Where some artists saw electronics as a means to undermine or break entirely from existing pop and rock tropes, UK musician Frank Tovey assimilated them in his work as Fad Gadget. His output under that nom de guerre – four albums, beginning in 1980 with Fireside Favourites, before continuing using his own name – is consistently fascinating, harnessing the possibilities of synths and drum machines in conjunction with an attitude that flirts with novelty, flamboyance and drama to articulate assorted concerns about society and the modern world.
Though hardly unique to this newly-forming area of music, the introduction of electronics into specifically British popular music at this time clearly acted as a vehicle for varying forms and levels of dissatisfaction and disaffection. It’s a distinct undercurrent in some of the music that emanated from Sheffield (that most pioneering hotspot) at this time – Cabaret Voltaire, The Human League (v.1!) – and though it was more a product of personal crisis than societal critique, Gary Numan’s work – particularly 1980’s Telekon – similarly exploited synth technology as the medium for a detached, alienated mode of expression. Inevitably, minds go and fingers point to Kraftwerk, wilfully ignoring the wry playfulness accompanying their mechanistic rhythms and ostensibly dispassionate vocals. In the case of Fad Gadget, his music sits somewhere in between: cool but concerned, intelligent but irascible, measured but ominous. Not so much a prophet of doom as one of decline.
There’s a distinct sense of this from the outset of his debut album Fireside Favourites. In ‘Pedestrian’, Tovey can almost be imagined on a soapbox – “Pedestrian, wait!” – in a punchy, up-front track where he doesn’t so much sing as remonstrate with listeners. In some ways, pointing a few fingers at Kraftwerk in relation to this album (and those that followed) is entirely appropriate, yet there’s a distinct angle in Fad Gadget’s output that rears back from their embracing of the ‘man-machine’, in favour of a more anxious ‘man vs. machine’. He sings of “Juggernaut noise and petrol fumes” – a theme that would be taken further in his 1982 album Under the Flag – in the process maintaining a lively, slightly abrasive manner. It’s reinforced by the palette of Tovey’s electronics: minimal bass, tilted into higher registers, reducing warmth.
“I’m stuck on / The state of the nation”, he clarifies in ‘State of the Nation’, a light, leisurely but spritely song that’s essentially dronal, locked onto the target of its subject. Again the lack of bass warmth, again the abrasion, here coming primarily from an endless stream of noise worrying through the middle of the texture. Though initially innocuous, a powerful sonic tension arises from the contrasting spring in the step of the beats with this slew of acid, which ultimately prevails at the end of the song. Religion – specifically the Mormons – comes in for criticism in ‘Salt Lake City Sunday’. It’s a circling track that becomes increasingly repetitive, like a mantra of denunciation, though Tovey restricts himself to his usual half-implied snarl of dislike and derision. The swirling electronics are reinforced by a snare drum, cranking up the song into an intense, militaristic cavalcade, “I slam the door in your face!”
Pure, nascent synth-pop is the language of ‘Coitus Interruptus’, a song that’s all the more troubling for its conflicted attitude. A neutral, steady pace and a list-like vocal blankness are used to recount aspects of relationships, largely reduced to sexuality and emissions – all things fluid – summarised as “this love sick repetition”. This is answered, exacerbated even, in the following, title track, where to the laidback stylings of almost weirdly cheerful synth music – like a robotic carnival – Tovey mingles the heat and intimacy of sex with nuclear, end-of-the-world imagery: “Hey now, honey, open your eyes / There’s a mushroom cloud up in the sky / Your hair is falling out and your teeth have gone / Your legs are still together but it won’t be long”. It’s a trinity of tension – carefree music, neutral vocals, catastrophic words – all of which makes ‘Fireside Favourites’ one of Fad Gadget’s most memorably disquieting songs.
‘Newsreel’ directs Tovey’s ire at the press, now turning brisk and bristling. Again the lack of warmth, the electronics forming a bed of punches and spikes beneath lyrics about prurient news intrusion. The instrumental pushes harder, switching up a few gears in terms of discomfort, before switching down again, only to be festooned with clatter and an intense closing crash. Tovey pushes into more grotesque territory in ‘Insecticide’ in an early example of electronica. His voice is all rippling distortion, the synths emit chaotic blip-bursts, the bass (such as it is – more implied than present) stays static, the beats pound onward. Ultra focused, fixated, Tovey likens and reduces himself to the form of a fly: “I’m smashing my face against the windowpane / The wife understands now / She’s getting quite used to me … / I fall to the floor and I do it again”. There’s a pervading creepiness to ‘Insecticide’ that feels all the more disturbing due to its inward focus, moving away from external concerns to internal ones, and the way this is transmitted through dark violence.
‘The Box’ hardly lightens the mood; it’s slow, spare, rudimentary, bare fifths instead of chords, basic bass, basic beats. All of it – particularly Tovey’s voice – feels precarious, fragile, with a pervading sense of being trapped, and mentally unravelling. It’s as close as Tovey gets to the world of Gary Numan, austere, cold and clinical, vacantly crying for release: “Let me out / I can’t stand the dark anymore”. It’s dank and dire, a situation where body fluids return as apt descriptors – “The window streaked excretion brown” – described with the aloof dispassion of a film narrative, seeking to distance the blackness of its reality through the medium of an imagined camera lens. Synthesizers and drum machines have rarely sounded so lifeless, tilting stupidly from side to side, aimless and artless, yet emotionally supercharged. When Tovey later adds extra embellishments they’re like metallic flowers, with sharp petals that cut as the lyrics vacantly flail, “Let us out / Let us out / Someone’s gotta let me out”.
Closing track ‘Arch of the Aorta’ plays out curiously in light of what’s gone before. It has an overt neutrality to it: modest tempo, simple beats, rich synth timbres but limited harmonic variation, faint traces of voices speaking at the periphery, their words inaudible. To all intents and purposes, it’s a wordless coda that doesn’t so much comment on or conclude what went before as deliberately leave everything open-ended. We’ve been unsettled again and again throughout Fireside Favourites (the irony of that seemingly benign title becoming overwhelming), and ‘Arch of the Aorta’ simply lets that continue. If anything, it places what could possibly be cathartic – the conversation taking place – beyond our grasp, obscured to the sides, an enigmatic babble that the music itself responds to in the very last thing we hear, someone asking “what?”
As i said at the start, an association between electronics and disaffection at this time was hardly unusual. In some cases – even celebrated ones – that association was less effective, less imaginative, musically than visually; electronics as much a symbol as a sound. Fad Gadget’s triumph was twofold. First, in harnessing the tension arising from embracing musical machines while decrying the ways in which machine-like society is harmful. Second, more significantly, in recognising and tapping deeply into the ways that synth technology could work in tandem with human emotion, such that apparent coolness and neutrality become the vehicle for remarkable amounts of heat and ferocity. These are fireside favourites, after all.
