That's not the fault of the work on the records. Fireside Favourites bristles and grooves with electronica that sounds of its time and the songs themselves are a strong blend of punk sneer and the starker kind of thinking then emergent of dark commentary. Really, if you want a good bingo card of post punk, you couldn't do better. On that alone, I'd recommend this as a worthy listen. But there is more than that on offrer.
Pedestrian is driven (nyuck nyuck) by a circular riff on a spiky synth snarl. The progress of humanity through its transport is still held back by the need to get around on your feet but those who choose to do that are told to wait at the stoplights or face annihilation. You can dance to this.
State of the Nation has that discoish vaguely Middle Eastern lope. A brooding organ plays under Tovey's dark snarl. "Life begins when you're ready to face it" is a great line but it's virtually buried in an aside.
Salt Lake City Sunday is an unrelenting harang against the religious organisation, rhyming repent with "they want your ten percent" When he comes to rail against the practice of posthumous conversion it's: "Leave my ancestors to rot in their graves." It's important to remember that a lot of the acrid darkness of these electronic doomsters of this time were happy to interrupt their program to take the piss. It didn't diminish the darker meaning even slightly. If anything, it enhanced it by resufing to give in to over-earnest whinging which would have earned the ridicule of others.
Coitus Interruptus is an unsmiling description of the marketing of sex as a leisure industry set to a robotic backing. and slowly fading with a series of absurdist sexual grunts, barks and bellows under a gothic organ solo.
Fireside Favourites begins with a synth brass swagger that sounds like Shirley Bassey doing a Bond theme backed by Coil. It's all Tom Jones seduction filtered through a deadpan disgust until Frank starts noticing the nuclear holocaust has begun and the pair canoodling in front of the fire are actually burning to ashes from a missle strike. Good times. Good times ...
Newsreel combines drum machine, real bass guitar and screeching keyboards with Tovey's report on media practices getting so intrusive as to insert mics into wounds to record the sound of death. There's more and worse as the precussion breaks down into a fractured march as the news teams and platoons begin to merge.
Insecticide begins with weird distorted cries. A minimal synth backing takes up as Tovey with a wobbling vocal effect recounts the life of an insect in a human home, driven to smashing its own brains out from the human response to it.
The Box is a rewrite of the single Back to Nature is the closest thing on the record to a rock song. Frank's thin vocal describes a premature burial. Is it figurative, though? "Let me out!" in the first verse becomes, "Let us out!"
The Arch of the Aorta is mostly instrumental and is a good contribution to the era's scattered vocal free or mostly vocal free mood masterpieces like The Cure's All Cats Are Grey or Devo's Gut Feeling. It's not clear that Tovey's repetition of the title phrase is looped or just performed. Other voices might be sourced from found material or performed but the gleeful cold against hot melody and voice material approach ticks about three numbers of that bingo card I imagined before. Pure British post punk and loving it.
Some friends in the '80s, looked though my record collection and found the Birthday Party's Junkyard which I was borrowing to tape. It was a few years old but one of them picked it up as though it were a nursery favourite. "We used to clean the house to this," he said with a warm grin. See, I never owned this album either. I knew the name of the act (and assumed it was a band) and would have easily heard a fair few of the tracks played on 4ZZZ. But I wouldn't have heard it at parties. And it makes me wonder how you would have listened back i' the day. In headphones while the family watched the news? Dancing in the lounge of a sharehouse by the light of the bathroom off the hall? Studying?
It's not that it's bad music, on the contrary, but there's a homogeneity made of the approach to the arragnements and textures and the declarations of the lyrics that pits a dark, dim view without the shouted slogans of a Midnight Oil nor the creaminess of a Dare-era Human League. There are effective ventures into abstract experssion all through but it's not the scarifying tracks of Throbbing Gristle. Beside names such as these, Fad Gadget appears to fade but they shouldn't. It's important to remember how much post punk mixed an elevated professionalism with self-discovered innovation. It got more bizarre and confronting but a lot easier to digest. While Gary Numan was monotoning about cars and androids, Frank Tovey was reading the newspaper back in a voice that didn't let go of you, it's just that his stuff sounded home made, as though he saw something while getting a carton of milk from the shop and rolled the tape the moment he got back in.
So, what do we do with Fad Gadget? His statements were as strong as any of his contemporaries and his approach that gathered found sound as well as picking up on what was then a burgeoning electronica and even with PR manageer wet-dream looks that could have had him as a pin up in a few seconds of exposure, he might have stormed it in. That he seemed easy enough bound in spider web costumes, moving as a mime while the march of the synthesisers droned around him is testament enough that his final bingo number, wsas the thing that set him in his underfame, was that he was in this for the gig, not the acclaim. Maybe that's it, however punk and then post punk we might have got, we still demanded our favourites be popular AND true to themselves. That's human enough but the second part is all we should ever ask. That's what Frank Tovey gave us.
Listening notes: I never had this on vinyl nor even on a cassette dub. As I pieced it together from YouTube clips and then failed to find a hard copy, I bought a download at CD resolution. Audio quality pristine.
No comments:
Post a Comment