Midnight Rendezvous

You are locked into The Zoo, the listener-supported, commercial-free rock stream that still believes an album side can change the temperature in the room. Pull up a chair at thezoorocks.com and stay with the deep cuts, because the track under the needle is one of those 1980 radio records that never quite got the air it deserved and still snaps like a fresh 45. The song is “Midnight Rendezvous,” written by John Waite and Jonathan Cain, cut for The Babys and issued on the fourth Chrysalis album, Union Jacks. Three minutes and thirty-six seconds of clipped guitars, bright keyboards, and a vocal that sounds like a man already halfway out the door.

The band that delivered it did not start as a Los Angeles radio machine. The idea took shape in London around 1973 and 1974, when keyboardist and guitarist Michael Corby and manager Adrian Millar began holding auditions. The name was a dare. Corby liked the spelling because it would irritate critics. Waite later told Hit Parader the joke was practical: labels would not come down to hear a straight rock band, so they called themselves The Babys and the odd spelling stuck. Waite, a Lancastrian who had already passed through Graf Spee and Chalk Farm and a short Cleveland stint with a group called The Boys, came in on lead vocals and bass. Drummer Tony Brock arrived from Strider and Spontaneous Combustion. Guitarist Wally Stocker, late of Joy and Pegasus, locked the original front line in January 1976. Chrysalis signed them in July 1976 on a deal that, at the time, was the richest ever handed to a new act.

The first album, recorded in Toronto with Bob Ezrin in the producer’s chair, arrived in December 1976. Broken Heart followed in 1977, Ron Nevison producing, and handed them the American breakthrough “Isn’t It Time,” a Jack Conrad and Ray Kennedy song that climbed to number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 and went to number one in Australia. The Babys had wanted to live on their own material. The hit forced a wider door. Head First, issued at the end of 1978, repeated the trick with “Every Time I Think of You,” another Conrad and Kennedy tune and another number 13. By then the internal weather had turned. Corby was dismissed on August 28, 1978. The remaining trio finished the record without him, then went looking for a new engine.

That search produced the Union Jacks lineup, and it is the lineup you hear on “Midnight Rendezvous.” Keyboardist, guitarist, and writer Jonathan Cain, already a minor solo name from the 1976 single “Till It’s Time to Say Goodbye,” stepped in for Corby. Bassist Ricky Phillips, out of Nasty Habit, took the low end so Waite could stand up front and sing. The five-piece debuted at the Whisky a Go Go on the last day of 1978 and spent the winter and spring of 1979 opening for Alice Cooper, shaping the new set on the road and demoing on a four-track before they booked Sound City in Los Angeles. The producer was Keith Olsen, the man behind the polished punch of Fleetwood Mac and the early Pat Benatar records. Olsen and engineer Chris Minto gave Union Jacks a tighter, brighter attack than the cinematic Broken Heart sessions. Synthesizers edged in beside the guitars. The orchestral fog lifted. What remained was radio rock with a new-wave glint.

Union Jacks reached the shops on January 8, 1980, on Chrysalis CHR 1267. Nine songs, a little over thirty-five minutes, jacket design by Bill Murphy and Rod Dyer, Inc. Side one opens with “Back on My Feet Again,” a Waite rewrite of a song handed over by Dominic Bugatti and Frank Musker, and that one became the band’s last Top 40 hit, peaking at number 33. “True Love True Confession,” another Waite and Cain collaboration, with Anne Marie Leclerc on backing vocals, was pushed first and failed to chart. Then came “Midnight Rendezvous,” also Waite and Cain, published across the Paperwaite and Cainsongs desks, issued as Chrysalis 2425 with “Love Is Just a Mystery” on the flip. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1980 and topped out at number 72. Cash Box carried it to number 81 for a short run. The album itself climbed to number 42 on the Billboard 200 and number 58 in Australia. Not a blockbuster. A working rock record with three openers that still play like a set list.

Listen to how the song is built. Stocker’s guitar gallops instead of sprawling. Cain’s keyboards flash in short figures rather than the Hammond wash of the early albums. Brock keeps the pocket dry and forward. Phillips locks the changes so Waite can lean on the melody. The lyric is a street-corner bargain: a meeting arranged, a promise made, a voice that will not quite admit how much it wants the answer to be yes. Waite, by 1980, had the grain that would later carry “Missing You” to number one. Here the grain is younger, more urgent, still tied to a band arrangement instead of a solo frame. Dutch television’s TopPop caught the quintet miming the single, Brock behind a Ludwig kit with a pinup sketch under the band name. Queen’s Brian May was already a vocal fan of “Back on My Feet Again.” “Midnight Rendezvous” was the one that sounded like the car was already running.

The rest of Union Jacks fills in the picture. The title track, Waite and Phillips, stretches past five minutes and is the closest the album comes to a grandstand. “In Your Eyes” keeps the melodrama on a short leash. “Anytime” is a full-band write. “Jesus, Are You There?” pushes the synths harder than some fans wanted. “Turn Around in Tokyo” is the outlier: Cain takes the lead vocal. “Love Is Just a Mystery” closes the record on a softer Olsen ballad. Rock Candy reissued the album on May 26, 2009, remastered, no bonus tracks, after years out of print. Collectors still chase the Santa Maria pressing.

The lineup did not hold. Chrysalis pulled The Babys off a Journey support tour so they could cut a fifth album, On the Edge, released in October 1980. “Turn and Walk Away” reached number 42. On December 9, 1980, in Cincinnati, the day after John Lennon was killed, an overzealous fan pulled Waite off the stage during an encore and wrecked his knee. He tried one more show in Akron on crutches. The tour collapsed. Cain left for Journey, where Gregg Rolie had already pointed the band toward him, and walked into Escape, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” and the rest of that decade. Waite went solo and, in 1984, took “Missing You” to the top of the American chart. Near the end of the eighties he, Cain, and Phillips formed Bad English and scored again. Brock spent years with Rod Stewart and worked with Jimmy Barnes and Keith Urban. Stocker followed Brock into Stewart’s band, passed through Air Supply, and later played in a reformed Humble Pie. Phillips anchored Styx from 2003 into 2024.

The name came back in 2013 without Waite or Cain. Brock and Stocker rebuilt the band around singer and bassist John Bisaha and guitarist Joey Sykes, with Holly Bisaha and Elisa Chadbourne as the new Babettes. I’ll Have Some of That! arrived in 2014. The current lineup, still led by Brock, has kept the catalog on stage, including the Union Jacks singles, through a 50th-anniversary run. Stocker’s playing remains part of the story even as the live chairs have shifted. The official home is thebabysofficial.com, with the band on Facebook, Instagram, and X. For session credits, pressings, and the paper trail on Union Jacks, the collector file lives at Discogs.

That is the long way around to a short record. “Midnight Rendezvous” is the sound of a British band remade with two Americans, produced by a California hit-maker, caught between the ballads that made them and the harder swing they wanted. It stalled at 72 and outlived the chart. On The Zoo it sits where it belongs, between the deep cuts and the songs everybody already knows, on a station that does not talk over the guitar. More of that catalog, and the rest of the freeform rock stream, is waiting at thezoorocks.com.