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Review: 'Family Fodder and Friends'
'Sunday Girls (Director’s Cut)'   

-  Album: 'Sunday Girls (Director’s Cut)' -  Label: 'Staubgold'
-  Genre: 'Punk/New Wave' -  Release Date: '16th October 2015'-  Catalogue No: 'Staubgold 140'

Our Rating:
Back in ’79 and ’80, Family Fodder seemingly had something of a Blondie fixation, releasing both the ‘Sunday Girls’ EP and the ‘Debbie Harry’ 7”. The latest in Staubgold’s ongoing reissue series of Family Fodder’s back catalogue (and following the comprehensive and superlative re-release of ‘Monkey Banana Kitchen’) sees these disparate and obscure releases, along with their debut single and a few other choice cuts. The inclusion of the two tracks from the 12” single released as Frank Sumatra on Small Wonder (the label perhaps best known for Bauhaus’ seminal debut, ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’) in 1979 make for a tidy – and rather tasty – bonus.

The first 12 tracks represent the ‘Sunday Girls’ ‘tribute’ release. It’s hardly your conventional tribute, being neither a covers album nor showing much by way of an obvious debt to the style of Blondie, chirping and bibbling away with brass drones and wonky percussion. With glockenspiels a go-go, ‘Sunday Girl I’ sounds like The Chipmunks on acid. Things only get crazier from hereon in. ‘Mine and Billy’s Head’ is a wild free-noise funk racket of bass, drums and horns. The spaced desert dub reggae ‘No Man’s Land’ is woozy and fluid-feeling.

‘Street Credibility’ characterises the band’s crazed irreverence – a badly-played, off-key and out of time reggae cover of the theme from ‘Coronation Street’ played on a dirty great distorted guitar while xylophones tinkle in the background, and the second version of ‘Sunday Girl’ which bookends the release sounds like the Chipmunks again, only this time drunk and on helium.

‘Debbie Harry’ is a bouncy slice of punked-up pop, and its flipside, ‘A ‘Version’’ is a contrasting experimental dub piece that’s all about the drums and the echo. Meanwhile, you’d be hard pushed to find a more audacious piece of theatrical post-punk than ‘Playing Golf (With My Flesh Crawling)’.

‘Warm’ could readily have provided a template for acts as diverse as Stereolab, Slowdive and Pram, combining elements of shoegaze, dreamy analogue disco and weirdy discord and clattering arrhythmic beats.

Sure, everything is all over the shop. The tracks from the single releases aren’t paired up or in any way sequenced chronologically, but having said that, the disc as a whole flows – as much as a disc packed with some of the zaniest, most unhinged array of musical mania you’re likely to hear can flow. While it’s perhaps obvious, listening to this, why Family Fodder failed to achieve the success or recognition of peers like the Flying Lizards, This Heat, The Pop Group or The Slits (to name but a few), it’s also easy to hear why they’ve proven so influential. Bands like this simply don’t exist any more, but at least with reissues like this there’s plenty of opportunity to catch up on the history classes we may have missed.

Family Fodder Online
  author: Christopher Nosnibor

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Family Fodder and Friends - Sunday Girls (Director’s Cut)