Athletico Spizz 80
Do A Runner

THE REVIEW

1980. We are at the turning point of the plastic decade… the NO FUTURE of a few seasons past seems to have definitively faded into darkness and all its protagonists scattered… most of them overwhelmed by new waves. Some have redone their makeup, others have already spread their wings… most busy riding the dream of the recording industry's “yuppie” era…

But in the heart of Albion, a romantic hero continues to remain restless, maniacally afflicted by schizophrenic artistic transformation. Spizz, in just over two years, has released 5 singles under different acronyms and with as many different formations… yet always keeping his mysterious nickname as the central theme. At the beginning of '80, he gathers four trusted companions around him and as Athletico Spizz 80 (during the May Bank Holiday) creates and releases, for the major A&M, the masterpiece “Do A Runner”. The work, divided into eleven chapters, is not the new wave of “A Certain Ratio”, it is no longer the punk of the Pistols or the Damned, and it is not yet the dark of Bauhaus and/or Sister Of Mercy. A freak mixture that winks at “kraut” electronics but never lets itself be overwhelmed by technology… sounds like Devo, but blended with the Clash, when not shooting into hyperspace-rock (and the eight minutes of the final “Airships” alone are worth the price, any price at which you manage to find it)… all packaged with childish Zappa-esque sarcasm.
 
Sadly, fortune does not favor our hero, as often happens to those incredibly ahead of and simultaneously behind the times, leading him to new hysterical changes of name and formation throughout the eighties (with a brief pictorial pause… ah the similarities with Captain Beefheart…) and the nineties, up to the year zero of the new millennium as Spizzenergi 2000. But “Do A Runner” will nonetheless remain a gem of rare beauty, unreachable and unmatched, an authentic epitome of the just-begun plastic decade.