re: #321 LudwigVanQuixote

This song was conceived as a ballad by Wang Chung’s Jack Hues and Nick Feldman, which is how it appears on the original demo. It was produced by Peter Wolf, who was lead singer of The J. Geils Band. On the Just My Show podcast with Eric Greenberg, Hues explained: “Most of the time we write separately, but ‘Everybody Have Fun Tonight’ is actually quite a collaborative song. When we came up with the original line, I then went away and wrote with a ‘Hey Jude’ style ballad around it, trying to be ironic. And then when we got in the studio with Peter Wolf, he was like, ‘This is an amazing dance hit, you rock the tempo, you’ve got to really deliver what the title suggests.’
The original demo we recorded in Nick’s flat in London around Christmas time I think one Monday, because it had all these sort of like sleigh bells and stuff on it. And I just wanted it to have that kind of weird Disney-esque sort of atmosphere. But things obviously change as people hear the songs and see certain potentials in it. And after To Live and Die in LA we did have a choice facing us, which is, Okay you can do more movies, you can be sort of arty if you want, but you won’t necessarily get support for that. Or you can go and have a hit record, which is what the label always wants from you. And we pretty consciously chose to have a proper hit record and sort of establish ourselves.”