The Flying Lizards
Top Ten

The Flying Lizards project by Irish musician (or rather multimedia artist) David Cunningham is not very well-known, although here and there some rock dictionaries or specialized sites mention the eponymous debut LP from 1979 as fundamental due to its avant-garde production techniques for the time and its quirky musical proposal that attempted to entertain and amuse without being banal.
To the writer, "The Flying Lizards" and the subsequent "Fourth Wall" (1981) are certainly curious works endowed with a certain humorous verve but which have not aged very well.

In the third album "Top Ten" (1984), Cunningham tries the card of a cover album, perhaps in an attempt to replicate that quarter-hour of success achieved five years earlier with the daring, albeit entertaining, reinterpretation of the classic soul "Money".

Despite this search for commercial appeal possibly appearing calculated, it's a project far from being ingratiating: the Irishman's taste for covers is uncompromising and recalls what the Devo did for the rollingstoniana "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction": a rock classic is taken and dehumanized through metronomic rhythms and an acephalous voice until any emotion and human warmth is annihilated.

Thus, titles from the origins of rock like "Tutti Frutti" (Little Richards, 1957), "Great Balls Of Fire" (Jerry Lee Lewis, 1957), "Dizzy Miss Lizzie" (Larry Williams, 1958) lose the vitality and innocent sex appeal that sustained the young post-war economic boom audience, transforming into android anthems severed by heavy thumping drum machine rhythms and distinguished by Sally Peterson's frigid voice which seems to declaim the lyrics with the same pathos as an airport service announcement.
A similar fate befalls the swooning sixties pop songs like "What's New Pussycat" (Tom Jones, 1967), "Then He Kissed Me" (The Crystals, 1963), and "Tears" (Ken Dodd, 1965) where the sixties' sweetness is transformed into mindless dementia with masticated melodies spat back in shreds.

"Sex Machine" (James Brown, 1971), the least aged track among the chosen ones, undergoes the same treatment: unsurprisingly, Cunningham's interpretation deconstructs the piece to the point of paroxysm, blatantly ignoring the Sex, accentuating the (drum) Machine ending in a genuine shootout.

"Suzanne" (Leonard Cohen, 1967) is distorted and made almost unrecognizable, yet this time it seems the author wanted to treat the piece with a certain respect and, at least in this case, there doesn't seem to be a desire for mockery. The text is not sung but recited in a robotic spoken world manner while the melody is darkly reprised with a synthetic string arrangement. The melancholic sweetness of the Canadian songwriter's tale of a never-consummated love gives way to
a very different dark and sinister interpretation, yet admirable for its originality and evocation; the Flying Lizards in this case achieve the masterpiece.

"Whole Lotta Shaking Goin' On" (Jerry Lee Lewis, 1957) and "Purple Haze" (Jimi Hendrix, 1970) are also deconstructed and disfigured, perhaps even more than the other "victims", resulting in a tendency towards dark much like the cover of "Suzanne", particularly unsettling is the whispered singing style used for the desecration of the blonde American rocker's pianist's track.

An overlooked album by a little-remembered band, out of print for over thirty years, "Top Ten" is a product of its time (the remix trend was at its peak), but it went unnoticed
perhaps because consumer electronics had already shifted towards a more soulful taste while Cunningham remained in the cold Kraftwerk-esque roboticism possibly even colder.

A work that can be read as both a playful and iconoclastic mockery of rock and pop of the past (something not uncommon in the New Wave field), or
as a hypothetical hit parade of a dystopian Orwellian future where the individual is forced and accustomed to not display their feelings lest they risk the intervention of the psychopolice.

In any case, an album that deserves rediscovery and is ultimately the most enjoyable work of the flying lizards that has withstood the inexorable passage of decades the best.