When You Make Music, You Play: Family Fodder

In the process of updating this blog day after day, I've consistently run into a difficulty that now presents itself as simple theory: that the amount of reasonable promotional photos of a band that can be found in a Google image search is inversely proportional to that band's relative obscurity. which, of course, makes rational sense. But occasionally it's not totally evident to me exactly how secret a band is until I'm trying to drudge up some vaguely attractive graphic for these entries.

Such was the case with today's Greatest Band of All Time--and my current-most musical obsession--the mysterious post-punk collective known as Family Fodder. One of the most fulfilling musical discoveries to fall into my lap in a great long while, I was really surprised to find so little interest in their somewhat extensive catalog. Anyway.

Though a musical collective in a sprawling sense, Family Fodder evolved primarily from the home recordings of the band's nucleus Alig Pearce. Over the course of the band's initial five-year existence, however, Fodder credits over 20 different musicians as contributors (a membership that includes two-thirds of the seminal Post-Punk band This Heat)--an open-door policy that accounts for the band's bafflingly eclectic discography.

A classically-trained pianist, Pearce spent several years home recording with various friends in the late Seventies before passing a tape around to a few friends--which, in keeping with the fevered climate of late '70s Britain, soon resulted in the release of a couple of 7"s. Pearce attributed the records to two different bands that didn't really exist: Frank Sumatra and the Mob, and the Family Fodder. The Family Fodder release sold better, so the name stuck. (incidentally: The Frank Sumatra record was released by the Small Wonder label in tandem with two other singles, Bauhaus' "Bela Legosi's Dead" and The Cure's debut 7" "Killing An Arab".)

Over the next year, Pearce would continue recording with a random assortment of contributors--most notably singer and then-girlfriend Dominique Levillain--compounding materials that would come to comprise their first full-length, the masterful Monkey Banana Kitchen. These Dominique Levillain-era recordings, easily their most palatable works, are also arguably their most accomplished: combining elements of Dub, tons of tape-manipulation, a subtle sense of humor, and a striking, almost New Wave pop sensibility, these recordings are powered in large part by the French-born chanteuse's bilingual musings (an approach that would have a profound effect on the early recordings of Stereolab). Songs like "Film Music," "Debbie Harry," (one of a number of songs approaching Levillian's bizarre obsession with the Blondie singer) "Love Song," and, most notably the brilliant single "Savoir Faire," highlight the band's magic formula at the time (vocals emulating a driving piano/keyboard melody, thumping, "four-on-the-floor" kick drum), but only touch on the vast possibilities of their output.

After a break-up with Levillian, Pearce trudged on for a few more Family Fodder releases (including the double album All Styles, which attempts to cover just that), but by 1983 he had moved on to new things, and the "band"--still obscure even in there own country--dissolved.

Since that time there have been a few reunions--the most recent of which resulting in 2000's surprising release of new material (the Water Shed LP)--little of which has served to bring any more attention to the band's brilliance (with the exception of a "best of" compilation, none of their original material has seen a proper reissue on CD). But here, in this rambling and poorly constructed blog entry, they finally arrive upon all of the glory they truly deserve as... the GREATEST BAND OF ALL TIME.