For whom the bells toll

Amazing live performance of "For whom the bells toll" by the late Fad Gadget (aka. Frank Tovey).
It must have been recorded around 1982 as the song appeared on their seminal album "Under the Flag" which came out that year. "For whom the bells toll" was released as a single in December of the same year and featured some of the first examples of heavy vocal sampling (The 12" version has a sequence in which the cut-up vocals are transformed in a way that they form a sort of dada-poem, but keeping the vocal melody intact in the process!).
This predates similar, soon to be popular vocal treatments which used the voice as an instrument, but didn´t care about the word, by almost two years.

"Under the flag" is one of the best and most criminally underrated albums of the "synth-pop"-era of the eighties and this live video (with authentic "accidental erasing") is a great testament for the power Fad Gadget (as a band) used to have on stage.

Although the backing-vocalists try to outdo Alsion Moyet in her gothic-cleaning-woman-style, her pre-Yazoo vocals can only be heard on the album. (Although if you listen closely you can hear her contribution in the looped vocal sounds which are part of the rhythm).

Frustrated with being a poster-boy for the increasingly silly goth-scene, he dropped the (brilliant) "Fad Gadget"-moniker and kept on recording under his real name in the mid-eighties.

After relatively unsucessful years he decided to revive his old alter-ego in the late 1990s. Around this time electronic music had evolved in a way that 20 year old "classics" like "Back to Nature", "Lady Shave" and especially "Ricky´s Hand" sounded like the latest...erm, "fad". One of the most forward thinking electronic "pop-stars" had come full circle

Frank Tovey died unexpectedly in early 2002.