Marking
its 45th anniversary today is the debut eponymous LP from The Flying
Lizards, which was released on July 28th, 1979. It became an
underground hit as a sort of novelty post-punk album, driven by the
success of their cover versions of the songs, Money & Summertime
Blues. Like Public Image Ltd at the time, the group took the essence of
dub style production and applied it to the realm of eccentric pop
music, creating an art-house experimental collective of musical
subversion.
Formed and led by
record producer David Cunningham, the group were a loose collective of
avant-garde and freely improvising musicians, including David Toop and
Steve Beresford as instrumentalists, with Deborah Evans-Stickland, Patti
Palladin and music journalist Vivien Goldman as the main vocalists.
Based on the surprise success of their broken down versions of Money and
Summertime Blues, which were recorded in Cunningham's living room,
Virgin Records extended their contract and financed the production of
their debut LP. With label backing in hand, Cunningham proceeded to
fill out the rest of the album with a pastiche of odd, incongruous and
inexplicable variants on the principal theme established with the
album's preceding singles, of warping familiar pop tropes into bonkers,
inside-out re-contextualizations of what a pop song could be. As a
continuous listening experience, the album evolves from the strangely
familiar into the utterly alien, as progressively more dense dub effects
are slathered onto the mix. In terms of sheer weirdness, perhaps only
The Residents were colouring as far outside the lines as The Flying
Lizards at that time.
The album
was a modest success in the UK and other markets, but subsequent albums
under the Lizards moniker proved to be much less successful. Two
follow up albums came in its wake, but it was an unreleased album of
pure dub reggae, The Secret Life of the Flying Lizards, recorded before
this debut, that was the only release to eclipse this in terms of
artistic achievement.
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