It looks like the Flying Lizards are going to have the third hit in a row with “TV” Out a few days it already sounds familiar and—more surprisingy—I'm singing it. Which may not sound particularly odd except that the Lizards are not the kind of organization set up to make you respond in quite that way. Or so I thought. They ve become the “commercially acceptable” face of experimental post-punk avant garde. Categories, my dear Watson, mere categories. Into sound, electronics, tape bops, minimal lyrics, their tracks hiccough and insist.

I suppose it’s the divide between intent and response but I thought they were somehow attempting to revolutionise rock listening habits. To wedge themselves between expectations from the listener to the track, much as Brecht a nd Weill revolutionised theatre in Germany in the early 30’s so that an experience which, up until then, had been for the elite was socialised in the true political sense. To that end it hardly seems surprising that the Lizards’ opening track on their first album is Brecht/Weill’s “Mandalay Song.” But am I wrong? David Cunningham, master of studio decks, tape splicing and the paraphernalia of recording, the brains, as it were, behind the Lizards says in a recent Melody Maker interview that the Lizards was just an idea to get some musicians together and experiment with sounds and now look what’s happened—they’ve become a rock identity. They are successful (how many groups would give their eyeteeth for three hit singles in a row?) yet, according to Cunningham they set out1 to be no more politically important than Gary Numan and HumanLeague.

The first two singles, I guess, didn’t hint at anything more in retrospect. Taking two 60’s hits like Berry Gordy’s “Money” and Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” into the 80’s by making them less frantic, more pedantic, with a hard metallic overtone, was amusing tongue-in-cheek stuff. Repressed and minimalistic, as though everyone in the studio was in a straight jacket and the woman Lizard sounding like a pouting, foot stamping child “Money—that’s what I want.” It laughed at the words and made them work in reverse to the originals.

But their first abum contains a couple of tracks which seem to say much more than a clever idea from Cunningham of mixing reggae dub with computer data read-outs and the odd smattering of jazz improvisation. The listener can always make music say something to them which is not always what the artist intended, and the relationship between thought and sound is sometimes tenuous. But here the juxtaposition between words and sounds in interesting. And unlike many rock tracks there’s so much space around a listener can fill it with whatever he wants to. How deliberate is it, for instance, that when men’s voices emerge they sound like faulty computet!? That the very malfunctioning.effect makes them sound inhuman yet vulnerable? The distance on “Her Story” is created between the woman’s voice and the male interjection. “This is a lcfve song” sings the male ‘computer1 with subdued desperation, relaying the male rock artist’s influence over the woman listener. The woman sees through and is confused by the influence: “You can still make money by singing sweet songs/I blame Howard Hughes/I blame the TV/I blame the Top 20 for my jealousy.” After all, conditioning from pop songs starts early. Didn’t we all learn to express emotions through the perimeters and attitudes drawn up by the feelings on rock lyrics? And in some ways doesn’t that continue to affect us?

On “TV” the effect seems to be one of saying that communications between people is often played out in lyric cliches that, when they’re stripped down, are meaningless. The relationship drawn up by the male rock ego seen on the small screen taken out of the cathode ray tube and placed into real life. There are parallels between this and the Pretenders’ “Private Life” that may hot be obvious. The woman is ironic: “Elton John profile/small screen smile/...I’ve told you before/You make me so sore/Your beautiful teeth/What’s underneath?"

And the male “line”: “I think you’re very beautiful” starts to go wrong under this attack until it turns into: “I think you’re very...very... very... very... very...”. The result is that a listener, 'more used to a track which is structured (start, middle, end) is forced to listen to fragments, is unsettled by the lack of expected form. The normal relationship between audience and track is subverted.

The other track that does this is “The Window” (this, and “Her Story,” by the way, were written by a rock writer, a woman, which is interesting on many counts and may well have something to do with a feminist reading of the songs which Cunningham may not haveintended). “The Window” is particularly intriguing as far as intent and result are concerned because other women critics I know have listened to it and thought it a song noire; a kind of rock fairy tale mix of delightful and unrealistic. The women sing a rather pretty melodic line, slightly ghostly, slightly choral and wintery. My hearing of the song remains as the representation of women and men in terms of threat and physical differences. The man represented by squeaking, fumbling, icy playing behind the,lyrics “Can you hear banging on the window/he’s throwing things at the window”. The words placed within a question mark rather than a statement are more menacing “I don’t want to let him in/I wish he wasn’t twice my size” seem far from a female fairy tale of princess and giant (although there’s a justifiable element of that which I don’t think detracts from my reading), to denote a difference in physical strength, an expression (more frightening because its so subdued and fatalistic) of women’s vulnerability to attack by male society.

Whatever Cunningham intended to do with the Lizards—and a lot of the abum is padded out with instrumental tracks which are overtly indebted to Eno—the result on this listener is that I can bring my perspective on life to bear on what comes out of the tracks. It’s usuaDy not that clear cut. Taken out of the album’s context “TV” can give the Lizards a hit based on a now identifiable Lizard sound.

Intent and result. In his essay on the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet in Greil Marcus’s book Stranded, Simon Frith talks about two tracks, “Stray Cat Blues” and “Parachute Woman,” to expbre Jagger’s expressions about sex and women: “Jagger isn’t wheedling girls up to his rooms, he’s taking their presence for granted... As Jagger’s vowels get longer and longer, more and more insidious, it becomes obvious that his contempt is less for the girls involved—children going about their pleasure business—than for the straight world that can only experience such simple sex as cheap, nasty, titillating...the Stones’ own sexual morality is expressed not in* ‘Stray Cat Blues’ t>ut in ‘Parachute Woman’, a sexist song without sexist consequence, because, what is being expressed is not sexual pride but emotional disinterest”

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As usual Frith has come up with an interesting reading of Jagger’s intent. I may quibble with it, Jagger may certainly not have been aware of what he was doing. But to Frith (as listener) the .combination of music, lyric and—more importantly—delivery combine to say something quite different from the initial message of the track.

Seeing music in a social/political context is to pick at its bones, to work out its place and its influence. It all depends on which part of your brain you use for hearing. In Stranded the premise is that a bunch of rock critics are stuck on a desert island with only one record to play. Which would it be and why? Nof exactly a novel idea but Frith is the only British writer involved and he’s the only one who hears his album within that particular context. Interesting. Personally I don’t think The Flying Lizards would stand up to being my sole companions.