Looking for a strategy to get you through the coming hard times, break some images and make some money? Steve Taylor talks to The Flying Lizards' David Cunningham, who reckons he might just have the answer to all three.

    Hi doomsters! Just as we thought that idealism might be toughening itself up after the pathetic delusions which wafted through the turn of the last decade to immobilize the soporific Seventies, everyone's going soft on us, turning into neurotic soothsayers.
    Just when it's of desperate necessity to find out what is going on and harness the power that a little understanding of problems can fuel, we're awash with low rent future gazing, private visions of economic nemesis and social collapse that allow almost everything happening here and now to be summarily written-off as so much Nero-like fiddling.  A commendable conservation of brain power and quaint; very, very Seventies.
    Or, you might hedge your bets on the current crisis on late capitalism, rather than revolutionary, just for a awhile longer.  Things then begin to look very different; as much as gaping cracks in the old edifice stare you in the face, the germs of newer forms of organization begin to sprout. It is even possible to see popular music and its inseparable economic base in such a light, as the polarizing, confrontational ethics of punk yield a more thought out, perhaps compromised, but paradoxically tougher set of attitudes and practices.
    Like it or not, this is where the likes of The Flying Lizards - and in particular their founder, organizer, negotiator and media figurehead David Cunningham - will be placed in the retrospective of future history.  Only a littler reflection is needed to make clear the fact that the economics of punk and post punk have all along have been engineered by an older generation of relatively sophisticated entrepreneurs - Mclaren, rhodes, Last, Wilson, Copeland, Travis, Branson and so on.  It is also equally and bitterly clear that many of the bands that attempted to survive on their own ideological resources - Generation X, The Adverts, X-Ray Spex - came a big, big cropper.
    Which is all why it makes little sense to complain about how "self conscious" The Lizards' method is, why it makes only partial sense to judge their debut album solely in terms of its status as a finished product or as a commodity marketed by Virgin Records LTD.
    The Flying Lizards are above all away of doing things, in the studio and in the mass consumer market.  And, as such, they might have at least as much to say about survival in Thatcherite Britain as bondaged howl from the streets.

    In order to trace the roots of this hopeful pragmatism, it's necessary to talk at length to an un prepossessing man in his early twenties who dresses badly when he's not being photographed, speaks in a softened Ulster brogue and has distinctive (naturally) grey-streaked hair cut short and neat, making him resemble - of all people - the actor James Coburn.
    This is David Cunningham, the third child of a policeman and a primary teacher who taught him, for example, to read before he went to school: "It was nothing to do with being bright... more like forewarned."
    A Protestant primary school, hay fever, summers spent indoors reading and then grammar school and Art: "My Art master had this totally disrespectful attitude towards art," Cunningham explains. "Any sense you had of 'This is my personal bit of art and it's precious' was immediately destroyed; it made you much more willing to take risks."
    He got into the habit of tearing up his own work, which, he says somewhat gradually, "recreated the entire history of art from the Mona Lisa - because that was the earliest art I consciously knew about." By O-Level time he'd got as far as "vaguely Bauhaus" via the "first systems Mona Lisa."
    Of A-Levels in Ancient History, Greek and Art, he failed the later - "because of the systems approach" - but made an important contribution to cultural vandalism. "One piece I did early on, with a friend called Chris Nealy, was a milk bottle which we covered in paper mache and painted blue," he recalls, "It was sort of a phallic symbol. We thought it was such a disgusting looking thing that we threw it out of the first floor art room window and it smashed on the ground below." Because of the furvere it created among the other staff, "both of us realized quite independently that the act of throwing it out of the window was more important than the act of making it."

    It would be misleading to give an impression of Cunningham's teenage years as one long neo-Dadaist fling, though. At school they were "virtually pummeled" into working, while at home, his father having died when David was 13 and the other, older children having left home, "it was just me and my mother surviving."
    Despite (because of?) having failed A-Level Art, Cunningham got into Maidstone College of Art, leaving Northern Ireland and the small community in which he'd been brought up, after the obligatory "summer in a factory."
    "Art college was interesting from the start," he says, "because there was a lot of Gestalt therapy in the first year, to the extent that I rebelled against it quite heavily." He explains the aim of the therapy: "Here you were with a group of people and it seemed silly not to use their skills and incentives." Why the rebellion then? "An experience like that can't help but feel very negative, because it's defeating a lot of your values. I think it's quite important to completely knock yourself out of the values hold."
    David Toop, a Flying Lizard who met Cunningham when teaching at Maidstone, remembers him as "one of the most energetic of the students doing music - producing some horrible systems pieces on plates, knives and forks."
    "Summertime Blues" was already recorded by this time, on borrowed tape recorders. Cunningham's "legendary" album of systems music, "Grey Scale", was on the way, but - more crucially - he was meeting some of the figures who were to shape and figure into his own musical future.

    After Maidstone, David Cunningham moved to London and began working on the edge of the art world, doing part time work in galleries and the like. "Grey Scale" had sold "a couple of hundred copies" cheaply released by Cunningham himself, but what of the "Summertime Blues" tape?
    "I sent it to 20 record companies and they told me more or less in the same terms what I could do with it," he says. "The only solid reaction was from Peter Jenner of Blackhill, but nothing came of that apart from a vague association with This Heat, who sent him a tape much the same time as I did. I'd already heard them: he seemed quite impressed that I'd been there before him, because they'd hit him, I think, with almost as much power as the Floyd had ten years before."
    Things became increasingly complicated at this juncture, although two strands can be traced, one leading through a frustrated period in the studio with Cunningham, Anthony Moore and three members of This Heat all chucking production ideas into the cauldron.
    The other strand of his career during early '78 follows the "Summertime Blues" tape through a former rock scribe, David Fudger, who became Virgin Records' publishing A&R persona around this time and played the tape to director Simon draper, who wanted it signed, "whatever it was."
    Cunningham doubts if it was unmistakable commercial potential which attracted Draper to the song: "They could get it pretty cheap, and even if I had nothing else to contribute to the music world, they could still recoup their costs." As it was, he was paid $250 for the tape - hardly likely to cause much of a flicker on Virgin's graphs, even if it had been 100 percent remaindered - and saw a total of about $1,000 back from it's 2,000 or so sales.

    The next Flying Lizards project had Cunningham rifling through his collection of old singles once more - not quite as far back as Eddie Cochran's 1958 million-seller, but to February 1960, when Barrett Strong had an American top 30 hit with "Money". a Berry Gordy Jr. song later to be covered by two well known British pop groups.
    Here the Lizards expanded to include a musician Cunningham had met at Covent Garden through a mutual friend - Jullian Marshall, a pianist and songwriter who was about to tour Europe with Marshall Hain. Cunningham had liked the elegant "black" sound of their single "Dancing in the City", but had other reasons for introducing Marshall into the fold.
    "I used Julian for the first time on 'Money'," Cunningham admits, simply for logistics; here he was with a piano - a grand piano - and a TEAC in his front room."
    Marshall recalls How It Was Done: "David played me the original version to refresh my memory, put one mike in the piano and another one by the metronome on the floor. We did it twice, the second time with various things - Chopin sheet music, a glass ashtray, a cassette recorder - thrown into the piano."
    His subsequent response serves as a revealing illumination of the Cunningham Method: "David said 'That's fine,' and I was slightly amazed: it sounded fairly wrong. But the next time I heard it, at Utopia, where he was cutting it" - this was after Cunningham had added all the other instruments, treated and mixed it - "it sounded fantastic."
    It reached number five in September of last year. In the States, where it was a cult hit on import - the fastest selling import in New York for a time - it has since been released on Virgin U. S. on both 12 and 7-inch, reaching number 34 in Cashbox at the last count and selling around 200,00 copies.

    Cunningham had been around the record business for long enough to know that this was putting him in a position of some power, especially as "Money" is reputed to have recouped his $250 advance with the first day's sales.
    "After 'Money' I was out of contract with Virgin," he says, "but they'd had a hit so I was trying to re-negotiate - just me and my lawyer. Various other companies made suggestions, advances, offers, but Virgin outbid them on my terms, which means I'm free to work now on some solo stuff."
    He doesn't think Virgin will want his solo work, "unless it turns out to be a much better album than I think it'll be," so it's likely to appear on his own Piano label.
    Armed with the finances to record the Lizards' debut album, Cunningham set about drawing together a disparate cast of people and the ideas they represented. Some are more close to the hub than others, and the business arrangements of The Flying Lizards reflect this; although the advance and costs are down to his own production company - which means he delivers completed master tapes and artwork to Virgin - some musicians get a proportional royalty, dependent on sales, for their contributions, while others were simply paid a one-off session fee.

    Of the central corps, two musicians stand out for the closeness of their relationship with each other and with Cunningham. David Toop and Steve Beresford are both well known - infamous some would say - for their long involvement with the London improvised music circuit as performers, agents-provocateurs and writers.
    Cunningham met Toop when he lectured at Maidstone, and Beresford after a concert in 1974 at the Unity Theater, Camden: "The drummer, Dave Soloman, was down on his hands and knees playing the floor and there was this bloke acting like Rick Wakeman with six toy pianos arranged on top of a grand piano, playing them all at the same time." "This bloke" was Beresford.
    This relationship blossomed when the two discovered that they were both to appear with that semi-orchestrated collision of incompetents, the Portsmouth Sinfonta - Cunningham on the violin, which he'd learnt at school as a way of escaping games, and Beresford on trumpet.
    Toop and Beresford wanted to rope Cunningham in as the producer of their "pop group", General Strike, who've just released a first single, "My Body" on the Canal label. It's far from just the improvised music connection which has brought the three together: both Toop and Beresford have played in soul bands; the latter even teaches the bass guitar in a London comprehensive once a week, playing along to funk tracks. Beresford confesses himself to be weary of jazz writers who stress nothing but the anarchic aspect of his work, choosing to ignore the stock of Motown albums on his shelf when he's interviewed.
    Toop's own account of his reasons for being involved are suitable articulate: "My main is in the interest of writing collectively in the studio - doing stuff which has the virtues of the best pop music but has the flexibility and unpredictability of improvisation, using a shifting set of people as opposed to hierarchical writing set-ups and the eternal marriages of 'group'."

    The ways this works in practice are central to the whole Flying Lizards' ethos: Toop, Beresford and drummer Dave Soloman record backing tracks which are then used for a variety of purposes; one went to Debra for her to write the "TV" lyrics, one became the body of their "My Body" single, and another went to Vivien Goldman who voiced it into the "feminist dub disco" of "Her Story", which is driven along by Beresford's excellent funk-bass line.
    Goldman is also responsible for the album's most clearly realized conventional "song", "The Window". I asked Cunningham how that came about: "Vivien played me a tape she'd done in her front room of her singing and playing the bass guitar. Because it was badly recorded, it sounded like an African woman in a village hitting a dried gourd and singing along with it. I really liked that tape, so when I had an afternoon of studio time for the album free because I'd forgotten to tell Steve and Dave to turn up, I put her in front of a microphone with a rhythm tape which I'd made and she improvised the melody and structure of 'The Window' right there."
    The other musicians on the album, says Cunningham, "increasingly became satellites after Dave Soloman" - but they include drummer Charles Hayward from This Heat, with whom he made "The Flood" and it's dub, "Events During the Flood"; Bruce, The Pop Group's drummer; George Oban, who used to play bass for Aswad, and Cunningham himself.
    What unites this clacking brood of musicians and ideologies is not, as some reviewers have suggested, some sort of perniciously incestuous arrangement; on the afternoon when Julian Marshall gave his side of the story in his Westbourne Park flat, he was meeting Vivien Goldman for the first time, despite her living close by in Ladbroke Grove. If a group of people have become acquainted through working with the Flying Lizards, is that somehow suspicious?
    The answer is that one personality holds the "group" together: that of David Cunningham. He is the only person with any contractual relationship with Virgin, he arranges studio time and who should be there, and - more importantly - he produces the records.
    Indeed, it's hard, on reflection, to see the Flying Lizards as having any consistency beyond this point: it's really a combination of attitudes and methods held together by a style of production. If you want a flip description of that style, you might try "post-dub Brian Eno" or "modernist Lee Perry"; dub techniques and music/art theory are probably it's main components.
    Cunningham dismisses himself as a musician - "I can be very bad" - and therefore as a performer, although he admits to possessing the type of ego that would head straight for the nearest stage if it were backed by any confidence as a player.
    As a producer, however, his modesty fails him: "One of the fundamental things is that I've listened to enough records - old records: Phil Spector, Joe Meek, Lee Perry and all those people - to know that if all else failed I could do something quite drastic to a record in terms of the vocabulary of production that those people have used, and that'd see me through. I feel technically competent to that extent.
    Yet sheer technical competence he regards as more or less irrelevant: "I see every piece of studio equipment as a 'black box'; once you find out from experience what it does to a signal, you can work out most of the problems which will result from a particular combination of equipment and sounds by drawing a diagram - my notebook's full of them."
    So what is important in the studio?
    "I tend to find things and react to them on the spot. 'Trouble' is the best track for looking at some of the ways I actually work. It took an hour to record and mix. I already had a rhythm box track from a song which wasn't used, put it through a graphic equalizer and played with the knobs to get that rising and falling effect. Then I put on two stylophones treated with echo and glockenspiel, but each time I played I just listened to the original backing track and not to the other overdubs - an artificial constraint. Then I treated the whole mix with flanging, quite heavily."
    How does Cunningham react to the suggestion that "Trouble" is so stripped down, so naked, that it sounds, just as he's described it, as a formal exercise - Piece For Rhythm Box and Stylophones, the place on the album where the Idea gets the better of itself and form usurps content?
    "I was a bit worried about using it on the album," he admits, "because it seemed too experimental in a way."
    That's as far as he'll go down that particular blind alley. As for the criticisms of the album which point to a general lack of emotional charge, he is much more defensive: "I find the idea of projecting a particularly strong set of emotions through music a bit redundant. Context renders so much. It would work, say, in the time of Bach, where lack of social or musical change guaranteed a response: there was less uncertainty about it."
    "I don't reckon making a record someone's gonna listen to in the bath or on a transistor radio, or a twelve-year-old's gonna think it's a really nice tune, but it, take it home, listen to it twenty times without stopping and then walk down the street singing it, is the same context at all: it's just sheer enjoyment."
    So where do the Flying Lizards come in? Just to provide that odd three minutes of "sheer enjoyment" every so often? David Cunningham looks up from his wine glass; whether it's because the second bottle is nearing it's demise, or it's getting late, he decides to put his neck on the block.
    "This is probably the most pretentious answer of the lot," he begins. "I'm a bout to publicly embarrass myself. The Flying Lizards started off being about the old idea that any old idiot can knock together a record, and it was in tune with the whole punk myth. That myth having been disinterred, disinterred and disinterred again, it's now redundant, I feel. The aspirations behind it, as embodied in the likes of Rough Trade, are profoundly sound, but don't work much on their own these days, especially when being peddled by an individual who's coming along saying 'let's destroy'."
    "Having had a hit single created a different position, where the Lizards were an object in the cultural playground, or cultural marketplace, almost. I was definitely encouraged to go along with it - and people no doubt wanted to listen to it, one imagines. Here one was with this sort of toy; it seemed that I could go ahead with it."
    "A Flying Lizards record automatically anticipates the expectation of what it might be, like everyone thought we would do "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin On" for the next single and it would get to number 69 in the carts and that would be the end of us, one-and-a-half-hit-wonders. But if one continually frustrates the expectation in a positive way, in terms of the marketplace, one might actually manage something."
    One feels obliged to ask: something being what?
    "Something being that marketplace music, meaning the music which Roger Scott plays on his Capital Radio afternoon show, is an area which is actually open to innovation and one can introduce something... something..."
    What's this: too many tape loops? Cunningham's voice is repeating itself, like the voice on the fadeout of  "TV" which says: I think you're very... very... very... without any conclusion.
    Come on, he can't mock the journalist's putative end tidying like this.
    "Something... something....  new?"

-interview by Steve Taylor/1980

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