Tuesday, September 3, 2019

Caravan on Camping Sand


Fad Gadget : Back to Nature


In September of 1979, Fad Gadget released its debut single "Back to Nature", an influential synth pop classic. Do-it-yourself East London art school grad Frank Tovey is Fad Gadget. He had more experience in performance art than music. He explained how he got started to Smash Hits in 1982 :

I set myself up in this small cupboard within a council flat.  A lot of shared the flat, so the only spare space I could find was inside the cupboard, where I had a cheap electric piano,  a little drum machine and a cassette recorder. There I began making music by playing just two or three notes  over and over again. I realized that if I could sig a further three notes then I had something roughly resembling a song.

"Back to Nature" is the first song that impressed Mute Records chief Daniel Miller, who played most of the instruments. Tovey's career was a spotty one that ended too soon when he died of a heart attack in 2002 at the age of 45.

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