Fad Gadget

Essentially recognized through his Fad Gadget guise, Frank Tovey anchored one of the post-punk period’s most enduring cult outfits. Under that banner he and a shifting cast of collaborators issued multiple singles alongside four albums that pushed pop conventions outward across the late 1970s and early 1980s. Once he began issuing material under his own name in the mid-1980s, Tovey stayed equally restless, folding Cajun, blues, and folk traditions into his ongoing exploration of experimental electronics.

His catalog, marked by humor, darkness, strangeness, puzzlement, wildness, honesty, and confrontation, also reflected a history of physically daring stage appearances that featured acrobatic maneuvers and the shaving of his heavily lathered torso. Although Fad Gadget shared an era with Cabaret Voltaire, the Human League, Wire, the Normal, and Soft Cell, the group never matched those peers in either underground visibility or commercial chart impact. Tovey’s singular imprint on electronic music nevertheless remains clear, and its reach has only grown more evident with time.

London-born Tovey developed an early admiration for Iggy Pop, Marc Bolan, and Lou Reed. Convinced from youth that he would pursue music, he completed a fine-arts degree at Leeds Polytechnic in 1975. Returning to the capital, he assembled rudimentary pieces using electric piano, drum machine, and tape recorder. A flatmate introduced him to Daniel Miller at the Rough Trade shop, where Tovey handed over his early recordings to the creator of the Normal’s “Warm Leatherette.” Miller responded enthusiastically and added him to the fledgling Mute roster.

Tovey debuted live as Fad Gadget in July 1979. Two months afterward came the first single, “The Box,” an electronic release whose blend of the comic and the unsettling established lasting touchstones of his career. “Ricky’s Hand” followed the next March; its sleeve asserted that, apart from an electric drill and the vocals, everything originated from synthetic sources. A third single preceded the debut album Fireside Favourites, issued late in 1980. Although Tovey handled most of the synthesizer work, John Fryer contributed percussion, Eric Radcliffe played bass and guitar, Nick Cash supplied drums, and Miller added further synthesizer.

Incontinent, the second Fad Gadget album, appeared almost exactly a year later. Returning regulars were joined by Wire’s Robert Gotobed on drums, Peter Bahner on bass and guitar, and David Simmonds on additional synthesizer and percussion. Darker in tone and less dependent on electronics, the record emerged as a wide-eyed yet unfocused follow-up. Under the Flag and Gag arrived in 1982 and 1984. A shift toward dance and soul textures, paired with comparatively conventional production values, yielded lighter, less urgent music, yet Tovey’s lyrics avoided both the everyday and the fantastical. More often likened to Bob Dylan than to Gary Numan, he favored portrayals of ordinary lives over themes of machinery or extraterrestrials. Alison Moyet of Yaz provided guest vocals and saxophone on Under the Flag, while Rowland S. Howard of the Birthday Party contributed guitar to Gag.

Following Gag, Tovey began recording under his own name and released six albums on Mute between 1985 and 1992. Shortly before that sequence he collaborated with Non’s Boyd Rice on the 1984 album Easy Listening for the Hard of Hearing. Those later releases frequently proved more demanding than the Fad Gadget work, and the name change afforded greater creative latitude. Prompted by his daughter, Tovey resolved to learn instruments properly; when she asked him to play one of her songs, he realized he lacked the ability and therefore took up the guitar, deliberately incorporating more traditional instrumentation. Tyranny & the Hired Hand, issued in 1989, represented his most organic statement, a labor-themed collection of covers drawn from modern and traditional protest songs. Grand Union (1991) and Worried Men in Second Hand Suits (1992) extended the folk direction with the Irish trio the Pyros.

In 2001 Tovey revived the Fad Gadget moniker for live performances, including a slot at London’s Elektrofest and an opening spot for Depeche Mode on the Exciter tour. Mute issued the two-disc retrospective The Best of Fad Gadget, gathering key tracks, B-sides, and remixes. Fresh material had already been composed and further recordings planned when Tovey died unexpectedly at home on April 3, 2002.