The four Fuzzlets, Vickie, Tina, Maggie, and little Jo- knocked
gingerly on the door of Grandma's cottage.
The door creaked open to reveal to green eyes glinting in the
darkness liek emeralds.
"My oh my," said a gruff voice. "What cute
girly-wirlies..."
"Hands out of your trousers, Wolfie! Quit drooling and cough
up the ackers or you'll get some of this," said
little Jo, tapping her knee meaningfully...
"I used to look for fairies at the bottom of the garden,"
admits Vicky to hoots, snorts and hollers from the rest of F-troop.
"You know how you get fairy-rings? Yes, well, anyway
I used to hold them in my hand like this..."
What, Fairies? (snigger, chortle, laugh.)
"Yeah, and I used to hold them in my hand, like, and talk
to them, and make them homes out of shoeboxes..."
Had you been eating the mushrooms? (titter, yuk, choke.)
"No, listen. I had two friends who were ghosts. There was
Natalie (gurgle, smirk, giggle) we used to play together and talk
and stuff. We'd play dollies and run around..."
"And when did you last see Natalie?" asks Jo earnestly.
"She hasn't been 'round for a bit, has she? Did you fall
out or what?"
And this is a fairy-tale. Once upon a time there were three little
girls and one woman and this bloke asked them if they'd like to
make a record and they said- You what? and peed themselves laughing
and the record sold 28,000 copies and got to number 26 in the
proper charts and so they jacked-in school and a job with the
DHSS and went on television and played court to hordes of spotty
rock-journalists and got slagged by feminists and drove several
local prat Djs insane and pissed-off the trainspotters by getting
snapped up by the yellow jaws of the sharp-eared WEAwolf.
No littel girl with any soul dreams of pop-stars, because any
little girl who's got a soul is a popstar. But dotdotdot
to get-a-band-together and become mega-famous and produce pop-music
superior to that of any tinny white idol is a real fan-tasy, fairy-tale,
pinch me I'm dreaming etc.
Big sister Maggis says: I was thinking about that, walking up
the road, and I thought, y'know, this is really strange
like, I dunno, a fantasy, not... not real. I mean, not
'not real' really because we know what we're doing but...
Little sister Jo says: It's like being drunk. You know what you're
doing and you're doing it and you just don't care...
Vicky says: It's just one, big happy fairy-tale. there you go,
Susan, that's what you wanted us to say, wasn't it?
1) They are giggling little girls who can't play their instruments/haven't
paid their dues.
Oh the grunting and groaning from the wrinkled Rockasaurases in
the pond that time forgot. These are little girls and they do
giggle- a giggle being amused laughter being emitted from something
other than a hairy male chest- a terrible affliction to be cursed
with. They can play their instruments but not very well, unlike
say, The Cure, Banshees, Simple Minds, Yes, Genesis. Anybody who
wastes their youth doing anything as manky as learning an instrument
when they could be doing anything (I've always wondered
about boys who join bands to have sex- how grossly inadequate
can you get?) is probably a dead-brain anyway. It is truly pathetic
that a decade after Suck and cohorts laid waste to the gig-punter-lig-groupie
palava that there should still be so many 'rock-fans' with their
retrograde snob-blobbering about 'aesthetics', 'production', and
ferchrissakes, paying-your-dues. F'shure the Fuzzlings have pissed
it thus far. That is part of the Rock 'n' Roll dream, is it not?
It's meant to be easy and if it isn't then why are you still bothering,
dickhead?
2) They are giggling little girls who are pandering to the
sick, sexist fantasies of dirty old men and thus putting feminism
back 20 years.
Always a good one this. A woman approached them at the London
JAMC gig and pleaded with them to cease facilitating the wet dreams
of the corrupt male consumer.
Another woman harrangued them in Manchester about their patriarchal
packaging by a sinister male record company and the kinky stage
gear... to both of whom the Fuzzhipsters replied- Fuck off back
to the '60s, earthmother!
"Why should Fuzzbox conform to their preconceptions? why
should we be all grey and miserable?" asks Maggie. "They
just end up looking like men, why? I mean, men and women are different..."
"Are they?" asks Jo, wide-eyed and smiling.
Patsy, Fuzzmanager and Vindaloo person, snorts, snarls and proceed
to talk of the dullness, drabness and the sheer blood tedium of
middle-class feminism that has fought so hard to avoid 'male'
stereotypes that it has developed its own equally confining and
repressive boxes.
Ah, but... says Maggie... what of her friend who works in a Brum
city-centre record shop who claims that most of the customers
for the FuzzEP are fat businessmen?
There is a problem but it has more to do with the tangled rat's
nest of male-sexuality in a fucked-up society than it has to do
with the Fuzzies.
The female-Punk-dress-sense involved the taking of fetished clothes
and subverting it, making it sexless. And yet, for many of the
sussed, the anti-sensual plumage, the caked slap, messy hair,
etc, were seen as outward signs of a woman who was assertive and
hip and therefore sexually attractive. On the sexual-politico
front there are scores of butch yet sensitive anti-sexist men
who are aroused by the idea of feminist woman. Those dungarees!
Those monkey-boots! (etc ad nauseum.)
There are men who get hot under the collar about giraffes, caged
birds, leather, freckles, fish- you name it. For any woman to
avoid arousing the fetish-crazed brain and attached genitailia
of some section of fucked-up maledom would have to be invisible-
and perhaps not even then. the Fuzzgear is tatty anti-fashion
pratwear- a parody of the Bucks Fizz yoghurt-tart syndrome. If
you locked the Fuzzdevils ina room with your average dirty old
man, they'd soon reduce the scrote to a heap of blubbering slime.
On top of this the Fuzzcorps have taken (admittedly basic) sexual-political
propaganda to places that the dull right-ons will never reach.
One is almost tempted to call them the most subversive feminist
band in rock.
Maggie: "Oh, pretty, yeah, damn, yeah, 'subversive', yeah,
like 'anarchy', like 'throw down the system'."
3) They are giggling little girls and there is no third reason.
Giggle, giggle.
None of the Fuzzbrats dance to jazz, frequent the Wag, have ever
tried Ecstasy or ever heard of Peter York or Bobby Helmet. Yet
what we have here, in the flesh, in the verbals, in every twist,
giggle and nuance, is the first pop-group in almost 10 years with
any style whatsoever. They've got it because they don't try and
don't care and despise it and think it's somethig to do with hairdressing.
The Fuzzmonsters have shown more collective style in their choice
of socks that all the po-faced pundits have been able to offer
in a thousand acres of wasted print.
As in Jo as in pucker-pink flares, protex-blue plassy rally jacket,
psycho-delic cravat, Banana Splits spex and hair reminiscent
of a panful of boiling kittens. Jo, the wittiest of the Fuzzniks,
is cool personified. She has no truck with the mean, moody silence
that the dim think is straight-from-the-fridge but which is in
fact nowt more than a front for the hot, blasted wastes of sulliness
and despairing stupidity. Jo jabbers and sparks and takes the
piss and is always being told to shut up. Not for her the desperate
retreat into pseudo-mystic 'art' a la pseudie Sue. Oh no, if Jo
doesn't know how something works she asks and if the answer is
couched in gobbledygook then she'll tell them, you're talking
crap. Not for Jo the ligging parasitism of certain Style-dogs
on the back of socialism, but a passion and an anger and an ever-rising
consciousness. Not for her the dead-ends of dress-design or mock-
journalism, no way. At the age of 13 Jo wanted to become an MP.
The whole style industry has been outwitted, outflanked and debased
by little girls from Birmingham (aaaargh!) . Perhaps in Jo we
have found at last a saviour from this bleak winter of pretension.
A beacon of style, subversion, surrealism and sex slashing through
the fog of naff.
But let us pull aside the velvet cloak of 'image' . What lies
behind the smiles, the giggles and the lack of dress sense? What
beastly maggots of conditioning and environment gnaw at the cortex
of the Fuzzpsyche? Well, they're all lapsed Catholics except ex
C-of-E Vicky and they all believe in God even though they know
that, as anarchists, they ought not to. But, aha! Ex-grammar school
gels, eh? Was it terribly terribly Bessie Bunter? No, says Vicky,
it was boring. It was crap. The three of them (excluding wrinklie
comprehensive spawn, Mags) explode in a gigglefest of nostalgiaover
memories of snogging and teacher-torture .
Jo: "The boys' school was next door and we had this paved
meeting rea but the rule was No Clinching in the Playgound. I
got caught once, clinching. 'Joanne Dunn. Would you plese stop
clinching in the playground. Very unladylike.' . . . Once we left
school three minutes early and you should have heard the fuss
they made! Tsk, Tsk! They were gonna make us tidy up the noticeboards
but they were afraid that we'd do grafitti all over them."
Jo once brought a teacher to pleading tears by refusing to put
a cover on an exercise book over which he had scrawled the word
'Toes'. Whoopee-cushions, false noses and "Darth Vader breathing"
in assembly--the three Fuzzpuppies waged a guerilla war against
the cosy liberalism of their school regime. The years of knocking
seven shades out of jelly has prepared them well for the absurdities
and stupidity of rock'n'roll .
Heard it all before... say the slit-eyed cynics. Kleenex, X-Ray
Spex, Banarama, The Slits. The Runaways, The Belle Stars . . .
What little boys fear they tend to lump together, but Fuzzbox've
got better songs, attitudes, politics and, damn it, style.
WGAFAWGUI have raised all the right hackles. They are three girls
(and one woman) who have found themselves doing something that
only little boys do, really, and doing something which they had
no real ambition or desire to do. It was like Wham! You're A Pop-Star
and they're staying sane by ripping the piss out of the whole
sorry mockery that is Rock Music with the sort of blitzed gusto
that one only gets from naive intelligent.
. . . And so Mr. Wolf gave all his money to the Fuzzchicklings
who gave it all to the poor people who all formed social surrealist
folk bands and brought down capitalism and everybody lived happily
ever after.
Three reasons to hate the Fuzzboxers
