In case you haven't noticed, the Human League and English Beat/General Public tour that was supposed to begin Wednesday in Seattle didn't. And it won't in the foreseeable future. According to English Beat/General Public frontman Dave Wakeling, "[tour promoter James Fitzsimmons] was dreaming a bit" about the market value of such a package tour, so it became a financial impossibility.

"I don't want to misjudge him too much, but it appeared that he'd offered top dollar to all the bands to get them interested and then found it terribly hard to break the news that the sheds weren't interested in paying as much as he'd already offered," says Wakeling. In his defense, Fitzsimmons says "Southern California was [the English Beat and General Public's] biggest market, and Dave Wakeling has a band that plays bars [there] about six times a week and that kind of took out that area of the country for them." In translation, Southern California had been saturated with Wakeling-related endeavors, reducing any reunion hoopla.

Instead of opening for the Human League, Wakeling, billed as the English Beat's Dave Wakeling, will be opening for Hootie & the Blowfish during the last two weeks of their current U.S. tour. According to Wakeling, Hootie expressed interest in having him open for them when both bands played a show in San Diego a month ago.

"[Hootie frontman] Darius [Rucker] started to play [the English Beat's] 'Save It For Later' and then he made this huge speech about the English Beat, about how influential we were and what an honor and privilege it was to share the stage," Wakeling says. "After they finished their show they came around to our bus and said, 'would you come on tour with us?'"

Wakeling's opening gig on the Hootie tour likely will coincide with the re-release of the English Beat catalog on London records. General Public's catalog will see a similar re-release on Dreamworks in the not-too-distant future.

As for the future of the English Beat and General Public, Wakeling says Ranking Roger, a founding member of both the English Beat and General Public, wanted too much money per show to tour with Hootie, so he bowed out. Right now, a revue tour featuring the English Beat, General Public and the Fine Young Cannibals is in preliminary discussions for some time next year. When the Beat dissolved in the early Eighties, guitarist Andy Cox and bassist David Steel went on to help form the Cannibals, while Wakeling and Roger formed General Public.

BLAIR R. FISCHER
(July 8, 1999)