In June 1987, an American president stood in front of the Berlin Wall and issued a challenge that travelled around the world in a single sentence, a demand that a wall be torn down. It was a political moment, made for television, and it belonged, on the face of it, to history, not to pop music. Less than a year later, a Trinidadian-born London singer released an album that borrowed that challenge for its title, and that, in its own quieter way, issued a challenge of its own: to a pop star at the peak of his fame, to a record industry that wanted him to repeat his last two albums, and to a musical landscape that was already changing under his feet. The album was Tear Down These Walls, Billy Ocean’s seventh studio album, released in early 1988, and it is, in retrospect, one of the most interesting records of Ocean’s career, not because it was his biggest, but because it was his most revealing. It is the record of a star trying, in real time, to hold on to his audience while reaching for a future he could hear coming, a future that sounded younger, harder and more electronic than the polished pop-soul that had made him famous.
This is the story of that album: how it was made, who made it, why it sounded the way it did, what it achieved, and why, even though it did not match the multi-platinum heights of its two predecessors, it deserves to be remembered as more than a footnote between bigger hits. It is a story about three very different producers working on one record, about a singer trying to honour his Caribbean roots and his adult audience at the same time, about a title track that was, in its own way, a small piece of pop history, and about an album that, for all its compromises, produced one of Ocean’s most enduring number ones, a clutch of fine ballads that are still underrated, and a lesson in what happens when a star tries to catch a changing sound without abandoning the sound that made him. It is also, inevitably, a story about walls, literal and musical, and about what it means to try to tear them down.
The hardest album to follow
Every successful artist eventually faces the same problem: how to follow a triumph without repeating it so slavishly that the new record sounds like a copy, or departing from it so radically that the audience that loved the triumph feels abandoned. For Billy Ocean in 1987, that problem was acute, because his previous two albums had not merely been successful. They had been defining. Suddenly, released in 1984, had given him his first American number one and established him as an international pop star. Love Zone, released in 1986, had consolidated that success, gone double platinum in America, produced a string of hits across pop, rhythm-and-blues and Adult Contemporary radio, and made Ocean, for a season, one of the most reliable hit-makers in the world. To follow Love Zone was, therefore, not simply to make another album. It was to make an album that could stand next to a record that had, in commercial terms, done almost everything a record could do, and to do so in a musical climate that was already shifting.
That climate is essential to understanding Tear Down These Walls, because 1987 and 1988 were years of rapid change in pop and rhythm-and-blues. The smooth, polished, adult-oriented pop-soul that had dominated the mid-1980s was being challenged, on one side, by a harder, more beat-driven sound emerging from New York and New Jersey, a sound that would soon be called new jack swing, built on syncopated drum programming, sampled rhythms and a fusion of rhythm-and-blues melody with hip-hop energy. On another side, it was being challenged by rock producers who had learned to make pop records with a harder edge, and by a new generation of listeners who wanted their pop to sound less like a ballroom and more like a street. Ocean, who was thirty-seven when the album was released, who had built his fame on warmth, polish and romantic directness, was not an obvious candidate to lead that change, but he was also not a singer who could afford to ignore it. His audience was not only his existing adult listeners. It was also, potentially, the younger listeners who were discovering rhythm-and-blues through its newer, harder forms, and an album that spoke only to the first group risked sounding like a museum piece.
Ocean’s answer to that dilemma, as embodied in Tear Down These Walls, was not to choose one side. It was to hire producers from both sides, and from his own trusted circle, and to let them, in effect, argue with each other across the album’s ten tracks. That is a risky strategy, and it is one that, in the hands of a less assured singer, could have produced a disjointed record, a collection of songs pulling in different directions without a centre. In Ocean’s hands, it produced something more interesting: an album that is, track by track, a conversation about what Billy Ocean could be in 1988, a conversation in which the singer himself is the only constant, the voice that holds the disparate productions together and makes them sound, if not like a single vision, then like a single artist trying on different versions of himself to see which ones fit. That trying-on is the album’s real drama, and it is why the record rewards a full listen, in sequence, rather than a greatest-hits skim.
Three producers, three futures
The album’s production credits read like a map of late-1980s pop. On one side stood Robert John “Mutt” Lange, the South African-born producer then in his early forties, already famous for his work with rock bands, for his meticulous, layered productions, and for his ability to turn a pop song into a widescreen, radio-ready event. Lange had worked with Ocean before, and he brought to Tear Down These Walls the same qualities he brought to his rock work: a love of big choruses, of crisp, punchy arrangements, and of songs that sounded, from the first seconds, like hits. He co-wrote and produced three tracks on the album, including its biggest hit, and his presence was a signal that Ocean and his record company were not content with a modest, adult-oriented follow-up to Love Zone. They wanted, at least on some tracks, the biggest possible sound.
On another side stood Teddy Riley, then only about twenty-one years old, a producer and musician from New York who was, at that moment, reshaping rhythm-and-blues and hip-hop with a new, harder, more rhythmic sound. Riley’s involvement in Tear Down These Walls, as a co-writer and arranger on the title track, is, in retrospect, one of the album’s most fascinating details, because it places a future architect of new jack swing in the same studio, on the same song, as Lange, a producer from a very different tradition. The title track, co-written by Ocean, Lange and Riley, is, as later commentators have noted, probably the only time Lange and Riley ever worked together, and the song itself, with its pop sheen and its hint of a harder, more urban edge underneath, sounds like exactly what it is: a meeting point between two musical worlds, a pop song that has heard the future coming and is trying, politely but firmly, to make room for it. That the song did not become a pop hit, reaching number 27 on the rhythm-and-blues chart but not making the Hot 100, does not diminish its interest. It makes it more interesting, as a document of a moment when two futures were briefly in the same room.
And on the third side, holding the album together, stood Barry Eastmond and Wayne Brathwaite, Ocean’s most trusted collaborators, the keyboard player and bass player who had written so many of his mid-1980s hits with him. Eastmond and Brathwaite produced and co-wrote seven of the album’s ten tracks, including its most enduring ballads, and their presence was a reassurance, to Ocean and to his audience, that the new album would not abandon the sound that had made him. Their tracks are, in general, smoother, more adult-oriented, more rooted in the polished pop-soul of Love Zone than Lange’s or Riley’s contributions, and they provide the album with its emotional centre. If Lange’s tracks are the album’s bid for the pop charts, and Riley’s contribution is its bid for the future, then Eastmond and Brathwaite’s tracks are its bid for continuity, its argument that Billy Ocean, whatever else he tried in 1988, was still Billy Ocean, still a singer of romantic ballads and Caribbean-flavoured grooves, still a voice that adults could trust.
That three-way split could have been a weakness, and some contemporary and retrospective critics have treated it as one, arguing that the album lacks the cohesion of its predecessors. But it can also be read as a strength, as an honest portrait of an artist at a crossroads. Ocean was not, in 1988, a singer with a single, settled sound. He was a singer with several sounds, several audiences, and several possible futures, and an album that pretended otherwise would have been a lie. Tear Down These Walls, by letting its different producers be heard, by letting a Lange pop track sit next to an Eastmond ballad and a Riley-tinged title song, tells the truth about that moment, and truth, in pop music, is rarer and more valuable than cohesion. A perfectly cohesive album that hides its artist’s uncertainties is, in the end, less interesting than a slightly uneven album that shows them, and this album shows them, track by track, with a candour that is itself a kind of artistry.
The album, track by track
The album opens with its title track, and that opening is a statement of intent. Placing the title song first, rather than burying it in the middle of a side, tells the listener that Ocean is not hiding his most ambitious, most topical song. He is leading with it, announcing, from the first seconds, that this album will engage with the world outside the recording studio, with walls, literal and metaphorical, and with the idea that those walls can be torn down. The song itself, as described above, is a pop record with a harder edge than Ocean’s earlier work, with a rhythm that owes something to Riley’s emerging sound and a chorus that owes something to Lange’s pop craftsmanship, and with a vocal from Ocean that is, as ever, warm and direct, even when the production around it is at its most modern. That it was released as a single in August 1988, and that it did not become a pop hit, should not obscure its role on the album. As an opening track, it works, setting a tone of ambition and engagement that the rest of the album then develops, in different registers, across its remaining nine songs.
The second track, a bass-driven groove about a hired gun, shows the Eastmond and Brathwaite team in a different mode, less ballad-oriented, more rhythmic, with a groove that leans on the bass and on a sense of forward motion. It is not a single, and it is not a song that casual listeners are likely to cite, but it is a useful reminder that Ocean’s collaborators were not only balladeers. They could write grooves, they could write songs with a harder, more funk-inflected feel, and they could give Ocean, a singer often associated with romance, a chance to sound tougher, more streetwise, without losing his characteristic warmth. The third track, a modern-day Motown-flavoured song about standing and delivering, released as a single in October 1988, continues that groove-oriented approach, with a chorus built for radio and a production that, while polished, has a rhythmic drive that distinguishes it from the smoother ballads elsewhere on the record. Together, these early tracks establish the album’s range: it will not be only ballads, and it will not be only pop hits. It will move, track by track, between grooves and ballads, between the dance floor and the quiet room, in a way that mirrors Ocean’s own career, which has always moved between those two places.
The fourth track is one of the album’s great ballads, and one of its most underrated achievements. A song about the colour of love, released as a single in May 1988, it became a top twenty pop hit in America and Canada, and Ocean’s tenth and final top ten hit on the American rhythm-and-blues chart, a fact that, in retrospect, gives it a valedictory quality similar to that of “Love Is Forever” two years earlier. It is a ballad in the Eastmond and Brathwaite tradition, with a melody that is both memorable and emotionally direct, and with a vocal from Ocean that is, at its best, a model of restraint. The song does not shout about love. It describes it, in terms of colour, of light, of the way love changes how the world looks, and that descriptive approach, rather than a declamatory one, is what makes it linger. It is easy, in a retrospective of Ocean’s career, to focus on his number ones and to overlook a song that reached the pop top twenty but not the top ten. That would be a mistake, because this ballad is, in its quiet way, as accomplished as any of his bigger hits, and it is one of the tracks that Apple Music’s album note singles out, indirectly, as part of Ocean’s most soulful work with his longstanding collaborators.
The fifth track, a calypso-flavoured celebration released as a single in April 1988, is the album’s most direct nod to Ocean’s Caribbean roots, and it is, in that sense, a companion piece to his earlier Caribbean-themed hits, though it is a different kind of song from those hits. Where the earlier songs used Caribbean rhythms as a flavour within a pop structure, this track, co-written by Ocean and Lange, leans more fully into a calypso feel, with a lilt and a lightness that recall the music Ocean would have heard as a boy in Trinidad, before he moved to London at the age of ten. It reached number 35 in Britain, becoming, by one account, Ocean’s twelfth and final British top forty hit, a fact that, again, gives it a retrospective poignancy it did not have in 1988. In 1988, it was simply a charming, summery single, a reminder that Ocean, for all his American pop success, had not forgotten where he came from. Today, it reads as a farewell of sorts, to the British top forty, to the calypso-pop tradition, and to a phase of Ocean’s career in which a Caribbean-flavoured single could still be a hit in Britain. That farewell quality should not be overstated, because Ocean continued to record and to tour, but it does give the track a place in his story that is distinct from its chart position.
The second side of the album, in vinyl terms, opens with its biggest hit, and the placement of that hit at the start of the second side is, in itself, a piece of album sequencing worth noting. In the vinyl era, the first track of the second side had a special responsibility: to re-engage a listener who had just flipped the record, to announce that the second half of the album would be as strong as the first, and to provide a new beginning within the album’s overall argument. Ocean’s biggest hit of 1988, a song about getting out of dreams and into a car, released as a single in January 1988, fulfils that responsibility with a grin. It is a bright, exuberant, dance-pop record, co-written by Ocean and Lange, reportedly inspired, in part, by a lyric from an older song about being sixteen, and it became Ocean’s third and final American number one, his fourth and final American rhythm-and-blues number one, and a number one in Canada, Australia, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands and Norway, reaching number three in Britain. Its video, which combined live action and animation in a way that was, at the time, strikingly innovative, helped to make it a fixture on music television, and its success, in the spring of 1988, gave the album a commercial centre that it might otherwise have lacked.
That hit, however, should not be allowed to overshadow the remaining tracks on the second side, which include, by several accounts, some of the album’s finest work. A mid-tempo song about being ready, a calypso-flavoured groove about pleasure that, like the earlier calypso track, nods to Ocean’s roots, a contemporary rhythm-and-blues ballad about gratitude, and a closing tribute song, together make up a second side that is, in many ways, more cohesive and more emotionally satisfying than the first. These are Eastmond and Brathwaite tracks, for the most part, and they show that team at its most assured, writing songs that are not trying to chase a trend but are, instead, trying to be good songs, in the tradition of Ocean’s best ballads and grooves. Apple Music’s album note singles out three of these tracks, the readiness song, the stand-and-deliver groove, and the closing tribute, as under-acknowledged gems, and that judgement, from a source that is not prone to hyperbole about Ocean’s lesser-known work, is worth taking seriously. A listener who knows Ocean only through his number ones, and who discovers these tracks for the first time through this album, will find a singer and a songwriting team working at a level of craft that the hits, for all their fame, do not always reveal.
The numbers, and what they do and do not mean
Commercially, Tear Down These Walls was a success, though it was not the multi-platinum blockbuster its two predecessors had been. It reached number three on the British albums chart and number eighteen on the American Billboard 200, with a number seven peak on the American rhythm-and-blues albums chart, and it was certified platinum in America and Canada, gold in Britain and Australia. Those figures, taken together, describe an album that was a major hit in Britain, a solid hit in America, and a hit in several other countries, including Norway, where it reached number three, New Zealand, where it reached number seven, and Canada, where it reached number eight. Its year-end positions, number sixty-three on the American Billboard 200 and number thirty on the rhythm-and-blues albums chart for 1988, confirm that it was not a flash in the pan but a record that sold steadily through the year, on the strength of its singles and its reputation.
That steady success, however, came with a qualification that contemporary and retrospective commentators have noted: where Suddenly and Love Zone had both gone double platinum in America, Tear Down These Walls went platinum once, a step down that, in the hit-driven economy of the late 1980s, was read as a sign that Ocean’s peak, in commercial terms, had passed. That reading, while understandable, is incomplete, because it treats platinum as a failure, which it is not, and because it ignores the context in which the album was released. By 1988, the pop landscape was fragmenting, with new sounds, new audiences and new formats competing for attention, and an album that reached the top twenty in America, the top three in Britain, and platinum status in two major markets, while producing a number one single, cannot reasonably be called a failure. It can, more accurately, be called a transitional success, a record that held Ocean’s audience in a changing market, that gave him another number one, and that prepared the ground, whether intentionally or not, for the next phase of his career, in which he would step back from the hit-making treadmill and record more selectively.
The critical reception of the album, on release, was generally favourable, though not ecstatic, and retrospective assessments have been similarly measured. AllMusic’s retrospective review gave the album three stars out of five, praising Ocean’s continued success as an attraction while noting that the album did not reach the multi-platinum levels of its predecessors, and that Ocean’s voice, in the reviewer’s view, lacked some of the resonance and authority it had shown on earlier dance tracks and was less convincing on ballads than it had been. That judgement, paraphrased here, is worth engaging with, because it captures a real tension in the album: Ocean, singing in 1988, was not the same singer he had been in 1984 or 1986, not because his voice had deteriorated, but because the productions around him had changed, and because the balance between his voice and those productions had shifted. On the Lange tracks, the production is so polished, so widescreen, that the vocal can feel, at times, like one element among many, rather than the centre of the record. On the Eastmond and Brathwaite ballads, by contrast, the vocal is, as ever, the centre, and Ocean sounds most like himself. That unevenness, between tracks where Ocean leads and tracks where the production leads, is the album’s most consistent critical point, and it is a fair one, even if it does not diminish the album’s best tracks.
It is also worth noting, in fairness to the album, that contemporary British reviews were, on the whole, kinder than the retrospective American assessment, with one British music paper giving the album three stars and treating it as a solid, professional pop-soul record from a singer who knew his craft. That difference in reception, between a British press that knew Ocean as a long-standing, Trinidadian-born London singer with a career stretching back to the 1970s, and an American press that knew him primarily as a mid-1980s hit-maker, is itself revealing. In Britain, Ocean was a veteran, a singer with a history, and a new album from him was judged in that context. In America, he was a recent star, judged against his own recent hits, and a new album that did not immediately produce multiple number ones could feel like a disappointment. Both judgements contain a truth, and a full account of Tear Down These Walls needs to hold them together: it was a solid, professional, often excellent album from a veteran singer, and it was also a record that, in America, marked the end of Ocean’s run as a multi-platinum, multi-number-one hit-maker, a run that had lasted, intensely, for four years.
Walls, in 1988 and after
The album’s title, and its reference to a presidential speech, deserves a final reflection, because it is easy, in retrospect, to treat it as a gimmick, a pop album borrowing a political slogan for its cover. That reading is too cynical, and it misses what Ocean was doing. The speech in question, delivered in Berlin in June 1987, was about a physical wall, a concrete barrier that divided a city and, by extension, a continent. Ocean’s album, by borrowing its title, was not claiming to be a political manifesto. It was using the image of a wall as a metaphor, for the barriers between people, between lovers, between musical styles, between a singer and his audience, and for the possibility that those barriers, like the Berlin Wall itself, could be torn down. That metaphor, applied to a pop album, is not grandiose. It is apt, because pop music, at its best, is about tearing down walls: between a Trinidadian boy and a London audience, between a rhythm-and-blues singer and a pop audience, between an adult ballad and a dance hit, between a thirty-seven-year-old veteran and a twenty-one-year-old producer with a new sound. Ocean’s album, by bringing Lange, Riley, Eastmond and Brathwaite together, was, in its own way, an act of wall-tearing, an attempt to show that different musical worlds could coexist on one record, held together by a single voice.
That the Berlin Wall itself would fall, less than two years after the album’s release, in November 1989, gives the title a retrospective resonance it did not have in 1988, and it is tempting, with hindsight, to read the album as prophetic. It was not prophetic, and it should not be claimed as such. Ocean was not predicting the fall of the Wall. He was borrowing a powerful image, as pop singers have always borrowed powerful images, to give his album a title that felt timely, urgent and hopeful. That the image then became, in history, even more powerful than it was in 1988, is a coincidence, but it is a coincidence that has helped the album’s title to age well. Titles that borrow a moment’s slogan often date quickly, when the moment passes. This title, because the moment it borrowed became a historical turning point, has not dated in the same way. It still sounds, today, like a statement about possibility, about barriers that can be removed, and that is a better fate for a pop album title than most such titles enjoy.
The album’s afterlife also deserves attention, because it is a record that has been revisited, in a way that many late-1980s pop albums have not. In 2014, Cherry Pop, a label specialising in expanded reissues of 1980s pop, re-released Tear Down These Walls as a two-disc set, with the original album digitally remastered from the original mix tapes and with bonus content consisting of extended versions of its singles and of B-sides that had originally appeared on those singles, including a song recorded for Love Zone that had ended up as a B-side, and a non-album song that had been the flip side of the calypso single. That reissue, with its careful remastering and its attention to B-sides and extended mixes, is a sign that the album has a constituency, of listeners and collectors who value it not only for its number one but for its whole track listing, for its B-sides, for its extended versions, and for the story it tells about Ocean in 1988. A record that is reissued with that kind of care, twenty-six years after its original release, is a record that has lasted, in a way that a mere hit single, however famous, does not always last.
What came after the album, in Ocean’s career, is also part of its story. After Tear Down These Walls, Ocean waited five years before releasing his next studio album, a gap that, in the hit-driven world of the late 1980s and early 1990s, was a long time, and that signalled, whether intentionally or not, a change in his relationship with the pop treadmill. He released a greatest-hits collection in 1989, which became a steady seller, and he continued to tour, but he did not chase the charts with the same intensity as he had in the mid-1980s. When he did return, in 1993, with a new album recorded in Chicago with a younger rhythm-and-blues star as a collaborator, it did not produce major hits, and it marked, in effect, the end of Ocean’s career as a chart-topping pop star and the beginning of his career as a veteran artist, recording selectively, touring, and eventually returning to his old collaborators for new work in the 2010s and 2020s. Tear Down These Walls, seen in that light, is not merely an album from 1988. It is the last album of Ocean’s imperial phase, the last record he made as a singer at the very top of the pop charts, and that status gives it a poignancy that its individual tracks, heard in isolation, do not always convey.
Listening to Tear Down These Walls today, almost forty years after its release, the first thing a new listener is likely to notice is its polish, its professionalism, its refusal to sound rough or unfinished, even on its most ambitious tracks. That polish, which some critics have held against the album, is also its strength, because it allows the listener to hear, clearly, what Ocean and his collaborators were trying to do: to make a pop-soul album that could speak to adults and to younger listeners, to Caribbean roots and to American pop, to ballads and to dance tracks, without sacrificing clarity for any of those audiences. That the album does not always succeed, that some tracks work better than others, that the title track is more interesting than it is catchy, and that the biggest hit is, in some ways, the least characteristic track on the record, are all true, and they are all part of why the album is worth writing about at length. A perfect album does not need an article. An interesting album, an album that tries to do several things at once and succeeds at most of them, does, because it tells us something about its artist, about its moment, and about the difficulty of making pop music at a time of change.
The singers behind the singer
One aspect of Tear Down These Walls that deserves more attention than it usually receives is its backing vocals, because they reveal, in miniature, the same breadth that defines the album as a whole. The album’s personnel list includes, among its backing singers, a veteran American vocal group, a future solo star who would go on to a successful career of his own, and a roster of New York and London session singers whose names, taken together, read like a directory of late-1980s soul and pop. That breadth was not accidental. A Billy Ocean album, in this period, was not a singer and a machine. It was a singer and a community, of musicians, arrangers, engineers and singers, working across studios in London and New York, in Battery Studios, in East Bay Studios in Tarrytown, and in Sigma Sound, Soundtrack and Mediasound Studios in New York City. The album was recorded in 1987, across those studios, and that geographical spread, between Britain and America, is itself a map of Ocean’s career: a Trinidadian-born Londoner, recording in London and New York, for audiences in both countries, with musicians from both traditions.
That community matters because it explains why Ocean’s voice, even on the album’s most produced tracks, never sounds isolated. He is always singing with, and against, a rich musical background, of keyboards, synthesizers, guitars, bass, drums, percussion, horns and strings, and of backing voices that lift his choruses without overwhelming them. On the title track, the backing vocals give the chorus its sense of scale, its feeling of a crowd, of many voices, joining a call to tear down walls. On the ballads, the backing vocals are subtler, colouring the edges of Ocean’s lead, giving a ballad about love’s colour, for example, a warmth that a solo vocal alone could not provide. On the grooves, the backing vocals add rhythmic bite, a call-and-response energy that recalls the Motown and soul traditions Ocean grew up admiring. A listener who pays attention to those backing voices, who hears them not as decoration but as part of the album’s argument, will hear Tear Down These Walls differently, as a communal record, made by many people, for many people, rather than as a star vehicle.
That communal quality is also why the album, despite its unevenness, has a warmth that many more cohesive, more single-minded albums of the period lack. Ocean, as a singer, has always been a generous vocalist, a singer who leaves room for his musicians, who does not try to dominate every track, and who sounds, at his best, like a man singing with a band rather than over a track. On Tear Down These Walls, that generosity is audible, in the way his vocal sits within, rather than on top of, Lange’s widescreen productions, in the way it blends with Eastmond and Brathwaite’s keyboard and bass textures, and in the way it makes room, on the title track, for a younger producer’s rhythmic ideas. A less generous singer, faced with three different production teams, might have tried to impose a single vocal identity on all of them, to make the album sound like himself at the expense of his collaborators. Ocean, instead, lets each production be heard, and lets his voice adapt, subtly, to each one, while remaining unmistakably his own. That adaptability, that willingness to be a collaborator rather than a dictator, is a form of artistry, and it is one of the reasons Ocean’s career has lasted as long as it has.
If there is a single image to carry away from this story, it is not a chart position, and it is not a studio photograph, though the album’s personnel list, with its long roll of musicians, backing singers and engineers, from London and New York studios, tells its own story of a major pop record made by many hands. It is, instead, an image of a singer, thirty-seven years old, Trinidadian by birth and Londoner by upbringing, standing in a studio with three very different producers, a rock producer in his forties, a new jack swing pioneer in his early twenties, and two trusted collaborators who have been with him since his peak, and singing, in the same warm, direct voice that has carried him from Fyzabad to Romford to the top of the American charts, about walls coming down. That image captures what Billy Ocean did, at his best, and what Tear Down These Walls, at its best, does: it turns a political slogan into a pop metaphor, a changing musical landscape into an album, and a star’s attempt to catch the future into a record that, for all its compromises, still sounds like a man trying, honestly, to tear down the walls between the singer he was and the singer he might become.