Oh no, not Fuzzbox. Not loud, talentless Fuzzbox, releasing a single again. 'What's The Point', it has been said, is an apt title for it.
Those haircuts. Those big girlie shriekings. All those garish colours and their flagrant inability to play their instruments. A novelty group--nothing more, let's face it. Young girls, giggly girls, who just happen to have been plucked out of the indie quagmire on some Filofax carrier's whim, and pushed into the world of Big Buck Records, to be moulded and manipulated into the next ...Amazulu?
Mags, Vicky, Jo and Tina would, naturally, beg to differ here. So would many of the (male) journalists who fell for their charms last year. And thereby hangs Fuzzbox's major problem. If audiences/critics don't like them, it's because they're no good. If audiences/critics love them, it's because they're girls and they probably fancy them. So, their male fans' normally astute and impartial judgment goes out the window together with their newly soiled underpants. File under 'girl groups' and toddle off home to do the ironing, dear.
Fuzzbox can't win.
"We can't win," they say.
Jo: "You feel people aren't expecting enough of us in some cases and they just pass you off as 'oh God, it's that girlie racket again!"'
Vicky: "Which it is! We don't mind being known as wacky, though, it's when we're known as being stupid, or that that's the only side to us. or they don't say we write our own songs."
Tina: "Even 'wacky' is a bit bad because we're hardly wacky. We're just normal and naughty."
Mags: "People tend to ignore the fact we've sold a lot of records. The first one sold an awful lot of records and is still selling. . ."
Tina: ".. .an awful lot of records!"
Mags: "So we can't be all that awful, otherwise we'd have gone away long ago."
Tina: "And we wouldn't have sold such an awful lot of records."
Mags: "Which is an awful lot really."
The debut Fuzzbox album, 'Bostin' Steve Austin', was greeted with the kind of lukewarm reception normally reserved for good ideas that have lost their (that word again) novelty value. Last month's media darlings turned media bores. Fuzzbox were a victim of their previous success. Few pointed out the quirky commerciality of the tunes, fewer still the presence of some of the most articulate lyrics about 'being a girlie' this side of more easily accepted 'serious' artists like Tracey Thorn.
Mags: "I think people thought, 'oh yeah--they've signed to WEA' and that we were going to do something disco--get Madonna in to produce us and start wearing 501 jeans or something. But unfortunately not."
Jo: "And also, when we released it, we had some stiff competition from Kiri Te Kanawa, Val Sings Christmas and all, and the album got a bit lost.
"I think it's quite obvious that if you've got a choice between 'The Black Lace Christmas Knees-up' and Fuzzbox, which one you'd choose. We don't mind being second to something like that."
Mags: "'Agadoo', now there's a song."
Vicky: "Actually, only today I heard a very nice record by Michael Crawford..."
Jo: "It was really funny in one review of our LP. the writer said 'I really wish I could like this but. . ."'
Mags: "She was being really patronizing towards us. She'd like to like it, just because we're women. That's like saying to a disabled person, 'I'd really like to like this because you're disabled.' It's not what you want to hear. It's quite disappointing when 'feminist' writers sit down and write that sort of crap."
Vicky: "Some people ignore our lyrics while others expect our lyrics to be deep and meaningful and totally profound, and if it's got some stupid lines in it then they ask what are we doing? We're meant to be these feminist young ladies saying something political. Just because a few of our songs are political they think they all have to be."
Mags: "A lot of people got 'XXX' all wrong. They said 'oh yeah, another song about Page Three girls'. And all it is is a series of images of women. It wasn't really a great statement.
"We're not a group that believes in forcing our ideas down other people's throats. I think 'XXX' is quite a clever song though. XXX--the female chromosomes and stuff like that.
"Some feminists have criticized it, yet one of the lines is "74's resolution is no solution'. And that's supposed to be the Sex Discrimination Act, which was actually in 1976 only you couldn't really sing 1976 and make it fit, so I thought 'Well, it must have gone on a green paper in 1974', so I'd get away with it!"
The good thing about Fuzzbox is that any preconceptions you may have had about them disappear as soon as you bother to take the time to listen to them. The last thing they want is to be a 'serious' band. They're astute enough to realize that the one quality that makes them different is their energy and larger-than-life personality. Sigue Sigue Sputnik with a sense of humour, if you like, though whether they'd appreciate the comparison is open to debate. Still, it makes a change from the Bangles...
Jo: "We get loads of journalists coming up to us and saying 'Don't you think you're just like the Bangles?"'(Mass laughter) "That's like saying to the Smiths, 'Don't you think you're just like Bob Marley and the Wailers?', because they've both got blokes in their group.
"People also say to us things like 'So why are you an all girl group?' Nobody goes to, say, the Waterboys and says" (conspiratorial whisper) "'Listen, why are you all boys?"'
Vicky: "It's just that you're analyzed so much because it's still a rare thing to be an all girl group. They're just vultures... Man!"
Some would say that the other quality that makes Fuzzbox different is the fact that they've been signed to a major record company when they openly admit that they can't play their instruments very well. Not that this has stopped other people in the past, of course, it's just that Fuzzbox have never tried to deny the fact, choosing to make a virtue of their deficiencies. "We are getting better" says Mags at least six times during the interview.
But what happens when, as they inevitably will, they start to play properly?
Mags: "It'll be years. Even though we have improved a hell of a lot. But I don't see us ever getting to the Dire Straits professionalism stage."
Jo: "I think we'll have gone through a lot of changes by then. "
Mags: "Also, we've got this theory that we're actually providing employment, because if we can't play our instruments very well, we have to employ other people, like orchestras, to come and do it. So, in fact, it's quite politically and ideologically sound not to be able to play very well. If more bands went out and couldn't play they'd be able to employ a whole host of professional musicians who spent years training to be where they are today. "
Vicky: "So there you are!"
When Fuzzbox's 'Love Is The Slug' single entered the national top 40, the voices celebrating the fact that they were one of the only two bands who'd emerged in 1986 from the indie sector to break through to the mainstream market, were strangely silent. The superior 'What's The Point', complete with bright and fast-paced video accompaniment, means 'Top of The Pops' surely beckons.
Fuzzbox will either become superstars, influencing a whole generation of young girls as someone like Madonna already is, or they will sink once more back into obscurity, a victim of a music business (and that means the 'right on' press as much as the record companies) that's stuck with the idea that if you giggle, this somehow interferes with your brain faculties.
Fuzzbox laugh at themselves more than anyone else ever could, and that's why they will probably survive to cock a snook at all the people expecting them to disappear up their frilly knickered back-sides. Get all four Fuzzboxes together and your ears will implode with the sound of hysterical laughter.
But that doesn't mean that they're any less ambitious than the introspective, muso groups they counter so well. If there was something they could achieve to prove to themselves they'd really 'made it', what would it be?
Jo: "I'd like to be able to write a song like 'Shaddup You Face'. To seriously sit down and write a line like 'Itsa not sa bad; itsa nice-a place; ah shaddup you face!' Imagine it! "
Tina: "I don't think we're quite up to that standard yet, Jo."
