It looks like the Flying Lizards are going to have their third hit in a row with "TV". Out a few days and it already sounds familiar and - more surprisingly - I'm singing it. Which may not sound particularly odd except that the Lizards are not the kind of organization set up to make you respond in quite that way. Or so I thought. They've become the "commercially acceptable" face of experimental post-punk avant garde. Categories, my dear Watson, mere categories. Into sound, electronics, tape loops, minimal lyrics, their tracks hiccough and insist.
    I suppose it's the divide between intent and response but I thought they were somehow attempting to revolutionize rock listening habits. To wedge themselves between expectations from the listener to the track, much as Brecht and Weill revolutionized theater in germany in the early 30's so that an experience which, up until then, had been for the elite was socialized in the true political sense. To that end it hardly seems surprising that the Lizards' opening track on their first album is Brecht/Weill's "Mandelay Song." But am I wrong? David Cunningham, master of studio decks, tape splicing and the paraphernalia of recording, the brains, as it were, behind the Lizards says in a recent Melody Maker interview that the Lizards was just an idea to get some musicians together and experiment with sounds and now look what's happened - they've become a rock identity. They are successful (how many groups would give their eyeteeth for three hit singles in a row?) yet, according to Cunningham they set out to be no more politically important than Gary Numan and Human League.
    The first two singles, I guess, didn't hint at anything more in retrospect. Taking two 60's hits like Barry Gordy's "Money" and Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues" into the 80's by making them less frantic, more pedantic, with a hard metallic overtone, was amusing tongue-in-cheek stuff. Repressed and minimalistic, as though everyone in the studio was in a straight jacket and the woman Lizard sounding like a pouting, foot stamping child "Money - that's what I want." It laughed at the words and made them work in the reverse to the originals.
    But their first album contains a couple of tracks which seem to say much more than a clever idea from Cunningham of mixing reggae dub with computer data read-outs and the odd smattering of jazz improvisation. The listener can always make music say something to them which is not always what the artist intended, and the relationship between thought and sound is sometimes tenuous. But here the juxtaposition between words and sounds is interesting. And like so many rock tracks there's so much space around, a listener can fill it with whatever he wants to. How deliberate is it, for instance, that when men's voices emerge they sound like faulty computers? That the very malfunctioning effect makes them sound inhuman yet invulnerable? The distance on "Her Story" is created between the woman's voice and the male interjection. "This is a love song" sings the male 'computer' with subdued desperation, relaying the male rock artist's influence over the woman listener. The woman sees through and is confused by the influence: "you can still make money by singing sweet songs/I blame Howard Huges/I blame the TV/I blame the Top 20 for my jealousy." After all, conditioning from pop songs starts early. didn't we all learn to express emotions through the parameters and attitudes drawn up by the feelings on rock lyrics? And in some ways doesn't that continue to effect us?
    On "TV" the effect seems to be one of saying that communications between people is often played out in lyric clichés that, when they're stripped down, are meaningless. The relationship drawn up by the male rock ego seen on the small screen taken out of the cathode ray tube and placed into real life. There are parallels between this and the Pretenders' "Private Life" that may not be obvious. The woman is ironic: "Elton John profile/small screen smile/...I've told you before/you've made me so sore/Your beautiful teeth/What's underneath?"
    And the male "line": "I think you're very beautiful" starts to go wrong under this attack until it turns into: I think you're very...very...very...very...very...". The result is the listener, more used to a track which is structured (start, middle, end) is forced to listen to fragments, is unsettled by the lack of expected form. The normal relationship between audience and track is subverted.
    The other track that does this is "The Window" (this and "Her Story", by the way, were written by a rock writer, a woman, which is interesting on many counts and may well have something to do with a feminist reading of the songs which Cunningham may not have intended). "The Window" is particularly intriguing as far as intent and result are concerned because other women critics I know have listened to it and thought it a song noire; a kind of rock fairy tale mix of delightful and unrealistic. The women sing a rather pretty melodic line, slightly ghostly, slightly choral and wintery. My hearing of the song remains as the representation of women and men in terms of threat and physical differences. The man represented by squeaking, fumbling, icy playing behind the lyrics "Can you hear him banging on the window/he's throwing things at the window". The words placed within a question mark rather than a statement are more menacing "I don't want to let him in/I wish he wasn't twice my size" seem far from a female fairy tale of princess and giant. (although there's a justifiable element of that which I don't think subtracts from my reading), to denote a difference in physical strength, an expression (more frightening because it's so subdued and fatalistic) of women's vulnerability to attack by male society.
    Whatever Cunningham intended to do with the Lizards - and a lot of the album is padded out with instrumental tracks which are overly indebted to Eno - the result on this listener is that I can bring my perspective on life to bear on what comes out on the tracks. It's usually not that clear cut. Taken out of the album's context "TV" can give the Lizards a hit based on a now identifiable Lizards sound.

- Penny Valentine/1980

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