In Your Eyes

Pull the needle across side two of Union Jacks and the first thing that hits is not a chart slogan. It is John Waite, close to the mic, singing like the room just got smaller. "In Your Eyes" is the deep cut The Babys never shopped as a single, and that is exactly why it still feels like a private letter that somehow got pressed onto vinyl. Four minutes and five seconds, credited to Waite and the band's new American bassist Ricky Phillips, it sits on Chrysalis CHR 1267 right after the long flag-waving title track and before the group-written rocker "Anytime." Album radio in 1980 had the hits queued up. The Zoo still has room for the song that did the quieter work.

Union Jacks landed on January 8, 1980, the fourth Babys album and the first with the lineup that finally let Waite step out from behind the bass. The British core was still there: Waite on lead vocal, Wally Stocker on guitar, Tony Brock on drums. The new hands were Jonathan Cain on keyboards and Phillips on bass, both Americans brought in after founding keyboardist and guitarist Michael Corby was shown the door. Producer Keith Olsen, the man who had already put a shine on Fleetwood Mac and knew his way around a big chorus, took the five of them into Sound City Studios in the Los Angeles area in 1979. Chris Minto engineered alongside Olsen. Anne Marie Leclerc added a backing vocal on "True Love True Confession," but "In Your Eyes" belongs to the band itself. Cain's keys sit up front. Stocker answers in short, clean phrases. Phillips locks the low end he co-wrote. Brock keeps the pulse from turning into a ballad puddle. Waite does the rest with that slightly bruised British tenor, half challenge and half confession.

The album peaked at number 42 on the Billboard 200 and hung around the chart for the better part of a season. The singles did the public work. "Midnight Rendezvous," a Waite and Cain tune, scratched the Hot 100 at number 72. "Back on My Feet Again," written by Waite with the British team of Dominic Bugatti and Frank Musker, climbed to number 33 and became the last Babys Top 40 hit. "True Love True Confession" never charted. "In Your Eyes" was never asked to. That is the fun of it. Side one was built for the request lines. Side two opened with a song about being read, about somebody seeing straight through the pose, and the band left it there for the people who played the whole record. Dutch charts even gave the album a run, topping out around number 24, while a lot of the rest of the world had already moved on. Rock Candy reissued the set in 2009, remastered, no bonus tracks, for the listeners who had worn out the Chrysalis pressing.

The name on the sleeve was a joke that stuck. In London in the mid-1970s, an ad went into Melody Maker looking for a singer, and the story the band has told ever since is that the notice asked for someone who looked like a baby. Waite, already through earlier outfits including Chalk Farm, Graf Spee and England, answered. Corby, Brock and Stocker filled out the original four. Chrysalis signed them. The self-titled debut arrived in 1976. Broken Heart followed fast, and with it the two songs that still introduce the band on classic-rock radio: "Isn't It Time" and "Every Time I Think of You," both written by Jack Conrad and Ray Kennedy, both reaching number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 8 on Cash Box. Those records used the Babettes, the female backing singers who gave the choruses their lift. Head First, cut as a trio after Corby left, kept the run alive and sent the band out opening for Journey. That tour is where the next chapter started.

Waite wanted the front of the stage, not the bass cabinet. Phillips, a young player working a music-store counter in Hollywood for about a hundred dollars a week, got the call after Babys associate Marc Salter caught him with another Los Angeles band. Cain, already a songwriter with a minor solo single behind him, auditioned with a tune called "Stick to Your Guns" and was hired on the spot. The five of them wrote at all hours. Phillips later said Waite would tell him it did not matter how late the clock read; if a song was in his head, the coffee went on. "In Your Eyes" came out of that room, a Waite and Phillips collaboration on an album otherwise crowded with Cain co-writes. Cain even took the lead vocal on "Turn Around in Tokyo," the only cut on Union Jacks that hands the microphone away from Waite. The sleeve design, handled by Bill Murphy and Rod Dyer, Inc., leaned into the flag the title promised: a British band flying a mixed crew.

The ride did not last. On the Edge followed before the year was out, with "Turn and Walk Away" as the calling card. On tour Waite punched a mirror and wrecked his hand. He finished a few more dates, then decided the band was done and pointed Cain toward the open chair in Journey. Cain took it, walked into Escape, and helped write the songs that turned that band into an arena fixture. Phillips later joined him in Bad English, the late-eighties supergroup that also pulled Waite back into the same orbit. Waite's solo career peaked in 1984 when "Missing You," written with Chas Sandford and Mark Leonard for the album No Brakes, went to number one in America. Stocker and Brock kept working. Brock's drum chair has since sat behind names as scattered as Rod Stewart, Eddie Money and Roy Orbison. The original Babys story closed in 1981. The songs did not.

A later lineup brought the name back, with Brock still at the kit and Stocker tied to the guitar legacy, fronted in recent years by John Bisaha, and the catalog is on the road again under the official banner. For the 1980 record, though, the voice you want is Waite's. "In Your Eyes" is the sound of that short, hot lineup before the split: British rhythm section, American keys and bass, Olsen's Sound City punch, and a singer who could make a non-single feel like the center of the album. If the phone lines are open for the hits, leave this one for the stretch where the station can breathe. The Zoo keeps the deep cuts in rotation for exactly that reason, the way THE ZOO was built to do, commercial-free and in no hurry to flip to the next jingle.

The band's own house is still open at thebabysofficial.com, with the current lineup, the old song list, and word on the shows. The same camp posts on Facebook, shares stage photos on Instagram, and keeps the short dispatches rolling at @TweetTheBabys. Waite's solo trail, the one that started when he set the bass down and ended up with a number-one record of his own, lives at johnwaite.com. Phillips has kept his own account of joining the band, the Hollywood music-store audition and all, on the Babys page at rickyphillips.com. Between those pages and a clean copy of Union Jacks, "In Your Eyes" still does what it did on side two: it looks straight at you and does not blink.