Shindig! #168 – The Revillos

If any band to emerge from new-wave lived out Neil Young’s quote about the ditch being a rougher ride but populated by more interesting people, it’s THE REVILLOS.

Emerging in 1979 from the ashes of The Rezillos, they may have retained the same ’60s fascination and all but one letter of the name, but this was no straightforward continuation.

Vocalists Fay Fife and Eugene Reynolds would spend the coming years leading the band off the path to rock ’n’ roll stardom The Rezillos seemed destined for. In doing so, they released some of the most colourful, underrated music of the period and built a dedicated, “out-there” fanbase.

SHAUN HAND meets Fife and finds a committed artist behind the kitsch and retro influences. “If I were to say what’s my favourite out of The Rezillos and Revillos? Definitely Revillos. I’m very fond of some of those songs. I felt much more at the centre of that”

The new group officially launched in September ’79 with ‘Where’s The Boy For Me?’ and a brief UK tour (which, despite the band’s initial desire to only gig on Fridays and Saturdays, began on a Monday). Punters rocking up to gigs expecting The Rezillos Mk 2, or to at least hear the hits, were in for a shock. The absence not just of old material — “Not a conscious decision,” shrugs Fife. “Again, it just never occurred to me.” — but also of Jo Callis’s Les Paul and Marshall stack had made room for a very different sound to emerge: one still plugged in to the jittery, DIY energy of punk but which leant much further into Fife’s love of ’60s girl-groups and hers and Reynolds’ passion for ’60s music and Gerry Anderson TV shows. “Bubblegum music from outer space; Johnny & The Hurricanes go psychedelic; Glitter Rock meets The Shangri-La’s,” as Reynolds would tell Fightback fanzine in ’81.

Although an early draft of the song had been rehearsed by The Rezillos, ‘Where’s The Boy For Me?’ was perfect aural proof of this fresh direction. To record it, Fife and Reynolds had deliberately returned to Barclay Towers, the Edinburgh tenement flat where they’d recorded ‘I Can’t Stand My Baby’ — dissatisfaction with the methods and costs involved in recording ‘Destination Venus’ at Richard Branson’s Manor Studios had been another factor in the split. From its jabbed keyboard intro to its backing harmonies and ironic lyrics, ‘Where’s The Boy For Me?’ makes little attempt to obscure its influences whilst simultaneously following its own quirky vision (it also remains Fife’s favourite Revillos single). B-side ‘The Fiend’, meanwhile, is a fantastically demented, sub-two-minute number that sounds like the kind of obscure ’60s garage single collectors fork out hundreds for.

Like the music, the single’s brightly-coloured sleeve and day-glo video also offered a bold stylistic contrast to most of their other retro-inspired contemporaries, be it the black & white check of 2-Tone or, to quote Paul Weller, the “sea of grey parkas” flocking to Jam and mod revival gigs. However, one adjective you should never attribute to The Revillos’ music or image — as I found out — is the f-word: fun. Fife is immediately indignant: “People have said of music I’ve been involved with, ‘It just looked like you were having fun.’ Nothing could be further from the truth; I never did the music to have fun.” She spits the word out as if it were cold porridge. “We were an art school band; we were arty people. We were influenced by Pop Art, Expressionism, all sorts of things. Pop Art would look at trivial things and then comment on the triviality.”

That approach informed their second single, the rollicking ‘Motorbike Beat’. “Eugene and I really liked how loads of my favourite music got all het up about things like motorbikes, cars and kissing,” Fife notes. “A lot of girl-group music seems to be obsessed with things that would otherwise seem trivial. I like things like that; I’m interested in the icons in pop culture.”

The Revillos played ‘Motorbike Beat’ live on their TV debut, for an episode of Something Else, which aired two days before Christmas ’79. Billed alongside fellow Scottish new-wavers The Skids, the contrast between the two bands is telling: while The Skids put in an assured performance, gesturing towards the epic landscapes guitarist Stuart Adamson would traverse with Big Country, The Revillos tear through their two songs with a thrilling, near-frantic energy. Yet they are clearly equally well-drilled: Fife knows where the cameras are every bit as much as Richard Jobson, the band are all in their stage gear, and the singers all have their go-go moves choreographed. It’s as if they’re in their own world, and they’re determined to make the most of every opportunity they get to live inside it.

“It’s like the creation of another, imagined world. You are right about that,” Fife agrees, allowing me to dig myself out of a fun-shaped hole. To this end, with Fife no longer having the time to make and design her own stage clothes as she once had (“DIY has limits,” as she observes), the band worked with designers in Edinburgh and later further afield to achieve their unique look: “I’ve never been interested in clothes or fashion, but I was interested in wearing odd outfits, you might say.”