New FADS のインタビューです。日本語訳は。。。そのうち作りたいです。 　　　[Top に戻る] [Articles に戻る]

○New Musical Express 　1990 年 10 月 6 日




*New Musical Express 　1990 年 10 月 6 日

Raving FAD

Nobody mention scaley-delic! New Fast Automatic Daffodils may come from Manchester but they'd rather not be seen as standing shoal-der with the likes of The Stone Roe-ses. Indeed, their new single 'Fishes Eyes' owes more to the antics of a nocturnal pisc-head on a mission from Cod than the latest goings-on at the Huss-ienda. Roger Morton reels at the revelarion.


Wake up Britain, you're drunk. You are brained on bagginess, soused with scallydelia, tight with Techno, caned by cover versions, befuddled by funkadeee-grooviness and stoned on Roses poses.

How do I know this? Because on a Saturday night in South London this seems the only plausible explanation as to why New Fast Automatic Daffodils are currently seriously lacking in adulation, and seriously overdrawn at the bank.

They wander on stage at The Venue looking about as sexy-lipped and style-sussed as a bunch of unemployed electricians. Then they proceed to funk-lash their way through a set of devastating, free-flowing, neo-demented grooves which jolt the hotch-potch crowd into non-stop party frenzy.

"This is how Pigbag should have sounded," screams a leather jacketed convert into his friend's ear. The grooving girl behind him is kinder. "this is how Flowered Up should sound," she shouts at her mate.

In truth, the buzz the New FADs give off is solid enough to trample comparisons underfoot. With their bass-heavy, percussion-happy drive, their well wired guitars and hollered weirdo vocals from bespectacled dancing gibbon frontman Andy, the New FADs are unequivocally, shockingly, dead dead good.

So why, unless we are currently pissed on a surfeit of bliss, have the New FADs remained, in Manc splash chart-grabbing terms, a bit obscure? Time to sober up and remember. Maybe it's because they used to be a bit of a grating, snarling, drunken, art-noise thrash-funk M-E-S-S.

Andy: "When we did our first gig someone said we sounded like The Exploited!...Ha ha ha."
Dolan: "We used to be frightened to play slow, because then people have time to heckle you. If you played quick enough and had five seconds between each song they didn't have time to shout. That's a bit of a worry when you first start."


Japanese Pop TV producers would be in tears over this sort of thing. There is little sign of 'happening' yoof culture and there are no pop stars whatsoever in the split 'n' sawdust central Manchester pub where the New FADs have gathered. There are, however, two stubbly, blonde barmaid and six staut-sipping pensioners who are clearly the targets for the stubbly 'Say No To Drugs' posters on the wall.

"It's the E-Pensioners," explained Dolan dryly. "The E-older generation."

The FADs are not really the most ravenously upwardly mobile pop band on the planet. This is why we are in the dowdy pub and not in the 'aspirational' Dry bar around the corner. Recently the FADs gave themselves 50 pounds each to buy some non-scruff clothes. Andy bought himself three T-shirts and a pair of baggy tracksuit bottoms which came to 17 pounds. Then he had a two hour discussion with another FAD about whether to tuck the tracksuit bottoms into his boots. Worse still, it wasn't a serious discussion. Obviously there is something wrong with these boys.

The FADs are Dolan the 'Lovable Geordie' guitarist, Andy the frighteningly focussed vacalist, Justin the easy-going bassist, Perry the, erm, easy-going drummer, and Icarus (Icly?) the new-boy percussionist. They met at Machester Polytechnic, formed, got drunk, sobered up and gradually started getting more organized.

From July '89 they released three EPs on Manchester indie label Playtime - 'Lions', 'Music is Shit', and 'Big'. The first two were hectoring nag - noise with hints of dance sympathies. 'Big' was a nearly efffective cruising, mellow groove. Their current first EP on Play It Again Sam 'Fishes Eyes' is their best yet by a full furlong or so.

The FADs have 'done their time' on the highway to a shoebox pub 'n' club circuit - days of making up songs on stage, being hailed as 'The First Real Punk Band To Play The Kob In Berlin' ("strange one that"), and sharing the bill with a headcase ageing hippy Welsh rapper - which they recall, more or less, with affection.

They have built up a 'proper' live following, and they know that hype rhymes with tripe. There are not the boys to start spluttering peace and love platitudes or baring their wounded but guru-like souls. They are saddled with that most disturbing of pop group qualities: a sense of proportion.

Justin: "We seem to be really big in Huddersfield, big in Sheffield and Leeds, and in Blackpool we're really big."

Dolan: "It's because of that seaside cabaret feel to us."

Andy: "It's also the free fish 'n' chips voucher you get with the single".

The 'Fishes eyes' EP is accomplished enough to survive without the FADs prophesying imminent world domination and the coming of the Daffodil Age. But their will be those who, on hearing its lolloping syncopation, grashing guitars and freaky sax samples, will assume that the formerly thrash-happy FADs have simply done The Baggy Thing.

Before the "I saw them down the Slug & Vomit in '89 and they were poonks..." letters start to arrive, ti should be said that the more conspicuously dancey FADs (which the single still doesn't quite do justice to) is the result of their getting access to a fancy studio, and finding percussionist Icarus (Ick?) to open up the rhythms.

Dolan: "We probably made the first indie-dance crossover record of the '80s with 'Fate Don't Fail Me Now', the B-side of 'Lions' . It was way ahead of 'Wrote For Luck'...And it was completely shite!"

Andy: "A lot of the dance thing has got very narrow-minded now. Like a dance record has to have this rhythm and this pace, which as it happens 'Fishes Eyes' has. But the rest of our stuff, which we think of as being dancey, doesn't conform to that sort of thing at all. Which is really good. 'Cos it's just too tempting. There's plenty of bands which just work to a successful formula."

The New FADs' stubborn opposition to cash friendly streamlining might sound like your regular indie no-sell-out stance, but for once their crossfertilised shows live up to the claims of open mindedness. Raggae, House, go-go, early '80s indie and psychedelia all surface in the mad (not Madchester) mix. Their wryly titled of forthcoming album 'Pigion Hole' promises to be equally, as you might say, genre absorbant.

Of course, clashing influences may not be considered a shooting offence these days (most people seem to accept that it's quite a good idea), but add this to the FADs other eccentricities and they start to look like a 'difficult' band - pseudo intellectual surrealist pegs in a world without pseudo intellectual surrealist holes.

Imagine! You are watching The Chart Show. The FADs' starfish and crab populated video for 'Fishes Eyes' flicks on screen and you are presented with the merry glib-snippet that "The New Fast Automatic Daffodils are from Manchester but not Mancunian, they take their name from an Adrian Henry poem, their second EP 'Music Is Shit' was inspired by a Daba tract and they are prone to posing for photos bare-chested whilst subverting the fascist connotations of the image by holding a teapot."

Not quite teen-trivia stuff. But does it mean that the New FADs have a playfully insouciant intelligence? Or does it mean that they are suffering from a monstrous case of post-student pretension? Time for the 'fish anecdote' and the 'test question'.

Right. It's three in the morning, and graphic designer Icarus (Ike?) is still up working. He hears the letterbox in the door to his flat rattle and goes to investigate. Hanging from the letterbox is a carrier bag, and inside it lies a mouldy herring wrapped in a strip of paper which bares the words "Beware! He is Coming! Fishes eyes will watch your lies..." (et cetera). The next morning Icarus treads on the neighbourhood nutter's delivery by mistake, but miraculously the scaley words survive to be used by Andy as the lyrics to the new FADs single. Looney, but true.

Is this your normal approach to lyric writing?

Andy: "Yeah. We just wait for maniacs to put things through our doors."

So you're a sort of sieve for insanity? (test question)

Andy: "Well, I usually work out what the lyrics are about around a month afterwards."

Perhaps you're sort of testifying to the non-viability of coherence in the modern day? (test question 2)

Andy: "Yeah. We're a post-modernist, neo-pre-postist band."

Not absurdist?

Dolan: "Well, there's a bit of that too."

Justin: "And situationist."

Dolan: "People do think we're absurd. It's a common misinterpretation."

Clearly the New FADs are not trying to hard to impress the Arts Council on this particular pub outing. But in their fishy sleeves, teapot photos and 'Music is Shit' joke manifestoes, the spectre of student-itis sitll lurks. Is that where the 'absurdity' comes from?

Andy: "Ppppffffhh!...Erm, quite possibly."

Dolan: "The tea-pot was just 'cos we were standing there with all our bare chests and it looked slightly fascist. So we picked up a teapot. It hardly looks like you're trying to conquer the world if you're standing there holding a teapot."

Do you fit the popular Labour-CND-veggie-echo-friendly young pop group profile?

Andy: "As individuals we probably do, but I don't think that's got anything to do with what we do in the band."

Dolan: "The whole thing about personal histories is that we all come from different backgrounds and different parts of the country. So we're not a Manchester band in that we all come from Salford and took loads of drugs together and went down the Hacienda. We all met as students and as a band it wasn't a career-oriented move. Although obviously it gets more serious."

The New FADs will squabble until the pub pensioners drop dead about the Manc Effect and how their funny peculiar distortion of indie-dance relates to it. But the solid base to all the open-ended arguments is that they have pushed their way up out of the scally-student-ethnic mixed sub-soil to emerge as prize contenders. Compared to many of the earlier blooms of the dance-fire hothouse, they're in an enviable position.

Andy: "What we've done up until now has been purely off our own backs, rather than some management company coming in dead early and going 'Right, this is how we're going to do it', with the massive injection of cash. If we go back to square one, the basis of their band is pretty much what we're doing now, whereas with a lot of people now the basis of their band is a million miles away from that. You know, how much arethey depending on whoever's been doing the knob twiddling for them. Rather than being part of a scene, we've always seen ourselves as similar to someone like The Fall who've got their own set up, on their own terms. So you don't have to look for the next bandwagon to jump on. 'Cos that's what a lot of bands are going to be doing in a few months' time. They'll be thinking 'Oh...Where do we go now?'."

Come the time of the national hangover, the New FADs will not be one of the bands shaking with the DTs.