Fad Gadget - The Best of Fad Gadget - Mute

Review by: - Josef Turner

"Every gig up until then I was injuring myself. At one concert I swung the mic around my neck and it came around and smashed me in the face. It cut my nose open and blackened both my eyes. I have lacerated my back with glass and every joint in my knuckles and toes has been grazed, so when I came home with both legs in plaster I started to sort out why I was doing it. The trouble is I get so involved when I'm on stage, there's so much adrenaline flowing that I don't feel pain in the end, it all comes down to entertainment. Whether you have something to say or not, people want to be impressed and excited." - Frank Tovey (FadGadget)

Rewind yourself, if you can, to the late seventies, Britain to be exact. I know you've seen the pictures and heard the stories. Poverty and rubble, first world country slipping into the third. Bloated musicians. Fat on acclaim and record sales while sitting on their laurels and growing fat. Punk rock. Guitars and Johnny singing "No Future!" with a grin and a sneer each confused with the other. The synthesizer.

Once again, it's the late seventies, Britain to be exact. Picture it. Picture a young man named Frank Tovey sitting in a room under the stairs (Harry Potter's room if you will) recording his debut album under the name Fad Gadget. Inspired by, I don't know, maybe Krafwerk and David Bowie, Metropolis and a future without one that's just machine, I don't know. Joining alongside Gary Numan's Tubeway Army, Cabaret Voltaire, Human League and others, he became an early stalwart of the Electronic scene. From these aforementioned groups rose the "New Romantics" of the early eighties that so dominated the charts.

Fast forward, if you will, to 1994. 1994, ten years past Orwell's magic year that every band of the late seventies was unconsciously counting towards, my freshman year of college in a small town surrounded by nothingness. I had just gotten a car and would drive drive drive for hours and hours and hours in this nothingness while filling it with the sounds of all the new music I was listening to. Trying desperately to break the laws of nature and create something out of nothing.

Camelot records was where all this new music was purchased. The cut-out bins were a font of discovery; Wire's first three records, the great bay area punk band Fuel, and Fad Gadget.

Fad Gadget. For the rest of that year those first three Fad Gadget albums were the soundtrack to my evening drives about town. Driving faster and faster and still getting nowhere. Spinning wheels.

Fast forward again seven more years and two cars later. The Best of Fad Gadget is finally released giving American their first taste of Tovey since the catalog went out of print in the early nineties. The primitive keyboard and synthesizer still sounds fresher than Nine Inch Nails. Still sounds better than third-rate knock offs like The Faint, and I like The Faint.

"Insecticide" is still the highlight cut to me. Video game beeps and distorted vocals that sound almost like buzzing. The life of a fly. More sounds and the menace slowly builds until the screaming "Smashing my face against the windowpane!"

The dancehall electronica of "Fireside Favorite" which precedes "Insecticide" also contains that sense of menace but this time with lyrics that belie the bouncy tempo that embraces it. The story of a man returning to his love grows more disturbing and grotesque as he sings of her body burning and decomposing as a nuclear explosion kills them.

Live, these guys were a menace. With a band that was composed of, at times, members of The Birthday Party, Fad Gadget would go to any extreme to convey, once again, I don't know, his angst? Alienation? Insanity? Pick one and go with it. Each of the tapes I had showed pictures of Tovey in some form of physical damage. Arms and legs were broken, skin was cut and shredded. Equipment was broken. In Amsterdam, 1983, a tour was scrapped when he tore all the ligaments in both legs, inspiring the quote which began this review. Needless to say, many shows ended in hospitals.

Then the late seventies grew up and the early eighties started growing into the mid-eighties. Human League got girls and went pop. ABC, Duran Duran, and Depeche Mode (who had played their first shows opening for Fad Gadget) with simpler songs about love and alienation. Cocaine and Big Hollywood movies. Fad gadget was too willfully complex. Fad Gadget tried to keep up. Inevitably Fad Gadget failed.

If only all failure could sound this sweet.

Listening to this collection makes me wonder what could have happened. Instead of sucking up to the charts trying to compete with Northern Soul and Industrial, what might Synth-Pop have become had artists like Tovey had popular success? What might the Synth-Pop Sgt. Pepper have sounded like? These questions haunt me as I listen to The Faint or The Primadonnas and all the others trying to raise high the flag.

Fad Gadget couldn't have been released at a better time.