Heart to art... THE FLYING LIZARDS "Fourth Wall" (Virgin V2190)  * * * * 1/2
    I should probably lay off them, but "Fourth Wall" should be prescribed - nay, forced - listening for Byrne/Eno and their fans. It approaches from a similar angle as "My Time As a Slice of Toast", but unlike "Mine's Two Veg and a Roast", "Fourth Wall" positively bubbles with life, humor, aggression and fun, and has a dance beat that sounds though it's produced for and by human beings.
    Forgetting Fern and Beano for the nonce, in terms of Cunningham's oeuvre (cleaning appliance), "Fourth Wall" has none of the doldrums of the saurian debut and improves vastly on it's action/collage funk. Delving deeper into the realms of chance, found sources and re/deconstruction, Cunningham has come up with a superbly subversive album.
    Cunningham reformed the Lizards as a trio a while back, with Patti Palladin and Michael Nyman. But whence the percussive domehead Nyman? The cuddly sage and his piano are only in evidence on the single, "Hands 2 Take" (his arrangement of a Palladin idea). In case the original 45 eluded you, this orchestrated frenzy is the only border-crossing where rock and classical both come out smelling like roses. Members of Nyman's own band (including, namedroppers, Lucy Skeaping, 'Irma' - for it she is - from Tom Phillips' opera) contribute staccato Gothic reeds and horns, Cunningham wrenches angular squawks from his guitar, Palladin purrs and growls the vocals and the percussion sounds like cloudy gunfire. It's a blustery palimpsest on Nyman's own sonorous systems-type music; like it and you'll love Nyman's band live.
    The only "version" this time round is of Curtis Mayfield's "Move On Up", possibly the most appalling of Cunningham's outrages. It has the sort of crummy jiveass bass line that even Motown hacks consider below  themselves, plinking Chinesy percussion, toolshed dub, Dr. Who synth and weird screams in the background. Similar to you-know-who's Ethnological Forgeries, it works both as a hooting lampoon and as an avant-revision of the original.
    "Fourth Wall" contains some blistering funk pieces; the ferocious, shattering "Another Story", with it's complex rhythm and careering harpsicord-type keyboards; the crackling machine-gun bump of "Steam Away" (apt); the drifting, ticking-over swing of "Glide/Spin" (guitar interruptions courtesy of Fripp), and the Czukay-ish "In My Lifetime", a prowling, tense rhythm passage with a hoarse male voice intoning, "I don't want to see your face ever again" repeatedly.
    The "minimal"/experimental pieces like "An Age". "Cirrus" and "New Voice" twist and dissolve "Evening Star"-type loops and repetitions, filling the cracks with discord, exploding quivering voices into 3-D. "New Voice", particularly, sounds like a cross between the flood of echoes at the climax of "For Your Pleasure" and one of Roedelius's funeral processions.
    The two oddities of the album are the opener, "Lovers and Other Strangers", and "A-Train". The former is a delightful diptych seemingly structured like a bubblegum tune. The first part bobs along with a sort of Irish whistling (eh?) on top, and suddenly collapses into a submarine dub, with dog-woofs, nursery rhyme trills, waterfalls of drums, sirens and a brief toast that sounds suspiciously like J. G. Bennett.
    "A-Train" is a fierce, ju-ju dance, a loping tribal rhythm with ex-Pop Groupster Gareth Sager levering chunks of blazing sound out of his sax, an arch keyboard riff chiming in shapes like Chinese calligraphy and swarms of raw treatments shifting around inside.
    Cunningham approaches random musical arrangements like a gambler, and it's this, along with his irreverence, wit and (I'm sure) basic innate feel for music that makes "Fourth Wall" the acceptable face of avant-rock. But that's not to denigrate the intellectual aspect of the album; it's simply that something keeps the cerebral processes from producing a dry, academic exercise like "My Holiday In a Caravan On the South Coast". While "My Word, Is That the Post?" spends 40 minutes demanding you admire its eclecticism (grrr), "Fourth Wall" steps out into the void, open to any invitation that may happen by, and in doing so undermines Art, Authority and all the other wobbly pedestals on which rock teeters. Cunningham's processes never forsake heart for art, and the result is a glorious, bizarre and seductive dance album that could have John Cage jitterbuggin', in an aleatoric kinda way.

    - John Gill