Word Paradise – The United Artists Records & Liberty Recordings, Fischer-Z (Cherry Red)
It wasn’t all crap pop or doom and gloom industrial indie back in the day. There were also groups such as Fischer-Z making great albums which somehow mostly eluded the British public yet were big hits elsewhere in Europe. This new 3 CD set gathers up the band’s original trio of albums – Word Salad, Going Deaf For A Living and Red Skies Over Paradise – from when the band were signed to major record labels, and adds a sprinkling of bonus tracks.
Word Salad starts with ‘Pretty Paracetomol’, an ode to painkillers, and ends with ‘Lemmings’ so you can sense that Fischer-Z aren’t the happiest of bunnies, as the dour ‘Remember Russia’ also evidences, although they also excelled at bad puns (‘The French Let Her’), romantic angst (‘Lies’) and social critique (‘The Worker’, which is the nearest Fischer-Z came to a hit single in the UK).
Musically, the band mix new wave with a reggae sensibility. Not a million miles away from some of the Police’s work, but managing to avoid both the banality of their ‘De-do-do-do, de-da-da-da’ gibberish and the pseudo literary profundity and bad rhyming of ‘ It’s no use, he sees her, he starts to shake and cough / Just like the old man in that book by Nabokov’. And thankfully, John Watts, the lead singer of Fischer-Z is not a complete dickhead.
Anyway, back to the review at hand. Going Deaf For A Living is probably my favourite album of the three here. It’s focus is mostly on relationships and (mis)communication. The opening track, ‘Room Service’, is about a hotel maid who doesn’t appear to speak English and delivers three breakfasts instead of the one ordered. ‘So Long’ is about goodbyes, ‘Crazy Girl’ does what it says on the tin, the title track is about choosing to ignore things, ‘Four Minutes in Durham (With You) is obvious, and the closing track ‘Limbo’ is about feeling helpless and adrift. All, apart from the angry spit of ‘Haters’, set to catchy, addictive grooves.
Red Skies Over Paradise gets a bit more serious, from the nuclear fallout cover on in. Tracks like ‘Cruise Missiles’, ‘In England’, ‘Multinationals Bite’ and the title track, offer witty social commentaries in a kind of post cold war political angsty way, whilst ‘Wristcutters Lullaby’ sees the narrator running away from both a suicide and the police, and ‘The Writer’ turns out to be dead in his room. Meanwhile, ‘Marliese’ is not the love song it appears to be but is actually an obsessional stalker song that features the dark refrain ‘You never really thought that I’d leave you in peace?’ Only ‘You’ll Never Find Brian Here’ offers a temporary moment of sunshine.
You’d have thought all this doom and gloom would be right up this country’s street, especially when the music is so addictively clever, but no. The band got dropped, although Watts has been releasing albums solo (including a reversioning of Red Skies…) and under the Fischer-Z moniker (including some great studio albums for Ariola and Harvest, Germany, as well as a live album). But he and the band are still under-valued over here: the world tour only features a single London date amongst the numerous venues elsewhere. Maybe this fantastic reissue will help things change? Get some pop miserableness into your life!
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Rupert Loydell
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