 1985 Grammy Awards (photo: YouTube)

Everybody plays some form of synthesizer or electronic instrument now. People create huge hit in their bedrooms on laptops. I kind of forgot about how at one time, keyboards were considered the enemy of rock. So, what was the mood in the room, at the Shrine Auditorium? I imagine there were a lot of old-guard record executives and musicians there. Were they looking at you guys thinking, “What the hell is this?” Or were they into it?

As far as I could tell, people were really enjoying it. It was so unique. I don’t know how many keyboards we had arrayed around us, but it was dozens. I hadn’t been to the Grammys before, so I wouldn’t know to compare it with anything else, but I certainly thought that people were really digging it and enjoying it. … And I didn’t feel intimidated, actually. I should have probably felt that a bit! But I think it was probably to do with the fact that I’d just hung out in the studio with Stevie and we’d jammed together and he kept going, so he must’ve enjoyed it. It wasn’t like he was grinding his way through; we were having fun, having this musical dialogue. And I’d grown up with his music, studying his music and learning to play his music. So, when we [successfully] jammed together, I kind of got over any sort of terror of being intimidated.

It’s interesting because electronic music in general, even now, doesn’t always get respect among rockists. It took six nominations for Kraftwerk to get in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Only one electronic artist, Daft Punk, has ever won a Grammy for Album of the Year. It’s sort of an open-ended question, but why were people so resistant? Why did they think that music just had to be guitar, bass, and drums? And there’s still people that feel that way, which surprises me.

I think I was shocked too. I always thought rock ‘n’ roll culture, pop-music culture, was the alternative: open-minded, embracing, not box-ticking. And I suddenly thought, “Oh my God, it’s the opposite of what I thought! People are not embracing change. They’re ridiculing new things. They’re not embracing new ideas. They’re not supporting young people doing new stuff.” I was a bit shocked with that, but that’s why you just have to keep going. You’ve just got to be who you are, and don’t compromise on that. Be who you are. Just do it. People will come and they’ll listen and they’ll like it. And if they don’t, they’ll listen to something else. It’s that easy.

Did you ever mention, when you were in that Live Aid helicopter with Brian May, like, “Hey, man, why did it say ‘no synthesizers’ on your record?” You had a captive audience…

[laughs] No, but I got to do band stuff with him when we were doing the Prince’s Trust concert. I was in the band. He was in the band and he was always really respectful to me and I felt very, very supported by him. He’s a very, very nice man. I don’t know where that came from.

I’ll just put this out there: Would you consider getting Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder, and Thomas Dolby together and redoing it somewhere? You could maybe even do it with some younger synth players as well.

That’s a good idea! I mean, my friend BT, who’s like a genius keyboard guy — it’d be good to have him there. What a great idea.

Awesome! To wrap things up kind of where we started, we were talking about the anthemic feel of your records. Do you have any stories about people saying your music helped them through tough times?

Oh, yeah! So many that I wouldn’t know where to begin. I know it’s made a difference to people — and that’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s your legacy. It’s not anything else. It is not how many records you sold; it’s whether it had an impact on people. And I’ve had so many. There’s a song called “Specialty” on Dream Into Action that particularly really meant a lot to [many fans]: “‘Bout time you realized/You are a specialty/There is no one like you/Spend your life worrying/’Bout what you could have been/Can’t you like being you?” People felt liberated by that. That’s great. I’m so happy with that.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarify. Listen to audio of Howard Jones’s full conversation in the video at the top of this article.

It was probably the most ’80s thing that ever happened. Ever. And yet, the grainy VHS footage of that night still seems cooler than anything that took place at the Grammys this year.

Jones was the newbie of this all-star funky bunch, but he went on to have a very good 1985, racking up four top 40 hits in the U.S., including the top 10 singles “Things Can Only Get Better” and “No One Is to Blame.” This week, he celebrates another milestone besides his Grammy anniversary: He actually turned 60 this past Monday. He’s continuing to push himself creatively with his ambitious new live multimedia ENGAGE! project, but for this Throwback Thursday, we chatted with Jones about the night that first introduced him — and synthesizers — to many American fans.

YAHOO MUSIC: This was an awesome moment in ’80s television. How did it all come about?

HOWARD JONES: Well, I think the Grammys really wanted to mark the arrival of electronic instruments and sort of give it, I don’t know, a bit of credibility. And they wanted to use great legends, like obviously Stevie Wonder, and some new voices as well, like me and Thomas Dolby. It was a kind of celebration of keyboard players using new technology and making great music with it. I think it was a great move, and I think it really did mark a sort of turning point for electronic music.

What are your memories of rehearsing for the big event?

The whole process was so amazing. We originally started off in a studio in London. Me and Tom were there kicking around some ideas and we were waiting for Stevie, and of course he never showed up at that time, so we realized we had to reconvene in Los Angeles. We ended up, all of us, at Stevie’s studio in L.A., and we had an amazing time putting it all together. For me, Stevie was a big influence on my playing. I’d studied classical music and musicals, but really my heart was in rock ‘n’ roll and funk and great keyboard players, so I used to really try and learn everything that Stevie did. And so we found ourselves in the studio together, and we jammed for 20 minutes — just him and me, trading licks back and forth, keyboard parts. I’ll never forget that moment. It was like we were having a dialogue through music. That was for me an absolute journey; it was incredible.

Is it true that Stevie didn’t show up to the actual Grammys until the last minute, and everyone was panicking?

Well, he was working on the mix in the studio all night and he doesn’t really have a concept of time, particularly between day and night. He just worked all through the night to get the mix the way he wanted, so we left him to do that. I think that’s appropriate — like, he’s the elder statesman, one of the absolute legends of pop music, so he should do that.

Were you freaking out?

I kind of had the sense that Stevie was not always predictable, but I never panicked and thought that he wouldn’t turn up. I was used to [unpredictability] at that time: I was doing shows where we were using new technology, and things would go wrong and things wouldn’t happen the way you planned. So the fact that he didn’t turn up till the last minute really didn’t faze me at all.

Any other Stevie-centric memories of that time?

One thing I remember about being at Stevie’s studio — which I was always really very moved by — was that his studio wasn’t in the most upmarket part of town, and people would turn up in the foyer, people a bit down on their luck, and at lunchtime he would arrange for food for them. And they would sit in the foyer and have takeaway food. That happened every lunchtime, and I was very impressed by that.

Were you intimidated to be sharing the stage with legends like Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock?

No, I didn’t feel that, actually. Maybe that’s just because of being the young new kid on the block — you’re full of confidence and you’ve got hits on the charts. I didn’t feel intimidated; I felt honored. It was great for me to be on the Grammys; I never thought I’d get that far, so it was great.

How much of the Grammys performance was actually live, and how much of it was pre-taped?

A lot of it was prerecorded stuff that we’d already done in the studio because of the ambition of it, because it was using that amount of technology. I don’t think anybody would have been brave enough to play everything live! So we played some things over the top of it, and then the rest of it was pre-done in studio. I think that’s the only way to have achieved it for the Grammys. I think it would have been very risky otherwise!

Did you feel it all worked out in the end?

Yes, it did, and the big surprise was I didn’t expect Thomas Dolby to come out in that amazing wig and tuxedo — which is so him, you know, and brilliant. And that tiny little keyboard!

What was the reaction in the Shrine Auditorium that night? Were people confused, or were they into it?

I think they were very excited about it, because it was a new thing. I don’t think anybody had ever done anything like that before — centered around keyboards, centered around new technology, drum machines and all that. That was quite controversial at that time. That’s the thing: As an electronic musician, people didn’t really understand how it was done, what you were doing or whether you were doing anything. I used to get things like, Rolling Stone would say, “Howard Jones doesn’t have to turn up to his shows; he can just send the keyboard and it plays itself!” It was absolutely not true at all, it was an acquired skill and a difficult thing that I’d been developing for years, but I understand that people didn’t know that and it was a new thing.

You have to remember, Queen used to put on one of their albums: “No synthesizers at all used in the making of this record.” When you start out doing these new things, there’s always going to be a reaction. I suppose that’s just the way it’s always been. But that [Grammy] moment kind of swept that away. I think people were like, “Oh wow, these are musicians and they’ve got brains and they write; they’re just using a different instrument.” So I think that was a moment that changed things.

Do you think this performance turned people on to keyboards or electronic music?

Yes, lots of people have told me they got very, very excited and ran out the next day and bought a Moog or a Prophet synthesizer and just got into it.

And now, 30 years later, you’re still pushing yourself, with your new ENGAGE project. What makes you want to keep trying new things, instead of just resting your laurels?

I think maybe it’s because I’ve never had, like, super-huge success. It’s always been consistent, where I’ve had a wonderful following with great fans, but it’s never been like every show I do gets sold-out or every album sells huge amounts. I felt I’ve always had to work hard at it and get people to the shows one by one, and I think maybe the struggle with that has kept me hungry to keep trying new things. At least that’s my theory at the moment!

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.