The Alternative Number Ones: David J’s “I’ll Be Your Chauffeur”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

I didn't know. This isn't me being cute or coy or dismissive. Genuinely, I had no idea. I wrote a whole Alternative Number Ones column on Love And Rockets and their big crossover hit "So Alive," and I didn't even tease the fact that a Love And Rockets member landed a #1 solo hit on the Billboard Modern Rock Songs chart shortly afterward. I could've figured that out pretty easily, but somehow it never even occurred to me that the David J from Love And Rockets was the same David J who reached #1 with the 1990 single "I'll Be Your Chauffeur." Missed me completely.

I cannot tell you how David J reached #1, but I can offer some theories. In the early days of the Modern Rock Songs chart, there weren't that many alternative rock stations in the country. Sometimes, a song could sneak all the way up to #1 without leaving much cultural residue. Maybe the bass player from Love And Rockets -- not even the main guy from Love And Rockets -- could drop a solo album and score an out-of-nowhere chart-topper. Anything was possible. And guess what? I'm not even mad at myself for forgetting the existence of "I'll Be Your Chauffeur." Because "I'll Be Your Chauffeur" isn't just a forgettable song. It's a song that practically shakes you by the lapels and demands to be forgotten.

David J was born David J. Haskins in the English town of Northampton, and like every other member of Love And Rockets, he was in Bauhaus first. So was his younger brother, drummer Kevin Haskins. (I don't know why one member of the Bauhaus rhythm section opted to keep his last name while the other one dropped it, but goths are supposed to be mysterious.) David J was never the person in charge of Bauhaus; that responsibility went back and forth between singer Peter Murphy and guitarist Daniel Ash. But it was reportedly David J's idea to call the band by the later-shortened name of Bauhaus 1919, and he also wrote the lyrics to "Bela Lugosi's Dead," the group's debut single and signature song. That means David J had a pretty big hand in shaping goth culture. Give him that.

Bauhaus were still a going concern when David J first went solo. In 1981, David J -- then billed as "David Jay" -- teamed up with René Halkett, a German artist who was part of the original Bauhaus movement, to release the single "Nothing" b/w "Armour." Bauhaus broke up in 1983, and Daniel Ash and Kevin Haskins went off and formed a new band called Tones On Tail. Peter Murphy went solo, and so did David J. David was the first to drop a solo album. Etiquette Of Violence came out before 1983 was over, and lead single "Joe Orton's Wedding" is some truly unlistenable circus-music bullshit.

While making solo music, David J also joined a few bands. He played in the Jazz Butcher, the London group led by songwriter Pat Fish, and produced two of their album's, 1984's A Scandal In Bohemia and 1985's Sex And Travel. David J was also buds with the great comic book writer Alan Moore. In 1984, David released an EP that was supposed to serve as a soundtrack for Moore's classic graphic novel V For Vendetta. He and Moore briefly had a band called the Sinister Ducks, and you can live a full and happy life without ever hearing their 1983 single "March Of The Sinister Ducks." And yet here I am, embedding it for your inscrutable listening pleasure.

David J's solo music was not setting the world on fire, but he kept making it. His 1985 album Crocodile Tears & The Velvet Cosh took a sharp turn toward mellow acoustic singer-songwriter music, with lots of saxophone and jazzy brushed drums. It could've been the result of an experiment: What if Billy Bragg wasn't that great of a songwriter, and what if his lyrics were all pseudo-poetic opacities rather than polemics? You can draw your own conclusions, but mine is that nobody would care.

The same year that he released Crocodile Tears & The Velvet Cosh, David J also got back together with his old Bauhaus bandmates and formed Love And Rockets. The whole idea of Love And Rockets was that Daniel Ash and David J would serve as co-leaders, trading off singing and songwriting duties. "So Alive," Love And Rockets' one monster hit, was a Daniel Ash track. Once again, David J was a supporting player. When "So Alive" came out, Love And Rockets were pretty deep into their career. They toured hard behind that album, and then they took five years to drop a follow-up album. In the column on "So Alive," I summed up their intervening years like this: "Daniel Ash and David J both made unsuccessful solo records in the early ’90s." I maintain that I was not wrong about this, but here I am, writing about a David J solo record in this column anyway.

This isn't a prank, right? It's probably not a prank. There is, I suppose, an outside possibility that someone could've designed an elaborate trap for me here. They could've written and recorded a fake song called "I'll Be Your Chauffeur" and forged all the online evidence, simply making it look like David J really released this single in 1990 and like that song was a #1 Modern Rock hit. But that would probably be too much work, and I don't think anyone would really get anything out of it. I'm forced to conclude that "I'll Be Your Chauffeur" was a real thing, that I simply have no memory of it. Today, "I'll Be Your Chauffeur" is David J's most-played solo song on Spotify, but it has less than a hundred thousand streams. It might be the least famous song that will ever appear in this column.

To be fair, I was 10 years old when the song came out. If "I'll Be Your Chauffeur" ever came on the radio back then, I would've simply kept scanning. The song only sat at #1 for a single week, in between the twin reigns of Gene Loves Jezebel's "Jealous," itself not exactly a cultural juggernaut. By the time I became an active alternative rock listener, "I'll Be Your Chauffeur" was long gone from those stations' playlists. It's a strange little relic of the moment when those stations were just finding their footing and, I suppose, starved for new Love And Rockets material. The streets were hungry! David J had to feed the streets!

"I'll Be Your Chauffeur" comes from David J's 1990 solo album Songs From Another Season, which doesn't sound much like Love And Rockets or Bauhaus. Instead, it's David J returning to the sound from Crocodile Tears & The Velvet Cosh, making quietly mellow singer-songwriter stuff with his old Jazz Butcher bandmates Max Eider and Owen Jones. David produced the album himself. It's soft, spare, and generally pretty boring. Occasionally, I hear distant echoes of the old rockabilly records that once inspired David's old glam rock heroes, but even that stuff comes through mountains of reverb.

The lyrics for "I'll Be Your Chauffeur" are an extended metaphor, with David J promising to take us to some kind of utopian promised land: "I'll be your chauffeur/ Drive you to a distant shore/ Fill the tank with gas and dreams/ The twinkle of the stars shall be our semaphore." (I had to look up "semaphore" just now, but that's the thing where you spell out messages by waving red flags around.) As the song continues, David goes cosmic with the analogy, singing that he'll chase a shooting star while bringing you to a ticker tape parade in space. Trippy.

In those lyrics, David J also offers this: "I'll be your chauffeur/ No diversion shall deter/ I'll wear the uniform/ The engine shall purr as if metal were fur." As if metal were fur! Good lord. Have some standards, college-rock radio programmers of 1990. Have some respect for yourself. There were Pixies and Sonic Youth and Mazzy Star singles you could've been playing, but you went with the "engine shall purr as if metal were fur" guy. Those anglophile tendencies were really out of hand. They were just playing anything British at that point.

Musically, there's not much happening on "I'll Be Your Chauffeur." The music is an amiable-enough shuffle, and it's not exactly unpleasant. There's a lot of accordion in the mix, and I'm not really sure what's going on with that. Maybe David J was trying to get some of that residual They Might Be Giants love. (They Might Be Giants' highest-charting Modern Rock hit, 1990's "Birdhouse In Your Soul," peaked at #3. It's a 9.) Maybe the accordion was cool back then. Family Matters only started airing in September 1989, so perhaps the grim specter of Steve Urkel had not yet altered that instrument's place in the cultural firmament. I'm the wrong guy to ask.

The problem with "I'll Be Your Chauffeur" isn't the pleasant-enough music. Instead, it's David J himself. He sings the whole thing like his mom is asleep in the next room and he doesn't want to wake her up. That's fine if you're making soul-wrecked torch songs; it's not so good if you're doing jaunty jangle-pop.

Also, "I'll Be Your Chauffeur" is over four minutes, which is way too long. About halfway through, there's a false start where the song ends and then, one second later, picks up again. He should've ended it there! It would've been fine! Instead, "I'll Be Your Chauffeur" feels like it goes on forever. I guess the extended version of the song does have the bit where David sings, "I'll be your chauffeur, yeah." He puts some nice deep-voice mustard on the "yeah," and that's absolutely my favorite part of the song. He only does the "yeah" a couple of times, though.

In the "I'll Be Your Chauffeur" video, David J and his backup guys amble around the countryside. The other guitarist sometimes wears a shirt with lightbulbs all over it. The accordion player has pointy sideburns and fake angel wings. This handy archive tells me that 120 Minutes only aired the "I'll Be Your Chauffeur" video once, and I can see why. This is the part of the column where I'd usually tell you about the chart fortunes of David J's later records, but he doesn't have a page on the Billboard site, and his Wikipedia page doesn't have the stats, either, so I have no idea. Nobody has bothered to make a publicly available database of the chart placements of David J solo records. I get it. We're all on this planet for a finite period of time, and nobody needs to use that time building the David J chart archive. My guess is that the guy didn't have any other alt-rock hits, but I didn't see "I'll Be Your Chauffeur" coming, so what do I know?

David J released another solo album, 1992's Urban Urbane, on MCA, and then he didn't come out with another solo LP until 2003's Estranged. David's Love And Rockets bandmate Daniel Ash released his own solo debut Coming Down in 1991. Ash does have a Billboard listing, so I can tell you that lead single "This Love," which sounds a lot like "So Alive," went all the way to #2. (It's a 6.) Ash also got to #3 with "Get Out Of Control," from his 1992 album Foolish Things Desire. (It's a 7.) I don't remember those songs, either, but they're pretty good.

When Love And Rockets finally came back with a new album, the alt-rock zeitgeist had moved on. Since then David J has done reunion stuff with both Bauhaus and Love And Rockets. He's made more music with Alan Moore. He wrote some music for stage productions, and he did some work with a latter-day version of onetime Love And Rockets opening act Jane's Addiction, a band that'll appear in this column very soon. David released a solo album called What The Patrons Heard in 2022. He's kept busy.

When you're one of the less-important members of a popular-ish rock band, you're supposed to keep busy. You're supposed to tinker around with little projects when your main gig isn't active. David J's been doing that for decades. That's what he was doing when he recorded "I'll Be Your Chauffeur." It's one more side-project lark in a solo career full of side-project larks. There's nothing wrong with side-project larks, but they're not supposed to go to #1.

GRADE: 4/10

BONUS BEATS: Look, I don't have a lot to work with here. What am I supposed to tell you? That David J and someone named McKenna Frazer recorded a ukulele-heavy version of "I'll Be Your Chauffeur" in 2012? That they made an incredibly cheap video for it? Fine. Sure. Let's go with that. Here it is: