Monday 24 April 2023

Remembering “Bad Bad Boy” by Haywire


The summer of 1986 I went to visit my cousins in Brooks and I accompanied my cousin Fred to Duchess to visit with one of is bandmates.

Their band learned every song by ear, and later that night I watched my cousins Fred and Vince learn the song “Take it Easy” by Andy Taylor.

But when we entered that basement in Duchess, the song playing was “Bad, Bad Boy”.

The song
“Bad, Bad Boy” was performed by Haywire, and the music video was shot in part in a roller rink. The song would go all the way to number 21 on the charts in Canada in 1986.

Battle of the bands
Haywire was a band from Prince Edward Island, who won a couple contests that earned them the money to record their material. One was the “Q-104 Homegrown” contest in 1984, and the other was the Labatt’s “Battle of the Bands” in 1985, that eventually lead to a recording contract.

Radio goes Haywire
The band would go on to have some other songs I distinctly remember, starting with “Standing in Line” and “Shot in the Dark” off the same album as “Bad Bad Boy’. They released another album which produced more singles, namely “Black and Blue”, “Dance Desire” and “Thinkin’ About the Years:”.

Parting thoughts
There was a time when Canadian bands proliferated the radio waves, partly because they benefited from Canadian content rules and partly because they were just good. Haywire was a band that likely would not have hit the airwaves if they weren’t Canadian, but when they did, listeners discovered they were just good.

"Bad Bad Boy" also takes me back to that summer, the last one I spent with my cousins in Brooks after five years of great times together. It reminds how much they loved music, how talented they were, and how cool it was to hang out with them.

No comments:

Post a Comment