You’ll find Rick Springfield in the roll of 1980s rock heroes between John Cougar Mellencamp and Bruce Springsteen. His surname often got him mistaken for the Boss – a fact Rick revealed in an autobiographical song ‘Bruce’ – but the music was nearer the Mellencamp model. Both had film-star looks, both changed their name to find fame (Rick was born Richard Lewis Springthorpe in 1949) and both topped the charts within 14 months of each other with memorable, melodic, guitar-laced singles. Mellencamp’s was ‘Jack and Diane’, Springfield’s ‘Jessie’s Girl’.

Yet, while Mellencamp was a small-town boy from Indiana, Rick had traveled widely. Born in Sydney, Australia, he’d spend his immediate pre-teen years in Britain where his army officer father had been posted. The Beatles and Rolling Stones were firmly established as idols when, having been given his first guitar at age 13, he decided to make music his career. As singer and guitarist with Rock House, he found himself entertaining Australian troops serving in South-East Asia. Springsteen would write ‘Born in the USA’ about the downside of the Vietnam experience, but for Rick it was an opportunity. “The band was asked to go and we jumped at the chance to make some money.”

Moving on to Wackedy Wak and then Zoot, he found himself with the Number 1 single in Australia, ‘Speak to the Sky’ (which when re-recorded, became a US Top 20 hit in 1972.) But, just as John Mellencamp reluctantly became teen idol Johnny Cougar at the bidding off an over-zealous manager, so Rick would spend much of the 1970’s being pitched at the US youth market by various record companies…the downside to having good looks. One of his recording sessions found him fronting Elton John’s band, but his management had apparently been expecting a new David Cassidy.

The resulting hassles, combined with immigration problems, made playing live in the States an impossibility, so he cut his loses and went to acting school, studying under Vincent Chase and Malcolm McDowell. Universal Studios liked what they saw and signed him to a two-year contract, resulting in appearances in series like The Rockford Files, The Young and the Restless, The Six Million Dollar Man, and The Incredible Hulk (playing a karate-kicking cop).

All that brings us to 1981 when ‘Working Class Dog’, the first of our two albums, re-ignited his recording career in spectacular style. There were three factors working in Rick’s favour on its release that summer: the previously mentioned ‘Jessie’s Girl’, his appearance as Dr Noah Drake on US TV’s ratings leader General Hospital (he’d star in two series) and the arrival of MTV, which opened its doors the very fortnight Rick spent atop the singles chart. Entranced by his music and image, they played him incessantly.

‘Working Class Dog,’ named after a line in the album’s storming opening track (and third hit single) ‘Love is Alright Tonite’, went double platinum, while ‘Jessie’ bagged Rick a Grammy for Best Male Vocal Rock Performance. Meanwhile, ‘I’ve Done Everything For You’, penned by future Van Halen singer Sammy Hagar, had reached Number 8 toward the end of what had been an enormous year. All the signs were that Rick Springfield’s was an overnight success: only he knew a full decade’s hard graft had gone into laying the foundation for fame.

The Grammy award in February 1982 set the scene nicely for the arrival of the ironically-titled (and sleeved!) ‘Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet’. It peaked in May, just one place short of the US chart summit behind supergroup Asia’s self-titled debut – disappointing, perhaps, but superior to ‘Working Class Dog’s’ Number 7. Its lead single, the chugging, keyboard-fuelled ‘Don’t Talk To Strangers’, also made Number 2, balked for four straight weeks by the Paul McCarthney/Stevie Wonder duet ‘Ebony And Ivory’. Another change of pace came with the sensitive ballad ‘What Kind of Fool Am I’, which reached Number 21 in July and , along with ‘I Get Excited’ – a number 32 in October, helped Rick register his second million-selling album.

The coming years would see him inherit the production credit from Keith Olsen, the studio brain behind Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’ – era success, who’d helped craft the pair of albums here. Interestingly, though Rick was a hero in Australia and America, Britain had remained immune to his charms until 1984; a reissued ‘Jessie’s Girl’ finally hit that April. The year also saw Rick move into movies as the star of Hard to Hold.

A sell-out Hammersmith Odeon concert in 1985 confirmed his status in Britain, while US hits continued through the 1980s. He then returned to pursuing his TV career, most notable in High Tide, a 1994-1997 detective series based around two brothers (Rick the elder) who ran a surf shop and solved crimes. In 1999 he played a record producer and Brooke Shield’s love interest in two episodes of Suddenly Susan, but the first year of the current millennium saw him out on the road promoting a new release, ‘Karma’. And guess what? It has a dog on the cover…

The two albums here represent Rick Springfield in his prime pop form, showing why he gathered a sting of honours to rank alongside his gold discs. ‘Don’t Talk To Strangers’ and ‘I Get Excited’ were both Grammy nominees, while 1982, the year of ‘Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet’, saw him voted Favourite Male Vocalist at the American Music Awards.

As well as being Rick Springfield’s annus mirabilis, 1982 also saw fellow countryman Mel Gibson storm Hollywood with Mad Max, while pop quintet Men and Work quickly made it a hat-trick of wonders from Down Under. But Rick had always known where his destiny lay. “You’d play Sydney and Melbourne and there were three other cities you could go to if you had the plane fare. Top bands would vie for a ticket overseas, but they’d all bomb when they got there. That was bad for the Australian ego.”

Rick Springfield had certainly changed all that – and the music here tells why. Tracks like ‘Just One Kiss’ (an early effort from the Steinberg/Kelly team that wrote hits for Madonna and the Bangles), ‘Don’t Talk To Strangers’, the affecting ‘April 24, 1981’ about the death of his father and, of course, the fabulous 3 minutes 15 seconds that is ‘Jessie’s Girl’ see to that. If every dog has his day, these albums suggest Rick Springfield has at least two… - Michael Heatley