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At various points in his career, the corporeal form of Fad Gadget withstood snapped tendons, spurting head gashes, and an X-shaped scar across his chest from broken glass. This festering manifestation of the shadow self tore out and tossed his pubic hair into the audience, mock-masturbated, sported medieval bondage gear, crowd surfed (often resulting in serious injury), fought with audience members, covered himself in shaving foam, and climbed rafters panting loudly in a microphone stuffed in his mouth. As Fad Gadget, Tovey abandoned British propriety and flagrantly debased himself into a primal nightmare. Eschewing the robotic playing by his contemporaries, Tovey shocked audiences with intense theatrics evoking…and provoking…the basest corners of the human psyche. Fad Gadget was filthy, dangerous, and chaotic. Perhaps he was simply too ahead of his time, or, quite simply, his message was too bleak for an era hell-bent for a bull market on Wall Street.įrank Tovey’s band Fad Gadget, the first outfit signed to Mute Records, boldly steered electronic music into the realm of industrial by mixing hand drills, Orff-inspired vocals, musique concrete, and shrieks. Tovey, much like the soothsayer of Julius Caesar, warned of the dangers of late capitalism with his bitterly anti-commercial, vulnerable lyrics. With that in mind, it is time to exhume Frank Tovey’s time capsule of the writhing, rotten underbelly of the Reagan/Thatcher era we’ve blithely chosen to forget. The deluge of nihilistic reboots is played out so heavily now, one wonders if innovation is still allowed, or if we’re just going to settle for pacifying our anxiety-riddled selves until the bitter end. To modern sensibility, the 1980s seem as much of a gentle utopia now as the 1960s did when The Wonder Years premiered in 1988. Humanity loves believing in a simpler past. As we greedily lap up salacious headlines and news clips on our phones, we collectively wonder if anything is changing for the better.

Quarantine, the rise of fascism, and the relentless news cycle has everyone caught in a hellish loop of anxious doomscrolling.