Fad Gadget - Fireside Favourites (1980)

 

I can't help feeling that Frank Tovey never quite received his due or achieved the status he probably deserved, and I'm pretty damn certain it isn't going to be happening any time soon given that he's no longer with us. Fad Gadget didn't quite seem to fit anywhere even in their day, at least not with any degree of comfort - not quite independent in the sense of the Fall, ATV or Wire despite being on Mute, certainly not mainstream, too early and too weird for synthpop when that became a thing. Fad Gadget weren't even particularly or conveniently electronic, at least not as a way of life. I developed a bit of a fixation with them following something or other in Sounds music paper which brought the realisation that Fad Gadget seemed to be fucking everywhere, and yet I still had no idea what the hell they were supposed to be or sounded like. Then he was on the telly performing Coitus Interruptus with the help of a can of shaving foam and I became an immediate convert. I bought this one and Incontinent and played them more or less to the exclusion of everything else that summer. This was the summer during which I took up painting, left school, and first began to consider that the future might be different to the present, and that it might even be an improvement - at least for me. The possibilities seemed suddenly endless and Fad Gadget was somehow the soundtrack. I went for an interview at Maidstone College of Art half way across the country. I'm not sure I was even convinced an art degree was the right thing to do, but I turned up for the interview and was taken to the canteen which was in a bit of a state having played host to some event.

'Fad Gadget played here last night,' I was told, and that was enough for me.

Fireside Favourites still sounds incredible and like no other album, not even like any other Fad Gadget album. If synth-based artists were mostly pretending to be machines at the time, Tovey went further into weirder, more disturbing territories of the kind described by J.G. Ballard - something pervy and a bit damaged but with a pop sensibility that wasn't quite showbiz, unless we're talking the Iggy Pop end of things; something brooding and a bit reptilian - punk rock with a synth is probably as good a description as any. Fireside Favourites grinds and growls its oscillator driven hymns to consumerism, marketing and stupidity then winks to the camera like Val Doonican on the title track, paranoid, schizophrenic, claustrophobic, and yet somehow entirely human despite the sharp corners; and Arch of the Aorta may be one of the most beautifully epic pieces of instrumental music ever recorded.