In 1985, rock band Mr. Mister had a problem. They knew that their ballad Broken Wings was a great song, but they also knew that no pop radio station in America was going to play a track that was almost six minutes long - especially from a band that nobody had ever heard of.
When they tried editing the track, cutting it down to a radio-friendly three minutes, they felt they had lost too much of what made the song so powerful.
So they came up with a different solution.
Some might call it a clever little confidence trick. Others might say it’s just plain cheating. But as the band’s singer Richard Page said: “It worked - and nobody ever knew…”
In a 2023 interview with Rock Candy magazine, Page revealed how Broken Wings was created and how it became a hit.
He recalled how Mr. Mister had endured abject failure in the year before Broken Wings was released.
The band’s debut album I Wear The Face was produced by Peter McIan, who had enjoyed huge success with Australian band Men At Work and their worldwide number one Down Under.
“Peter had produced that mega-hit,” Page said, “and we were hoping that some of that would rub off on us. And it never does.”
I Wear The Face limped to number 170 on the US chart in 1984. “Honestly, I didn't expect that record to do anything,” Page said. “And sure enough, it didn’t!”
Despite that failure, Page was not unduly worried. At that time he was making good money as a session musician, contributing backing vocals to records by a wide array of acts including Julio Iglesias, Twisted Sister, REO Speedwagon, Kenny Loggins, the Village People and Mötley Crüe.
Page was also courted by two major bands in need of a lead vocalist - Toto, who had fired singer Bobby Kimball, and Chicago, whose frontman Peter Cetera was having hits as a solo artist.
“I think I was on a shortlist for both bands,” Page said.
But he remained committed to Mr. Mister, and convinced of the potential in the songs he had written with keyboard player Steve George and lyricist John Lang.
Lang, Page’s cousin, was not a member of the band, but as Page said: “His writing had this edgy kind of weirdness, and I had this light melodic thing going on, so it was an interesting contrast. Sometimes, John’s words were kind of angst-ridden, just full of despair, so they didn’t always work with my little melodies. But he had a lot of great ideas, and Broken Wings was one of them.”
Mr. Mister’s second album, Welcome To The Real World, was recorded between October 1984 and April 1985.
It was at Ocean Way, the LA recording studio known as “the Abbey Road of the West Coast”, that Page laid down the lead vocal track for Broken Wings. And he nailed it in one take.
“I was in the big room at Ocean Way,” he said. “They had the lights down, and I could just see a little glimmer of the control room and the guys in there. I had a C12 microphone, worth around $30,000. The right kind of preamp. Everything was sounding really good in my headphones. It was just one of those moments when I was really inspired…”
Welcome To The Real World was a seamless blend of AOR, new wave, pop and progressive rock. It was also packed with potential singles.
Broken Wings was picked first on a very simple basis: it was, in Page’s estimation, “the best song”. But it was also the longest track on the album.
“I never thought it would be a hit,” Page recalled. “It was too long, nearly six minutes. The conventional wisdom was: there’s no radio station in the world that will play a song this long. Although they played American Pie [Don McLean’s classic hit], which was like eight minutes. So when Broken Wings was sent out to radio, we lied. We put a different time on the cassette box: four minutes twenty seconds. And it worked. Nobody ever knew.”
Released in June 1985, Broken Wings eventually reached number one in December of that year.
In the moody black-and-white video for Broken Wings, Page rocked the classic ’80s look in a trench coat with sleeves rolled up to the elbows. But if the short-haired Page looked like Sting, guitarist Steve Farris had the kind of big hair favoured by glam metal bands.
As Page said: “Steve would travel with a box of Aqua Net hairspray. I mean a whole case of it. And he had to have his own dressing room because nobody could bear the smell of that stuff!”
After Broken Wings came another chart-topping smash with the euphoric anthem Kyrie. Sales of Welcome To The Real World eventually topped two million.
But this was a hard act to follow, and Mr. Mister blew it in 1987 with their third album Go On…
With no hit single, the album peaked at number 55 in the US.
A fourth album, titled Pull, was shelved by the band’s record company RCA, and would remain unreleased until it was issued on Page’s own label Little Dume Recordings in 2010.
Back in 1990, after Pull was rejected, RCA dropped Mr. Mister. And with that, the band split up.
Richard Page went to record solo albums and worked with other artists including Barbra Streisand. He also performed for eight years in Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band.
Page told Rock Candy that he has received offers for a Mr. Mister reunion, but in all these years there has been only one time when this band has played together again.
It was on 16 May, 2023 - to celebrate Page’s 70th birthday. In an LA studio they played Broken Wings and other old songs for a small audience of family and friends.
“The four of us hadn't been in the same room for thirty-something years,” Page said. “Considering we hadn’t rehearsed together, it was amazing. And more than that, it was beautiful.”
