Blue Plate Special: Fad Gadget
Fad Gadget was the alias of Londoner Frank Tovey, one of Mute Records’ earliest standard-bearers and among the sharpest architects of cold, sinewy synth-pop at the turn of the ’80s. Built from drum machines, analog squelch, and the clang of found objects—drills, razors, anything that buzzed—his songs moved like factory belts: precise, grimly funny, and charged with social bite. Early singles “Back to Nature” and “Ricky’s Hand” arrived like warning flares, followed by a run of striking albums—Fireside Favourites, Incontinent, Under the Flag, Gag—that bridged post-punk austerity and proto-industrial bite while keeping pop structure in their crosshairs.
Onstage he turned minimal electronics into maximal spectacle: tar-and-feather tableaux, shaving-cream slathered torso, mic cables cracked like whips, and climbs up lighting rigs that made each show feel half concert, half performance art. The menace and deadpan humor of his records—sex and surveillance, machines and media—were mirrored in that stark physical theater. After his Fad Gadget phase, Tovey resurfaced under his own name and with Frank Tovey & the Pyros, folding folk textures and roots grit into his electronic instincts, before a late-career resurgence that saw him back on festival stages and supporting Depeche Mode in Europe. His sudden death in 2002 fixed his legend: a cult innovator whose fingerprints are still on electro, industrial, and synth-pop today.
Some of my favorites from the albeit brief Fad Gadget catalog:
Collapsing New People – from the album Gag (1981)
Love Parasite – from the album Under the Flag (1982)
State of the Nation – from the album Fireside Favourites (1980)
Ricky’s Hand – from the album Fad Gadget by Frank Tovey (2005)
Plain Clothes – from the album Incontinent (1984)
Scapegoat – from the album Under the Flag (1982)
Jump – from the album Gag (1981)
Swallow It – from the album Incontinent (1984)
