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Album Details
- Artist: Fischer-Z
- Album: Word Salad
- Label: United Artists
- Year of Release: 1979
- ME Rating:
- Reviewed by: charlesmartel on 2011-07-05
RecommendFor some reason, Fischer-Z were always inappropriately compared to Talking Heads. A more inappropriate comparison I could not think of. The two bands share almost nothing in common. Talking Heads were about art, Man, art. Fischer-Z were about life, growing up, politics - everyday stuff with an everyday relevance to people. Fischer-Z were post punks. Talking Heads were not.
It is worth pointing out that Fischer-Z and the frontman, John Watts are, to all intents and purposes, one and the same thing. Watts writes the lyrics and the music. This is his musical vision. When, in later years, he would go solo, then reform the band, then go solo again, it almost did not matter. The whole thing was part of a continuum of one man's musical vision.
Word Salad was the band's debut album. It shows the band (John Watts) at a youthful and innocent stage. Like many people, I came to Fischer-Z by way of their third album, the wonderful Red Skies over Paradise. This fact has greatly influenced the way I looked at the two albums which went before it for to me that was the definitive Fischer-Z album while Word Salad and Going Deaf for a Living were merely building up to it. Of the two, this is the fun album, the album you make of the fun lyrics and the lightweight, almost poppy melodies you write when you first stared out as a band.
The music and the themes were lightweight, often quirky, sometimes a bit too light-hearted. However, the indications of future greatness were there. The music was tight and crisp, with a good sound of guitar and keyboards driven post punk style. Perhaps the stand out track is “The Worker” which deals with the futility of a working life. Like much of Watts' later work, “The Worker” has a large measure of social commentary in a political way. However, he also wrote Political stuff, and “Remember Russia” is the lone example on this album.
Yet “The Worker” holds a rare distinction in British popular music. It is the only track which, following its being played on Top of the Pops in Fischer-Z’s one and only appearance on that iconic music show, then actually went down in the charts after the show. Watts put it down to the poor quality of the mix on that occasion, but I cannot help but feel that this fact demonstrates the shallow and lukewarm attitude of most British music punters when faced with something less than safe.
Be that as it may, it seems likely that any pretensions John Watts had to becoming a commercially successful pop band in the UK were shattered by that experience. If so, it is something to be thankful for. It pushed the band away from the dubious attractions of trying to make it big as a singles band and towards a musical direction which was later to reach fruition with Red Skies over Paradise. It is tempting, but rather unsettling, to wonder what might have happened if “The Worker” had become a hit. I doubt that Red Skies over Paradise would ever have been made.
The rest of the tracks are, by comparison, rather lightweight. In their own way, tracks like “Acrobat”, “Spiders”, “Headlines” and the joyful “Billy and the Motorway Police” are an easily digestible, sometimes amusing look at different angles of life. This style, once distilled into weightier themes, was to become the distinctive hallmark of John Watts' music for the future, setting him on the path to becoming surely the most underrated songster of all time.
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