The Fixx.
Forty years ago, the British New Wave rock band the Fixx released their debut album Shuttered Room. That record, which contains the now-classic songs “Red Skies” and “Stand or Fall,” would set the template for the Fixx's future recordings: sleek, modern-sounding music with lyrics influenced by the current political and social times. Shuttered Room was followed by more hit songs for the Fixx throughout the 1980s such as “One Thing Leads to Another,” “Saved by Zero,” “Secret Separation” and “Deeper and Deeper.”
“It does feel like we've gone through a whole cycle,” says Cy Curnin, the band's lead singer, acknowledging the milestone anniversary of Shuttered Room. “Unfortunately, maybe some of the subject matter on the first album seem scarily relevant to today, which is also a testament to that cycle. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's a prophecy, but I've often felt like we're messengers... and the message that we're trying to bring forth is from some quantum field of looking at our behavior from another perspective.”
That musical and lyrical tradition set forth by Shuttered Room remains alive today as the Fixx—whose members consist of Curnin, drummer Adam Woods, bassist Dan K. Brown, guitarist Jamie West-Oram and keyboardist Rupert Greenall—just released their 11th studio album, Every Five Seconds, the band’s first new studio LP in 10 years. Amid the backdrop of the pandemic and political divisiveness, the themes of Every Five Seconds really encapsulate today's mood of uncertainty and frustration, as reflected on tracks like “Closer” and “Take What You Want From Me,” whose lyric goes: “Fanatics rule in duplicity/These minor men in the majority.”
According to Curnin, the new album was completed by the time the pandemic hit. “I think in terms of the way that we write, there's a substance to what we choose to reflect of humanity—that there's a constant underwhelming and overwhelming. It's not about eureka moments or natural disasters. It's that constant ebb and flow of the underwhelming nature of humanity. We just never seem to realize that we create pain to make love from, love comes from pain, eventually, it's supposed to be that journey. We're stuck in the pain part, and I seem to write from that aspect, too.”
Even the album's title, Every Five Seconds, which is taken from the song “Lonely as a Lighthouse,” seems like a barometer of our current information overload. “You're struggling to retain staying mindfulness, which has become a mantra of the age we live,” Curnin says, “and everyone is obsessed with trying to be mindful. What that's always said to me is that we're so distracted by so many things and we never really get a chance to get into the deep well of knowledge, so we're constantly bombarded with headlines and no text underneath it. We've been bombarded with this left and right divisive dogfight. We wanted to put something that was kind of a balm to the anxiety of the times.”
The sweeping and moody rocker “Wake Up” from Every Five Seconds seems to advocate action and self-empowerment than inaction from the sidelines: “We're suffocating and can't breathe/If only we stood up.” Curnin characterizes the track as descriptive of life today in a sort of dystopian way. “There's a personal responsibility to it—it's not just watching it on a screen. I think in that song, I was dipping into the idea of waking up myself as a kid or waking up the innocent in me and grabbing some personal responsibility and really joining in with the rush for the barricades and trying and speak up, act out my fears rather than just 'take it, take it, take it,’ ‘sit quiet and hope nobody notices that I'm not doing anything.'”
Not just featuring observational songs, but Every Five Seconds delves into the personal—such as on “A Life Survived. “ Says Curnin: “I think that that song kind of shows all my walls falling down in one moment. I was going through a big period of change in my life, so you kind of have to accept things [and] realize that the thing that is constant to your mistakes is you and it's not the causality of a mistake. It's not outside of you quite often, you bring them on yourself. So I was talking about having been numbed through periods of my life where you wake up and you go, 'I should have been a bit more alive rather than just survive that period.' I didn't really live it enough. So that's the autobiographical part of that.”
The dreamy and Gothic-sounding “Woman of Flesh and Blood” marks a unique moment in the Fixx's recorded history in that it features a rare lead vocal by the band's guitarist West-Oram, who initially came up with the song. “Normally, he was thinking I would be singing the vocal,” recalls Curnin, “but I said, ‘No, you really have to sing that.’ The vulnerability that he was portraying and then this dreamlike state was so Jamie that it had to stay him [on lead vocals]. And then the second half of the song–the angry other part–I went, 'Oh, I got to do that bit.' He wrote the first set of words that I sing. And then he was like, 'Well, you write the second verse that you're gonna sing.' And so I was able to sort of encapsulate where he was coming from lyrically in that last verse, and we kind of told the tale together there.”
Amid the turmoil presented throughout its songs, Every Five Seconds concludes on an optimistic note with the acoustic-flavored “Neverending.” “There's a kind of a—I wouldn't say flamenco—but that hopeful craziness that gypsies put on when they're playing their acoustics with the sweat coming off their brows. I definitely wanted to get that energy in it. When I wrote that song, that was what I was channeling. You have your heartbeat and you have your passion, and off you go. That's neverending, that's what's gonna drive the spirit of mankind forward, is keep believing in the things that really matter to you as your first impulses beyond hate, and then you find this neverending quality to it, we keep going around and around in the gene pool. So it was very celebratory and full of hope.”
As evident on the new record, the Fixx are one of the few bands from the 1980s MTV era whose sound remains virtually intact, just like their classic longtime lineup. “I guess that's what happens when you get a bunch of like-minded fellows that see no reason to divorce each other,” Curnin explains about the group's timeless sound. “We've grown up together and know our own strengths and the things that attract us musically.”
As the Fixx are currently on tour in the States through the end of June, Curnin considers Every Five Seconds a worthwhile addition to the band's legacy. “If I look at it as like an audio gallery of our work, I can see the progression of our life together,” he says. “We still feel really honored to be together. I'm super excited not only to be playing on stage, but hanging around with these guys because they bring my better angels out—and my best self really takes center stage when they're there. It's like a marriage but better. We have so much that so much unlived potential still that we're looking forward to keeping it going. A record from the Fixx—the relevance to us now is we do it for us and the audience.”
