It seems fitting, somehow, that The Flying Lizards' "Money" should have cost so little and made so much. Forget about expensive studio gadgets and weeks of rehearsal time - "Money" was recorded in an industrial meat fridge, using a technique called "Prepared Piano" (which means chucking things like ashtrays, tape cassettes and paperweights onto the strings to get that tinny 'banjo' sound). And it cost less that £6.50 to record, yet it sold more copies in the last year than any other singles released by Virgin records. That's more than either The Skids, The Members, Penetration, XTC, Pil or The Ruts!
    What's stranger still is that the Lizards aren't so much a "band" as just a means of packaging the studio experiments of the brains behind the Lizards, David Cunningham. He writes almost all the music, rearranges the remainder, and produces and plays it himself, using a few session musicians when he needs them. Even the band's vocalist, deadpan Deborah Upton, is just an old friend from art school who simply turns up when he's recording or playing Top of the Pops. It's rumored that she'd never sung before she met David.
    "She's still never sung!" he says, laughing about her slightly unusual vocal style. "It's terrible of me, I know, but I always say something like that about her in interviews and then she reads it and she won't talk to me for about a month. She admits that she can't sing, but she doesn't like me admitting it for her!"
    "The trouble is that interviews always come around just at the time that the records are getting the build-up, and the build-up's the time when we really need to see each other. Last time I said something rude about her, it was just before we did Top of the Pops and she wouldn't talk to me. It was pretty horrific."
    If you remember "Money", the chances are you'll remember its forerunner, an even more freeze-dried version (featuring cardboard box drum kit) of the old Eddie Cochran classic "Summertime Blues". David recorded it nearly three years ago after leaving his Irish homeland to study Art at Maidstone in Kent. The first thing he discovered was that he was a pretty useless painter and so, "having to think of other things to do", he started up a 13-piece band, Les Cochons Chic (that's The Chic Pigs to you and me). He then released a solo album called "Grey Scale" of piano music so weird that it's unsurprising that it sold less in total than "Summertime Blues" did in a day.
    Having no sophisticated equipment, David recorded the single with just a 4-track tape machine, transferring each tape onto a smaller 2-track while adding more tracks every time, and so building up the equivalent of a 16-track studio technique (except it cost about a fiver to make). Next he decided that at over three minutes running time, it was too long, so he simply sped it up until it lasted 2 minutes and 45 seconds (oh, the wonders of technology!)  And lastly he tried to get it released as a single and sent it off to over 20 record companies. All of them said it "wasn't commercial" until Virgin Records - well known at the time as pioneers of all things extraordinary - snapped it up and proved them all wrong. Almost immediately, the single's thin, two-dimensional sound was labeled as "minimalist" (i.e. he used a very basic technique and the minimum of components). David's never liked the term too much but admits it is an approach molded by his art school background.
    "The school was very influential 'cos it considered that 'anything goes', which took away one's hesitation about doing something that might not work. You actually got very used to doing things that didn't work. Also, the only way our art teacher could make us do better paintings was to tear up the bad ones. So he tore everything up, which stopped us being 'precious' about our work, and quickly battered all notions of whether our work was actually worth anything."
    True to his word, he doesn't have any great expectations of his music. He simply experiments with "sound textures", and they work if he likes them, and if anybody else happens to like them then so much the better.
    The day we met in his house in Clapham in South London was the release date of the Lizards' debut album, called - would you believe - "The Flying Lizards", an intriguing and mostly highly enjoyable development of the type of sound technique he was using on the singles. Four of the tracks are wordless and sound like a movie soundtrack, and his method of recording these is flexible but meticulous in the extreme. First, he books studio time - whether or not he has a specific idea in mind - and he hires a few musicians for the day. Then he introduces them to a rhythm, a sequence of notes or just a type of sound effect, which they then expand. David finishes off by adding his own instrumentation and then remixing and re-arranging the tapes until he's happy with the sound balance. It's a bit like making a rough sketch, then being given a whole range of colours to blend it into a painting. The result is that, being made as a very personal album, it's likely to inspire very personal feelings in it's listeners. David doesn't seem too concerned as to what anyone else will make of it.
    "It doesn't actually bother me if anyone says it's great or they say it's dreadful. I know what I think about it.  I think it's seriously flawed in some ways, but then again there's absolutely no point in my coming out and saying that, as very few people are going to listen to it in the same way as I've listened to it, knowing the construction of it. Perhaps what I think are mistakes will be plus points to someone else."
    When it comes to actually writing "songs" - as opposed to instrumentals - he's not quite so confident. "I tried to write a song after 'Money' which I never actually put out, and probably never will as it sounds like Billy Joel. It's really horribly commercial. My songwriting thing is quite honestly a joke. I just thought, all these horrible songs you hear on the radio, they must be easy to write so let's write some of this rubbish. But when I actually did it, it was too rubbishy."
    How does he react to the people that think his kind of music is "a con", especially the way he's dressed up a couple of old songs in modern new clothes and had chart hits with the pair of them?
    "If people feel conned, they needn't buy my records. If people actually buy them then it's their fault. I got a letter from Janie Bradford today. She's the lady who co-wrote 'Money'. She said, 'if you get any gold records for the single, do send me one!' She must be a really interesting person."
    It's unlikely that many of his audience will be more critical than David is himself. He says he can listen to side 2 of the album "straight through - endlessly", but being a typical perfectionist, he's got a few regrets about the first side. "If I had the time again, I'd do it completely differently. But doing it's doing it. I hate all this stuff about Fleetwood Mac going back into the studio for the twentieth time to re-record their double album or whatever. It's quite ridiculous. I mean, you should record something once, and if it doesn't work - forget it. And maybe you'll dig the tape out in 20 years time and think 'oh that was a good idea, but it didn't work because of that'. With the insight of 20 years distance, you'll be able to put your finger on the problem. But I don't think there's a lot of point in bothering with complex things if there's something else you can do very easily. What I've always aspired to doing is producing music that I can listen to and that other people like and listen to as well."
    Can't say fairer than that can you?

- by Mark Ellen

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