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.

The Hare and the Moon - The Gray Malkin (2010)

Just to get it out of the way, I was once quite partial to the neofolk. It's appeal, at least for me, lay in the juxtaposition of musical forms which had, by that point, become indelibly stamped as innocuous through childhood memories of watching Val Doonican or the Spinners on the telly, in stark contrast with the subject matter, the black uniforms, the whole ambiguity of are they or aren't they? - which has obvious appeal when you're young, irritable and disinclined to think about anything in too much detail. Then as you get older, you realise that they are - or were in a few cases - which is probably partially why we're in the mess that we're in now and why no-one seems quite certain as to whether Hitler is still a bad guy or just someone who went about things the wrong way. Anyway, the realisation left something of a bad taste in my mouth because really, I knew on some level that there was more to our neofolk banner carriers than simply not liking reggae. Having one of the more corpulent representatives of the form visit me in my own home, take up space on my sofa, use my artwork, call me a fairy on his website, and then turn out to have really, really, really disliked reggae all along was also annoying, and has subsequently somewhat sucked the fun out of listening to the one Sol Invictus album that wasn't shit.

So, it takes work to get me listening to neofolk, and I notice with some sense of relief that the Hare and the Moon wisely shun the term on their Bandcamp page, rather citing their influences as M.R. James, Arthur Machen, and Black Sabbath, amongst others. This is actually a cassette edition of their second album issued by the ATSLA label in 2014, kindly sent to me by the man from ATSLA. It's a bit strange getting a cassette tape through the post in the year 2018, but strange in a good way because I prefer physical objects to things downloaded. I tend to appreciate music stored on physical media due to the greater effort expended in creating it, obtaining it or listening to it. Also, having spent the last couple of years digitising tapes from my own collection, some dating back to 1980, I have come to realise that reports of cassette tape as an unreliable, second rate medium have been grossly exaggerated. Of the hundreds of cassettes I've digitised so far, I have encountered no discernible reduction in sound quality, excepting on a couple of Memorex tapes, and Memorex were always shit so it's no big surprise. By contrast, I've lost count of the number of CDRs which have since degraded into digital slush.

Cassette tapes were a wonderful and democratic medium. Almost anyone could record something. They were cheap and easy to duplicate and to send to other people. One could listen to a cassette tape without requiring a fucking password or expensive glitch-prone technology. The odd one might get chewed up, but it was pretty rare if you kept your tape deck clean and stuck to decent quality tapes; and maybe they won't last forever, but most of them will probably last as long as you're alive and I don't know why anyone would need them to last longer.

So yes, this is a nice thing to have received in the post; and to finally get to the point, the Hare and the Moon tap into the folk tradition and the folklore of the British isles and its countryside without any of the bollocks I've grown to find so distasteful, or any of that whining about one's culture being under assault. I grew up in the British countryside, which was actually sort of terrifying. My childhood was spent within a stones throw of Meon Hill in Warwickshire, famed for witchcraft related murders having taken place in living memory; so as a child, the background noise of my existence was very much the sort of thing invoked by M.R. James and seen in The Wicker Man, which is why I now live in a city. The Hare and the Moon capture the rhythm of that world very well without necessarily sounding like an historical re-enactment of anything. Traditional instrumentation is here blended with the electronic to produce a fusion which reminds me a little of Eno's work with David Bowie; and so, something I might ordinarily have avoided turns out to defy expectations, and to provide a breath of very fresh air. Had neofolk been a bit more like this than how it mostly turned out, the world might have been a better place.

Get it here.

Spandau Ballet - Journeys to Glory (1981)

We read in the weekly music paper about how they were all the rage down in that London, but it was difficult to hear them over the sound of Judas Priest, Saxon, and the Wurzels around our way, so their impact was reduced. We smirked at them in their tartan blouses on Top of the Pops, but truthfully we weren't that bothered, and I bought The Freeze because it sounded a bit like Joy Division; and a handful of approximately decent singles followed before they turned into Val Doonican's warm-up act. Toes were tapped but ultimately it was hard to care, meaning that I'd never really thought about Spandau Ballet for longer than five seconds - excepting periods of meditation upon my hatred of Robert Elms which probably don't count; and thusly over a thirty-year period didst Spandau Ballet eventually accrue mystery sufficient as to warrant my noticing this in the Half-Price racks and wondering what it was like.

The thing which surprised me most is how pedestrian they sound, some new wave band you might have heard rehearsing in the village hall beefed up with a big production and - oh - looks like Santa brought someone a synthesiser for Christmas; and yet this was once thought to be what comes next. We had seen the future, and it was a little bit like what you hear when you turn over to BBC2 and watch the test card for a while. With hindsight, it was all very Alan Partridge.

Okay, that's a little harsh. Journeys to Glory is not without its qualities, and there was probably a point at which it sounded important and forward looking when played in some self-involved club or other; and musically it's fairly decent, but the problem is that Tony Hadley is simply a fucking awful singer. Technically he's wonderful but, to paraphrase my friend Andrew J. Duncan, there's nothing wrong with his voice and that's what's wrong with his voice. He sounds like a million other technically perfect bellowing and hooting Brentwood's Got Talent contestants, but that's all he does. There's neither range, subtlety, nor soul, regardless of how closely he sonically resembles the somewhat superior Alison Moyet. If they revised this with all of the vocals re-recorded by some guy caught having a poo in the alley outside the studio, it might be remembered as a classic, as opposed to the first album by that New Romantic band who weren't as good as Duran Duran.

I'm still going to buy the second one if I see it though. Instinction was mint.

NWA - Straight Outta Compton (1988)

Still one of the greatest rap albums of all time, maybe the greatest, and still annoying the living shit out of people three decades later. Since the NWA movie came out a few weeks back I've experienced a huge and repetitive upsurge in the sort of complete bollocks people always come out with in proximity to this record and those who made it. Amongst the less contentious observations has been the traditional suggestion that It Takes A Nation of Millions knocks and will forever in perpetuity knock Compton into a cocked hat, alongside every other rap album which the person delivering the statement hasn't heard, which is usually almost all of them. Public Enemy were great, for sure, but this sort of thing always sounds to me like well, I'd rather support the work of responsible black people who know how to behave in polite company, in other words, I want to hear what you have to say, beleaguered minority voice, but within reason, and nothing I wouldn't be able to repeat in church.

It's my own fault for replacing all of my former social interactions with facebook. Mere days after the film came out, someone had politely befouled my page with an article about all the women Dr. Dre has beaten up over the years. I'm not sure if he expected me to apologise or something, but I'm disinclined to even discuss rap or its failings with someone who only gives a shit when there are censorious fingers to be pointed. The article was further embellished with the following response from another facebook person, one I've been ignoring since they shared one of those Muslims who don't like the flag should fuck off back to Russia type opinion pieces masquerading as a news article.

I have always wondered why so people enjoyed their music, and why now so many people want to go see their movie. There are a lot of people in the music industry that I just don't understand how so many people go crazy over. Why does society think it's okay to be hateful to some people, and make huge celebrities out of such hatred spewing forth from their "art"? There is so much more to be asked, but it has given me such a headache. It is not okay to be hateful and hurtful, and yet there society goes making hateful people rich and huge celebrities.

I know: person who doesn't like rap fails to like rap, which isn't what I find so aggravating so much as the notion that an opinion formed in general ignorance of a subject is now so often held to be as valid as actually knowing shit. I'm not a huge fan of that dancehall artist who used to advocate shooting homosexuals, but then I can't even remember who he is or what the record was, and I know fuck all about dancehall so my opinion, beyond a few basics, probably doesn't count for a whole lot.

Probably Dr. Dre is indeed a horrible cunt. The music industry is hardly lacking in horrible cunts, most of whom seem to get a free pass, and this specific focus on Dr. Dre as a horrible cunt seems significantly informed by how strongly we disapprove of his records, none of which - it might be pointed out - waste much time in trying to promote the image of Dr. Dre as a more caring amalgam of Bono, Val Doonican, and Deputy Dawg. I personally feel the relationship of artist as horrible cunt to his or her work is most eloquently expressed in this instance when Ice Cube asks do I look like a motherfucking role model? on Gangsta Gangsta, the answer to which is, most realistically, no he doesn't; and I think he would be surprised and disappointed with you if you said yes.

I'm not sure it's possible to make it any clearer than that. Straight Outta Compton was never meant to constitute advice, and if it upsets you, that's probably because it's supposed to upset you. Whilst this doesn't make Dr. Dre any less of a horrible cunt, neither does it necessarily invalidate his art or what any of them were trying to do with it, any more than Alice in Wonderland is a bad book because of the author's poorly quantified regard of little girls.

Musically it's sharp as fuck, one of those rare discs which makes everything else you listen to that month sound shite, at least while you're playing it. The rhymes are tight, brutal, absolutely on point, and often very funny because the album is a bunch of kids talking shit to their mates on a street corner rather than an earnest political address unto all the nations of the world; and if you don't think bunches of kids should be allowed to talk shit to each other on street corners, or that it's okay providing they first check with a responsible adult to make sure there's nothing that would seem out of place on the Disney channel, then fucking screw you because you're the reason people still need to make albums like this one.

The bottom line here is, I would say, that if you've ever been in the position of there being another person or group of people having so much power over you that you really and literally want to break their arm, leg, head, skull, or whatever it takes for you to shift that weight, then you will understand this album and why it was made and why there are sexual swearwords. If you've never been in such a diminished position then be happy because you're pretty lucky. Regarding those sections of human society still getting the shitty end of the stick in the twenty-first century, either you want them to have a voice, to maybe have some sort of say so as to be able to elevate themselves by some means, or you want them to shut up and keep making your trainers or serving your burgers; and if you want them to have a voice, you don't get to pick and choose what they say.

...then again, what the fuck do I know? I probably only listen to this because I think it's cool.