Alternate title to this post: Reach The Beach, Biotch!
When’s the last time you got your fixx? For me it was in the early ’80s, when they were one of the bigger bands on the scene.
They also were the first band I saw at a proper concert, in summer of 1986, when they opened up for The Moody Blues (!) at Merriweather Post Pavilion (Respect!).
For some reason they slipped through my radar, and perhaps that is why every time I hear “Stand or Fall” in a bar or the radio or on someone else’s playlist (not that anyone is cool enough to have The Fixx on their playlist, but they are necessary staples of any “I Love ’80s” type shuffle searches), I am almost overwhelmed with a potent combination of nostalgia/joy.
Virtually any hit song can bring back an entire decade, and I only recently celebrated what the Top 10 songs were, exactly 30 years ago, HERE.
But that is where nostalgia (and joy) end and true brilliance begins. There are songs that aren’t particularly special, or worthwhile, that still bring it all back. Anything that can conjure up a time when I was still taking spelling tests, sharing a locker and hitting the skating rink each Friday night is going to be celebrated.
But the songs that actually endure –on aesthetic as well as emotional levels– are the ones that tend to transcend more simple feelings like nostalgia and joy.
Put another way, if you had to name one band whose sound absolutely defines a specific time, in this case the early ’80s, who would you pick?
For me, more than any other band Duran Duran is the early ’80s. A song like this, or this or especially THIS works that magic and charms me back to Izod shirts and Levi’s cords. And the roller rink. (If there are two words more powerfully, irretrievably intoxicating than Couples Skate I can’t think of or even invent them).
But looking back with objective eyes, a case could be made that The Fixx also had a definitive sound that stretched past the one or two songs that would keep so many other worthy artists of that time on this list (think: Men At Work, Thomas Dolby, and the myriad one-hit-wonders). I even bet some (many?) people would wrongly call The Fixx a one-hit band for the hit they remember, “One Thing Leads To Another”.
In reality, of course, they had several other hits (not just songs, hits). A quick bit of research confirms that they had at least 5 songs crack the Top 50 in a four year period. Not bad.
But it’s not the number of hits or the uncanny ways these songs summarize everything so good, bad and ugly (and EPIC!) about the early ’80s…it’s the fact that. like Duran Duran’s better work, they hold up amazingly well. They are of their time, prescient and pretty immune to the unforgiving imprint of time. Not bad.
You want to distill the ideas, images, obsessions and sounds of the early ’80s and only have two songs to do it? Give me “Stand or Fall” and “Red Skies” and I’ll take all comers. Both from the same album (Shuttered Room, released in ’82). Not bad. Not bad at all.
Stand or Fall:
Red Skies:
