Pink Fairies
Kill 'Em & Eat 'Em

"The Pink Fairies have reunited, Attila's Huns have returned" [cit.]

Ok, a lot has changed since the '70s. Sergio is still there, with eyes in ecstasy in front of more than thirty centimeters by just as many, dyed with elves and uranium flying pigs in sunglasses, a sip of beer and he returns to the illustration but it has shrunk, visibly reduced by twenty centimeters per side, under a transparent plastic cover and the pigs have gone away. A strange bearded, hairy animal wielding a Fender has taken their place, inheriting the sunglasses from the pigs. Time passes... time has passed by the gates of the Wight Festival lingering on those insolent youngsters who, naked and raw, smashed eardrums far from the big stage, from the "jet (music)society" that bartered their art for loads of bucks. It passed through the incendiary hard-prog-blues armamentarium, the caresses of the "War Girl" embellished with the slaps of the "Heavenly Man," through the steps of sweet Marilyn, lost in the streets of Portobello. It passed and took away the clouds, the purple rain, and a few too many pigs, one of which went to strand on the chimneys of the Battersea Power Station on the banks of the Thames, actually no, that's another story, despite also being pink. As I was saying, time changes everything, and inevitably its action has impacted the Pink Fairies too; let's be clear, they're still pink and they are (partly) still the same, but the new, roaring eighties with shoulder pads, sequins, majorettes, and glitter galore, have eroded and smoothed our heroes’ guitars, softened their souls. Someone once said, "How you change to not die..." and in some cases, it is almost physiological to renew oneself as long as one does not sell out too much though.

Indeed, the Pink Fairies are back! They wandered for about ten years after the fantastic triad from 1971 to 1973 (don't ask me which one or I'll be offended) sealed by the legendary live album in 1975 at the Roundhouse. They're back... Deus vult! So declares the aforementioned motto adorning the cover notes of "Kill 'Em And Eat 'Em," penned by Mick Farren, deus ex machina of the misunderstood Deviants, a band that includes Paul Rudolph, Duncan Sanderson, and Russell Hunter who together with Twink formed the Fairies. Farren is not part of it but is an element of that magic circle with relative outer orbits (belongings, references, or presumed ones) that encloses our Pink Fairies, the aforementioned Deviants, the Pretty Things (in the times of "S.F. Sorrow"), Tomorrow, Hawkwind, Lemmy, Brian Eno, MC5, Syd Barrett (the pink always returns), the girl in the sky with diamonds and the little mouse that my father bought at the market. In short, all of the above and more.

The music has changed, and the advent of synthesizers has triggered a debate between purists of digital sound and the fundamentalists of the "picks and sticks" committee. The Fairies have not betrayed their inclinations by crossing to the other side of the river, but they deemed it necessary to modernize part of the sound and images, abandoning the typical prog and psychedelic artwork style (a deception since years later they returned to the old habit), reducing their sideburns by a few centimeters and, mainly, offering a less underground product, with an immediate impact, in step with the times. This thesis is proven by the title itself "Kill 'Em And Eat 'Em," a synthetic concept that best summarizes the tendency of the new era, frenetic and distracted, that has lost the time for reflection, where everything happens without you noticing. A year earlier, in this regard, our Giovanni Lindo expressed himself with a withering "produce, consume, die." (which he later retracted, remaining just Giovanni, but I love him anyway).

Well, in this work the Pink Fairies are still Pink and they are still Fairies, they have just slightly reduced the thickness of the abrasive paper, avoiding causing those ugly abrasions that we, incurable masochists, love so much. Without infamy and without praise, but in all sincerity and all in all it is an album that I like. The legacy of the newborn eighties is quite important, true, but an album doesn't necessarily have to be compared to its predecessors to be judged good. The Fairies hit the instruments as only they know how to, and those who know them well, in this full-length, will be able to grasp its soul, especially in episodes like "White Girls On Amphetamine" where the atmospheres, in some passages, wink at Punk (recondite reminiscences of "London Calling"). Our incendiary Londoners have started to look ahead, in some cases too much, risking ending up in the traps of that MTV ("Fear Of Love"). Fortunately, they have stayed out of it, maintaining a perfect balance between the more rounded Naked Prey of the coeval "40 Miles From Nowhere" and the dark valve-driven psycho-rock of the Bevis Frond, far from the freak shows of the hit parades. Ten steps full of musical bipolarity, digitized and crystallized like (almost) all '80s productions, where they tackle deep themes related to drugs, I presume autobiographical ("Talking LSD" and "White Girls On Amphetamine") and the discomfort caused by Thatcher’s reckless conservative and repressive policies. "Waiting For The Icecream To Me" evokes some perplexity, despite being a beautiful, crepuscular ballad that seems to wink at Carlos's "magic black girl" (but we'll even give them the benefit of the doubt) and the initial "Broken Statue" re-proposed in a Billy Idol perspective compared to the beautiful live version by the Deviants at Dingwalls in London in 1984 and contained in the album "Human Garbage." For the rest, you travel by sight, without daring maneuvers among the Speed-rock "Undercover Of Confusion," "I Might Be Lying" and "Fool About You," the states of drunkenness of the sharp "Seeing Double" and the pleasant Blues of "Bad Attitude," seasoned by the sun and dust of Route 66, just over six thousand kilometers west of London.

Meanwhile, Sergio has downed two more beers, pondering over the bizarre and singular episode and now finally sees everything clearly. The pigs, suddenly, start dancing in a ring with the elves and the little mice bought by my father; the celestial man, about to join them, notices the girl, until a moment before floating in the air with diamonds, lying on the ground from an amphetamine overdose and rushes to help her while in the meantime, the hairy guitarist has also arrived... and... and... and.

The epilogue will remain unknown as he fell asleep just a step away from the solution to the mystery.
I forgot, Sergio is a hippie neighbor of mine, but thinking about it, I'm not really sure.