Dead Fingers Talk - Discography

Dead Fingers Talk - Discography

Without doubt Dead Fingers Talk were a superb live act with some great songs but as Jeff Parsons recalls elsewhere, the songs that a lot of people knew they were sick of playing. As such their debut album would end up featuring new untried songs leaving out such live centrepieces as 'Harry'. In this respect they share common ground with Adam & The Ants who also jettisoned songs for their debut.

Dead Fingers Talk certainly didn't get the rub of the green with Pye but at least they got to record and leave something for posterity. The reviews we feature below are for once fairly accurate. The band were complex and had great potential and mentioning Magazine & XTC in the same breath does any of them any disservice.

DEAD FINGERS TALK `Storm The Reality Studios' (Pye) *** 1/2 Sounds 17.6.78

I'VE NEVER seen Dead Fingers Talk live, but you get the feeling from this record that they must go over well: the powerful presentation, sly stylisation and expert musicianship auger well for onstage performances. That apart, I still like this, a Mick Ronson production with especially finely rendered guitars and overall neatly balanced despite a bit of wateriness in the vocal department.

A very original mulch of material here, obvious influences but well-blended and interesting. The more I played it the more it got a hold on me. The `obvious influences' are Lou Reed, but it's no derivative drivel. `Electric City' is a night time trip down the alleys of the sleepless wonder, with a hook which oddly resembles that in Free's `All Right Now'. `Nobody Loves You When You're Old And Gay' exhibits a smooth change-up of pace and Tony Carter's stylish drumming; throughout the album he retains a light, bouncing touch which rescues some of the numbers from dreary monotony and elsewhere (notably `Old And Gay') creates a breezy, unselfconscious, somersaulting rhythm which seems to inspire the others. BoBo Phoenix's double tracked sly vocals complete the picture: `Old And Gay' is a touch Tom Robinson (and John Lennon?).

`Storm The Reality Studios' itself is a grudging, grunting stutter with a pop chorus, `Some people wanna fuck you up/some people just wanna fuck'. The rhythm section is out of the very best cock-a-hoop blues, from Bluesbreakers through to Cream's ; `Spoonful', incorporating the same odd melody strain that the latter band used so successfully.

Side two illustrates the worst aspects of trying to put a good live band on vinyl: long, well-acted numbers onstage can lose all impact. `Fight Our Way Out Of Here' starts excellently with Hendrix licks and then degenerates into overlong, repetitious machinery-beat - automated rock. About four minutes too long and very destructive of an initial impact, slopping Bo Bo's lyrics into stodgy lumps that stick in his throat. In fact, throughout his lyrics could have been given a finer edge by the production. `We Got The Message' rehashes `Sweet Jane', you've heard it a million times before and, depending on your mood, it'll grab you or send you back to your Debbie Harry pics. The finale `Can't Think Straight' features a hook out of `Sunshine Of Your . Love' and scatters Hendrix all over the place.

While I've picked up a great amount of respect for this band from this recording, the main feel is that there is a need to hone their cutting edge.

PAUL CHAUTAUQUA

DEAD FINGERS TALK Storm The Reality Studios (PYE) NME 17.6.78

THE ONLY time I saw ' Dead Fingers Talk they were fighting a losing battle with the acoustics and the audience at the Astoria Theatre in Tottenham Court Road. "I know its a terrible gig, but it's a showcase," explained the man from Pye - which tells you more than you think about the way that people's careers get screwed up in the wonderful world of rock and roll.

Still, they displayed presence and courage and ideas, all qualities that transmit themselves on "Storm The Reality Studios". Both in form and in content, DF7s grasp of continuity is impressive: they've seized on aspects of youth culture that haven't changed that much over the last decade, and expressed their perceptions in music that draws a straight tine from Jimi Hendrix (there's a reference to "Purple Haze" in the last cut, and DFT have been known to do the song as an encore) up to the present day.

Between '68 and 178, their power base of operations would appear to be '72: specifically Bowie circa "Ziggy Stardust" and various incarnations of Lou Reed, a natural tendency of DFT's, but amplified and extended by producer Tick Ronson, who made the journey from Hull and back himself several years ago. "We Got The Message" on the second side is to "Ziggy" what Badfinger's "No Matter What" was to The Beatles' "Rubber Soul", and "Someone/Everyone" on the first side sounds uncannily like certain sections of Lou Reed's "Berlin" - Bobo Phoenix's acoustic guitar and voice evoking Reed's "Oh Jim" with almost uncanny verisimilitude.

Guitarist Jeff Parsons ends up sounding like a cross between a very timid young Hendrix - certainly younger and more timid than Hendrix himself ever was - and Ronson himself, Rono having absorbed his mentor's expertise at recording voices and guitars but displaying a weedier rhythm section sound than anything Bowie ever produced. So much for form. The content of the best of DFTs recorded material is considerably warmer than Reed's. "Electric City" is as much a city song as Reed's archetypes, but though Phoenix (the composer of most of the album's material) makes no attempt to gloss over the squalor in which Reed wallows so obsessively, his city is still a place for optimism and idealism.

This somewhat starry-eyed quality overspills into old-time hippy-dippy love-yer-brother stuff on a few of the tracks, but - as a diametric opposite to the violence fetish of too much of the last few years' rock and roll - that stuff lives better than it sounds, so it's nice that DFT have their ideals in the right place, though lyrics like "For all we know know, we might not be alive at all /Just a dream in someone's mind ... my destiny slowly unfolds throughout eternity / express, through me, the power of the universes are purest yick whether it's '68 or-'78.

Elsewhere, Phoenix displays his compassion to better advantage. "Nobody Loves You When You're Old And Gay" laments the lot of the ageing queen, "Fight Our Way Out Of Here" points out "First we made flowers and now we make fists/they made money out of that, they'll make money out of this", while the apocalyptic tide track (which features effective usage of techniques unfortunately defused by overuse earlier in the album, like out-of-synch overdubbed vocal/guitar tines) lays it down even dearer: "Drinking gin and tonics selling punk clothes to the vulnerable/the image became the reality and everyone was so gullible/punk rock revolutions, don't make me laugh/the people in control still know money's where it's at" before concluding "Some people wanna fuck you up/some people they just wanna fuck." You can tell just by hearing this album - even if you didn't know already - that DFT like to play Lou Reed songs in their set. Pity William Burroughs never wrote songs, because if he did, DFT"d be playing them too.

"Storm The Reality Studios" indicates that Dead Fingers Talk have a fair idea of what they'd like to achieve, and much of the materials that they will need in order to achieve it. If Phoenix and his boys can reach the heights of their best material with greater regularity, they will indeed be a band to reckon with. As it is, they're good now and they're going to get better. Keep tabs on' em.

Charles Shaar Murray


This Crazy World/ The Boyfriend (Pye 9/2/79)