The Band Everyone's Really Talking About - Welcome to Fire Engines Week
The Band Everyone’s Really Talking About - Welcome to Fire Engines Week
It can’t have escaped people’s attention that the media this week is aflame with the announcement of a seismic event in rock music history. Everyone is talking about this group who surfed the zeitgeist years ago, before crashing and burning all too quickly, with only the music surviving the blast.
And everyone but everyone seems to have an opinion on what has been hailed in retrospect as the most important band alive, whether they like them or not. All that really matters is that this band is back in the public eye once more for all the world to see how great they were, and still are.
Welcome, then, to Fire Engines Week. This week has been dubbed as such in honour of the release of chrome dawns, a definitive compilation of the small and imperfectly formed back catalogue of Edinburgh’s finest agit-punk conceptualists. Available from Cherry Red Records on double vinyl and CD, chrome dawns features all of Fire Engines studio output collected in the same place for the first time.
This consists of three singles - ‘Get Up and Use Me’/’Everything’s Roses’; ‘Candyskin’/’Meat Whiplash’; and ‘Big Gold Dream’. chrome dawns also features Fire Engines’ mini LP of ‘aural wallpaper’, Lubricate Your Living Room. Beyond the records, the band’s two John Peel sessions are also in the mix, as is a cover of Franz Ferdinand’s ‘Jacqueline’ from a split single on which FF covered ‘Get Up and Use Me’.
The CD rounds up a plethora of live material not on the vinyl. This includes the band’s first gig at Leith Community Centre in 1980, a 1981 Valentino’s club show, and part of a live soundtrack to an Edinburgh Festival Fringe play, Why Does the Pope Not Come to Glasgow?
With such a major cultural artefact being put in the public domain, it is only right the original quartet of Davy Henderson, Murray Slade, Graham Main and Russell Burn are receiving so much attention.
This has come this week primarily from a series of articles in the magnificent online publication, Outside Left (www.outsideleft.com), which features a brand new interview with Fire Engines frontman Davy Henderson, reminiscences, videos and more. There will no doubt be album reviews in all the right places, while yours truly has penned forthcoming missives in the Herald and the List.
I’d not thought about pursuing either until Bob Last emailed me asking if I knew if there was any press coverage happening for the record. I didn’t, but was galvanised to do something myself. And everyone knows that without DIY of one form or another that nothing will happen. So here we are.
Full disclosure, the Herald piece is a short excerpt from my 10,000-odd word essay and interview with all four members of the band that appears in the 32-page CD booklet. The vinyl has various snatches of interview text collaged into Michael Robson’s amazing inner sleeve design. I’ve not received my copy of either yet, but the images on Michael’s Instagram look magnificent. You should buy both vinyl and CD. This is art several times over.
The interview for the CD booklet took place in October 2023 as a preliminary to the Fire Engines’ AGM. Every band should have an AGM. Forty-odd years after Fire Engines stopped the clocks for a couple of decades, its important.
We spent a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon in Edinburgh in a bright, white meeting room in the Fruitmarket Gallery, just next to the back of Waverley Station. Like the overage teenage gang the quartet still are at heart, the reconvened Fire Engines refreshed themselves throughout the day with cans of not inexpensive lager from the Fruitmarket cafe bar.
By the end of our attempt to go through each track or tranche of tracks on the album, the scene resembled something between Proustian longeurs and a Chekhov play. As these four elder statemen of a revolutionary era in leftfield Scottish pop waxed forth on the past that shaped them, each moved increasingly into their own private island of remembrance. As they talked and remembered, each Fire Engine became oblivious to anything beyond their sphere. This wasn’t Proust or Chekhov anymore. It was something much more avant-garde than that.
Listening to the last twenty minutes on headphones and trying to make sense of it all, it sounded like some sub Samuel Beckett radio play, or a Robert Ashley opera. It was a mini symphony of inter-connecting monologues coming from the same place but ending up different as they talk over each other trying to be heard. As an accidental exercise in Musique concrète, listening to these half-cut old blokes telling war stories made me think of Glenn Gould’s radio documentary, The Idea of North. And yes, I do have records like that. For the purposes of chrome dawns, alas, none of it made the cut.
The recording of my AGM day conversation with Fire Engines took weeks to transcribe and edit. The 10,000-odd words that appear in the chrome dawns CD booklet are only a fraction of what was said. I’m not sure what I’ll ever do with the full transcript and recording, though I think as well that there’s some stuff I’d still like to ask. Maybe I’ll get round to it another time. Fire Engines Week goes on until it doesn’t.
In the meantime, here’s a little archival thing I did back in 2016 about Fire Engines’ first John Peel session cover of Heaven 17’s ‘(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang’. The horrible far right must have been doing something or other, so the Quietus put out a call for an Anti Fascist Anthem Top 40. I suggested ‘(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang’, which was placed at Number 11. That’s two number 1’s.
I loved working on chrome dawns, even though I keep accidentally calling it chrome yellow, which is a hybrid of Aldous Huxley’s first novel, but which drops the ‘h’, so it’s Crome Yellow. But I digress. chrome dawns looks and sounds wonderful. Especially as ‘(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang’ is on it, appearing on record for the first time since 1992. If my copy of chrome dawns ever turns up, I will treasure every work of art on it. Fire Engines will live forever.
Fire Engines - (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang
When Fast Product records boss Bob Last played one of his and label co partner Hilary Morrison’s roster the forthcoming debut single by his latest charges, the high-concept studio gloss and anti-fascist sentiments of the song impressed the four young men gathered on Last and Morrison’s s sofa. It was 1981, and with Margaret Thatcher forming an unholy alliance with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, Heaven 17's slap-bass driven '(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang' sounded like a very necessary anthem.
No-one in the room expected the four young men to cover the song before the original was even released. As Fire Engines, however, they had just released an LP of so-called aural wallpaper called Lubricate Your Living Room on Last and Morrison’s 's Pop: Aural label, so anything was possible. Especially as the raw, rudimentary and highly-charged angularity of Fire Engines was as far away from Heaven 17's studied construction of style and substance as it could be.
When Fire Engines ran out of time recording their first John Peel session, however, and opted to record a final track in a manic two hour stint back in Edinburgh, this is exactly what happened. The end result of Fire Engines' take on '(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang' sounded scratchier, scrappier and more urgent than Heaven 17's glossy slice of Nu-funk entryism. It was as if the song was on the run from forces unknown and threatening to collapse any second. The fact that Heaven 17's version was already being trailed by the time the Fire Engines session was broadcast gave both recordings a frisson of subversive zeal.
When Radio 1 went on to ban Heaven 17's single due to its political content, 'Fascist Groove Thang' stalled at number 45 in the singles chart. If the BBC's draconian censoriousness gave the record a sheen of underground cool, Fire Engines' deconstruction was even more samizdat. It was only officially released in 1992 on Creation Records' Fire Engines compilation, Fond. As the 1980s ushered in a new era of pop protest, it was just what Thatcher's children needed.
This was first published in The Quietus in June 2016 as part of a multiple-authored Top 40 of Anti-Fascist Anthems. ‘Fascist Groove Thang’ made it to number 11.
chrome dawns is available from Cherry Red Records. https://www.cherryred.co.uk/artist/fire-engines
Fire Engines main photograph by Hilary Morrison.
Fire Engines Week articles can be found at www.outsideleft.com