Fiction, here they are, like a mammoth dissolving out of the ice in Siberia, still playing post-punk like it was never even fashionable anyway, this wonderful, ten minute long video takes us through two versions of their songs - To Stick To, and Let The Day Perish. They've managed to invest the energy of iconoclasm with the emotional vulnerability that lurks behind the bravado of the formal experimentation of Wire, Gang of Four, Magazine, they've added a grandiosity of sentiment to the kitchen sink realism of XTC and Orange Juice, and yet their sound is cryptic, exposing the planar rift between rolling floor toms and the complexity of guitar, the forward motions of bass lines with the simple yet ambiguous ellipses of lyrics.
Post-punk is so easily maligned that when it gets done right you
forget about all the articles you wrote slagging it off, the way
you just stopped reading the NME for years because you got bored of
hearing 'bout four white dudes playing in a band influenced by the
same four bands, churning out the same four songs, only in a few
different keys and with different lyrics. Fucking boring. And then,
you hear a band like Fiction - you start howling out at the
moonless sky for forgiveness from a God you don't believe in - like
seeing your long lost brother stroll casually into the house on
Christmas Day and giving you a warm embrace - like one of those
Japanese soldiers they found on little Pacific islands in the 70s
who thought the war was still going on, sitting there defending
their island from invaders who'll never arrive - like a single,
wandering Hell's Angel, riding into town, leather jacket and Harley
Davidson, all attitude but the furore and press outrage has
dissipated, one lone upstart kicking up shit with no one paying any
attention to him - Fiction creeping up through your blindspot,
dodging the twitching and rotting corpses of Bloc Party and The
Futureheads like they didn't even know they existed, jumping you
from behind and reminding you why you fell in love with music as a
sixteen-year-old, its simplicity and immediacy, carrying round six
cds in your bag for you to listen, when you actually listened to
what music journalists said because you couldn't just find the song
on youtube and listen to it, when you'd go out and buy albums by
Black Flag because you read that Kurt Cobain liked them, those
glorious days when you weren't bitter or broke.
The history of music is pretty much over, all that's left is what
you decide to do with the bits; the remains, limbs and internal
organs, how you reassemble them, and what wretched Frankenstein's
Monster you make with it. We're left with slight, musical
variations on themes and ideas that can quite easily be traced back
decades or centuries; retrogressive in bondage trousers, bomber
jackets and ear's full of safety pins; tie dyed, lo-fi psychedelia;
skinny ties, skinny jeans, angular guitars and no ideas; mouthing
off about the man and the industry, keeping it real, never sell
out, burn out don't fade away.
