‘Collapsing New People’: Fad Gadget’s tribute to a post-punk titan
Before Depeche Mode, Yazoo, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds had helped propel the fledgling Mute Records to global stature, early synthpop pioneer Fad Gadget was the label’s promising new sign.
Mute founder Daniel Miller only counted the Ballardian electro skulker ‘TVOD/Warm Leatherette’ under his Normal moniker on his nascent indie label when hearing like-minded Fad Gadget’s, real name Frank Tovey, similarly austere and fizzing demo for ‘Back to Nature’.
Singing Fad Gadget and cutting his first single at London’s RMS Studio, the polished version of ‘Back to Nature’ formed one of the key numbers of the emerging synthpop wave, a shuffling and pulsing groover scoring a strange lyrical vignette of weird romance amid “infrared heaters” and “the shade of a rubber tree”.
Equally fantastic singles would follow, the bristling ‘Ricky’s Hand’ and ‘Make Room’s more enduring B-side ‘Lady Shave’ around 1980’s Fireside Favourites debut LP, but the electronic primitivity wasn’t fronted by a staid and disaffected singer that would later plague synthpop. Having studied visual arts and mime at Leeds Polytechnic, Tovey would throw himself into a whirlwind of confrontational antics during his shows, most infamously appearing on stage tarred and feathered or entirely naked save smothered in shaving cream.
By 1984, Tovey was ready to give up the wildman persona and embark on a ‘solo’ career under his real name. Yet, for his last Fad Gadget album, Tovey decamped to Berlin’s famed Hansa Studio with the joint production chops of Gareth Jones and cut Gag, a new wave offering that expanded his sonic palette and looked to the city’s industrial fringes for inspiration for the record’s lead single and Fad Gadget’s defining hit.
Having already crossed paths when supporting Fad Gadget at Berlin’s The Loft venue, industrial pummellers Einstürzende Neubauten happened to be likewise recording in Hansa as Jones and Tovey were to cut ‘Collapsing New People’. Inspired by Einstürzende Neubauten’s use of found instrumentation and scrapyard music, the pleasing clangour of a nearby printing press pulled the pair, along with drummer Nick Cash, to record the machine rhythms and form the looping beat of ‘Collapsing New People’s metallic clash.
Einstürzende Neubauten were invited to contribute, partly for their novel factory sound contributions, but also to make clear this was no piss take. With the band’s name translating as ‘Collapsing New Buildings’, and wry lyrics such as “Exaggerate the scar tissue / Wounds that never heal / Takes hours of preparations / To get that wasted look”, it could have been easy to mistake it as a potshot at the German post-punks’ supposed earnestness.
But Tovey was a huge fan. Capturing some of their racket in the studio, Tovey nonetheless relegated Einstürzende Neubauten’s conjurings for the ‘Spoil the Child’ B-side. Jones would collaborate with Einstürzende Neubauten on later albums, as well as add his sampling chops to Depeche Mode’s Some Great Reward, but ‘Collapsing New People’ stands as one of his and Tovey’s glowing works, a crashing and animated blast of cartoon theatre that Einstürzende Neubauten should be proud to count as one of their musical odes.
