We're gonna shoot for three straight leading into the weekend here, with three wildly different anniversary celebrations.
Let's kick the trifecta off with this 38th birthday set, featuring one of the great undersung 1980s ensembles just as they were exploding upon an unsuspecting, velour-clad populace.
Another '80s band that is thought of in the wider, less engaged world as a one-hit wonder, but whose first four records are totally flawless gems, worthy of any LPs ever tracked by anyone and certainly head and shoulders above their MTV'd contemporaries.
Something like a cross between Pink Floyd and Cheap Trick, they managed to forge a kind of poppy art-rock sound, led by the somewhat mysterious, paranoiac presence of their singer, possessed as he was and is with a singular, identifiable-by-one-syllable voice and a highly existential lyrical bent.
Their secret weapon was always their guitar player, whose super-melodic efforts put their tunes in a unique sonic groove, somewhere between Roger McGuinn's chime in The Byrds and the delay experiments of U2's The Edge.
One of the greatest and most tuneful postpunk groups, no one sounds like The Fixx even 40 years after they first hit. And even cooler, they still tour and play after four decades. Well, they did before society got locked down for COVID, anyway.
So what have we here, then? There's a CD of their King Biscuit Flower Hour performance two weeks after this one that's long out-of-print, but this is the pre-broadcast vinyl of their BBC Rock Hour taped in Boston at the legendary Paradise.
The Fixx
Paradise Theater
Boston, Massachusetts USA
11.18.1982
01 BBC intro: Sylvie Simmons
02 Liner
03 Cameras In Paris
04 One Thing Leads to Another
05 Kingdom Christsake
06 advertisements
07 Stand or Fall
08 Going Overboard
09 I Found You
10 advertisements
11 Reach the Beach
12 The Fool
13 Some People
14 advertisements
15 Lost Planes
16 Red Skies
17 Sinking Island
18 BBC outro: Sylvie Simmons
Total time: 59:20
Cy Curnin - vocals
Rupert Greenall - keyboards
Jamie West-Oram - guitar
Adam Woods - drums & percussion
Alfie Agius - bass
declicked preFM vinyl from the BBC Rock Hour, show #351
first broadcast the week of December 19, 1982
343 MB FLAC/November 2020 archive link
This one was declicked somewhere along the lineage, and has been rendered free of obtrusive surface noise for your auditory pleasure.
I shall return in 24 with another goodie, but don't miss out on The Fixx... even if you aren't broken, they're still pretty necessary.--J.
This is awesome! The Fixx is so underrated--their lyrics, arrangements, and musicianship fly under the radar but are exceptional. And you're right about JWO's guitar playing; it's immediately identifiable. Thanks for publishing this!
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DeleteThank you. The FIXX is one of my favorite groups. Their musak is solid from their first singles to the stuff they released recently (and Cy, the lead singer, has a new EP out now).
ReplyDeleteif you're on Facebook, I highly recommend friending Cy Curnin. He gives lengthy solo piano concerts for the lockdown and sings all sorts of songs including Fixx classics
Deletein fact, Cy shared this post on his feed when I put it up
Deleteit was an honor!