Lemmings on Lover's Rock

Heyyyy... remember these?

No, not the pictures-with-vinyl antics again. And not vinyl in general, although some of you might not remember those either. I meant specifically, vinyl copies of Fad Gadget albums. And I only say vinyl because for the longest time I was under the impression that vinyl copies were the last and only remaining artifacts from Frank Tovey's band (well, really, just Frank Tovey was the band -- an early Trent Reznor type, if you will) until I discovered just yesterday that apparently he did have a few compact disk re-releases of his old material, although they all appear to be undoubtedly out of print these days. Looks to be the only thing still available this day and age is the 2-CD The Best Of Fad Gadget which covers 30 tracks from his 1979-1984 Fad Gadgetry career, and the 4-CD Fad Gadget By Frank Tovey which appears to contain a few demo tracks, rarities, selections of Tovey's work with his later band The Pyros, and some concert footage and hour-long documentary directed by Alex Proyas (The Crow). I might even consider investing in the latter, since I've never heard his Pyros work, and I'd love to take a gander at his live performances, which were notoriously, ah... theatrical, as he was famed for wearing nothing but tar and feathers on stage, or covered head to toe in shaving cream as he removed his pubic hair delicately with a razor while singing. Oh, those wacky industrialists!

So anyway, Frank Tovey (Fad Gadget) was one of the earliest signers to the inchoate Mute label and has often been named-dropped as a huge influence on later 80's industrio-synth pop like Depeche Mode (who used to open for him in the early days), Erasure, and early Human League., to name a few. His signature is a sort of fractured synth death march, like the almost Birthday Partyesque "Back To Nature", or my personal favorite "One Man's Meat", the track that first introduced me to Da Gadget back around 1987 during my freshman year of college. I think I actually found this album in, of all places, a cut-out vinyl dump bin at the old Record Bar in Greenbrier Mall circa 1988. Tovey later experimented with other genres like blues/cajun and folk and collaborated with many other musicians on other projects, but sadly, Tovey had always suffered heart conditions all his life and he died of a heart attack in 2002.



Anyway, since I don't have any Fad Gadget CDs (yet) and I have yet to burn the record to disk, I have none of Frank Tovey's work on my computer to post as a download sample. But here is a video for the rather charmingly danceable "Collapsing New People" from German(?) TV that to me sounds like anything that could have charted back during its time, if Depeche Mode's name had been stamped across the single several dozen times. And remember, more information about Fad Gadget can be found on the internet! :-D