Say It Isn't So

The Zoo Crew has got the turntable warmed up and the needle down on a record that still hits like a fastball over the fence. Right now the station is spinning "Say It Isn't So" by The Outfield, the opener from the 1985 debut album Play Deep, and if you are a Zoo Freak who came up on album rock radio, you already know that riff before the first chorus lands. It is the sound of three East End lads who somehow wrote American summer radio better than half the bands born on this side of the Atlantic, and it is living right here on THE ZOO the way a deep cut ought to live, loud and without a commercial wedged in the middle.

John Spinks wrote the song, same as he wrote nearly everything the band ever put on tape. Columbia heard the demos for "Say It Isn't So" and "Your Love" and signed the group in 1984, which tells you the label already knew which track was going to walk into American rock radio first. "Say It Isn't So" was the lead single, released ahead of the album, and it climbed to number 18 on the U.S. rock chart while turning into a regional number one in plenty of markets that still treated album radio like a religion. Play Deep itself landed on November 12, 1985, after sessions at AIR Studios in London that July, with producer William Wittman behind the board. Wittman had already worked with Cyndi Lauper and the Fixx, and he gave the trio that bright, punchy finish that sounded huge on a car stereo. The album later peaked at number 9 on the Billboard 200 and went double platinum in the States. Four singles came off it. "Your Love" became the one everybody can hum in a grocery aisle, but "Say It Isn't So" is the one that opened the door.

The lyric is a straight-ahead plea. Somebody has got the singer all screwed up, he cannot sleep, and he wants to know if there is somebody else in the game. Spinks never dressed a hook up in poetry when a clean chorus would do the job. In a 1986 interview he put it plain: he loved melodic music, he could write a pretty melody, and you did not have to analyze the words to understand them. You put the songs on while you were driving and they made you feel good. That was the whole assignment. He had grown up on the Beatles and wanted harmony stacked on a guitar figure you could whistle after one pass. Fans who dug into the video, directed by Andrew Morahan, noticed something cheeky in the clip. John appears more than once in the frame, white shirt and black shirt, so he can cover both guitar parts and the backing vocals at the same time. It is a small studio trick, and it fits a band that was always a little smarter than the power-pop label stuck on the sleeve.

The name on that sleeve almost never happened. Before they were The Outfield they were the Baseball Boys, a handle Spinks lifted from the Baseball Furies, the bat-swinging street gang in the cult film The Warriors. He wrote it on the spine of a demo cassette as a joke, something outrageous, and the record people liked it. Their American manager, living over in England, figured Baseball Boys was a bit too tongue-in-cheek and tacky for a proper campaign, so the band went looking for something with the same attitude. Spinks later said The Outfield was the most left-field thing they liked. The baseball obsession stuck anyway. Album titles kept swinging at the same idea, Play Deep among them, and the group opened American tours for Journey and Starship while the record climbed. Back home in England almost nobody noticed. None of the albums charted in the U.K., and the band could play a local pub where half the room had no idea these three had sold millions of records across the ocean. That split is part of the story Zoo Freaks love. An English band that sounded like it had been raised on American FM, named for a position on a diamond, bigger in Dallas and Chicago than in the East End where the songs were written.

Getting there took the long way around a pub circuit. Tony Lewis, John Spinks, and Alan Jackman had already played together in the late 1970s in a power-pop outfit called Sirius B. They rehearsed for months, did a handful of gigs, and then watched punk swallow London whole. Their brighter, sing-along style did not match the room, so the group broke up. Tony kept working the pubs and clubs, stepping up to the microphone with a longer guitar lead, and one night John caught him singing a cover of the Police's "Message in a Bottle." John told him that with that voice and John's songs they could build a proper band, then asked if Tony could play bass and sing on some demos. Alan sat in on drums. The chemistry held. They worked under the Baseball Boys name, held day jobs, and cut shoestring recordings at Scarf Studios. A missing singer on the night of a show at the Mitre pub in south London forced them into a three-piece on the spot, and the next day the decision stuck. American management heard the tapes, suggested the name change, and walked them into CBS Columbia. By 1984 Tony was a professional musician for the first time, and the songs that became Play Deep were already in the can as demos.

Spinks had been writing since he was a kid in the East End, born November 28, 1953, swinging a tennis racket like a guitar and chasing Beatles melodies. Lewis, born December 21, 1957, in the same part of London, had the high, clean voice that made those melodies stick. Jackman, born in Slough on October 24, 1958, supplied the whip-crack snare. Years later the original three cut Replay together, released in 2011, before Spinks died of liver cancer on July 9, 2014, at 60. The group disbanded after that. Lewis put out a solo album, Out of the Darkness, in 2018, and died suddenly on October 19, 2020, at 62. Jackman has kept playing, including work with Albert Lee. The songs did not leave with them. "Say It Isn't So" is still the first thing you hear when you drop the needle on Play Deep, a three-minute argument with a girl who will not give a straight answer, built for a station that still believes in albums.

If you want the long version from the people who kept the lights on, the official home is theoutfield.com, where the band history and the Play Deep era sit in plain view. The official Facebook page is The Outfield on Facebook. Fans who never stopped arguing about set lists and live tapes gather in The Outfield Fanzone, a long-running group that still trades stories about Tony, John, and Alan. Tony's own site, tonylewismusic.com, carries his biography and the road from those East End demos to the records that ended up on American radio. Spin it again if you want. The Zoo Crew is not in any hurry to take it off.