Fashion: Fàshiön Music DLX RM – UK – 2xCD [2022]

Disc 1

1. Steady Eddie Steady
2. Killing Time
3. Citinite
4. Wastelife
5. Silver Blades
6. Silver Blades A Deeper Cut
7. Sodium Pentathol Negative
8. [The] Innocent
9. Red, Green & Gold
10. Fiction Factory
11. Do It In The Dark
12. Steady Eddie Steady [1980]
13. Emotional Blackmail
14. Bad Move
15. Let Go
16. I Don’t Take Drugs, I Don’t Tell Lies
17. We’re The Fashion
18. Small People
19. Bike Boys [1978]
20. The Naff All Tango
21. Killing Time – 1978 [original]

Disc 2

1. Steady Eddie Steady [live]
2. Red Green & Gold [live]
3. Don’t Touch Me / I Don’t Take Drugs / Sodium Pentathol Negative [live]
4. Citinite [live]
5. Killing Time [live]
6. Big John / Hanoi Annoys Me / The Innocent [live]
7. Die In The West [live]
8. Symiane [live]
9. Bike Boys [live]
10. Wastelife [live]
11. Sodium Pentathol Negative [1978 version]
12. Steady Eddie Steady [1978 version]

It looks like the Easy Action label is firmly committed to documenting the nooks and crannies of Birmingham [UK] Post-Punk since the label has just issued the first music by Brummie scenemakers Fàshiön that is native to the silver disc [as well as on LP, if that’s the way you swing]. I previously noticed the label when they issued the unreleased album by Stephen Duffy/Nikki Sudden’s early band The Hawks. And they cannot help but keep my attention by reissuing Fàshiön rarities and more.

I have gone on a bit about the band’s second phase, under the lead vocals and guitar of Dee Harriss, but that was the later part of the story for me. I actually went all the way to the band’s origin points, in 1979, when they were signed to the “weird” New Wave oriented label founded by Miles Copeland. In 1979 I was a DJ at my high school’s [10 watt, monophonic] radio station, and when our station manager wrote to every label out there to possibly get us serviced with promos, only one label was desperate enough to send us anything! The first releases by IR.S. Records came into our station, and I recall seeing “A Different Kind of Tension” by Buzzcocks, and especially the “Product Perfect” album by Fàshiön Music.

I was a graphic design geek and the use by their designer/bassist/synthesist Mulligan of Microgramma Bold Extended on the “Product Perfect” cover completely caught my eye. In that year it was my favorite font! Being neck deep in New Wave by 1979, I actually played the album on the air. If you were within a mile of my high school, you might have been able to receive the signal! I especially liked the medley that closed side one: “Big John/Hanoi Annoys Me/Innocent.” That was what my pick to play was. After that album, I wondered what had happened to Fàshiön and didn’t hear of them for another three years, when they appeared on MTV in a radically different Synth-Funk guise with “Love Shadow.”

That had been a little hard to believe since the Fàshiön I knew was a left-field Post-Punk-slash-Reggae band. Like a more radical version of The Police without middle aged Rock Stars slumming and adopting Jamaican accents. And this release captured every last note that was not their album “Product Perfect” [reissued last year for RSD] in rounding up their four seven inch singles issued both in the UK and America [each completely different], as well as all of the demos from the second album that never was by the group.

The reason why the band had gone missing for three years after 1979 was down to the band’s vocalist/guitarist/writer Luke James [a.k.a. Luke Skyscraper] deciding that he’d had enough of this scrambling after stardom, when he split after a tour with the still unsigned U2 in early 1980. So we’ve got 21 tracks jam-packed onto disc one, with a live concert by the band comprising disc two. Which, seeing as we’re out of time today, we’ll dive into tomorrow.

Next: …Fàshiön Blow You Away