New Wave Eye Candy (video one-off #3)

 

A fan writes: "If this song were a feeling, it'd be running late for a job interview while stuck in traffic with explosive diahorrea"

The first time I heard the Cardiacs, I'm not even sure I knew they were the Cardiacs - and it was quite by accident. There was a free festival on Port Meadow in North Oxford - members of Monitor Crew were off one of our habitual nocturnal strolls and to our surprise the meadow was full of tents (I remember seeing this poor tripped-out hippie girl running panicked through the tents and tripping over the guy ropes). And then we came to this stage where a garish, herky jerky frightmare was underway (as opposed to what you'd probably expect at a free festival at that time - sub-Hawkwind / Gong/ Here and Now spacerock, Magic Mushroom Band etc). The lighting was demented, I see to remember. It was not something my ears and eyes were ready for in '85 - and possibly not even now. But so distinctive and memory-indelible that some years later finally encountering the Cardiacs I was like, "oh, that was them!".  

Pronk, some people call this - punk meets prog.  More than punk or postpunk, to me the New Wave-iness of it stands out - but that particular histronic strand of New Wave - groups like Punishment of Luxury (some of whom came out of fringe theatre). Angletrax. Early XTC. Devo but some of the other more annoying groups from Akron and Cleveland even more so.  

Apparently they were fans of Split Enz - the very early Enz who were still a prog pop group rather than streamlining their sound for echt-New Wave

another category: New Wave collapsing back into prog, or a sort of prog

The Cardiacs, the true children of Punishment of Luxury

I actually saw the Cardiacs early on in the career, quite by accident, and only realised much later, when they started to get some attention in the music papers, that it had been them.
Living on post-graduation in Oxford, on the dole, in Jericho in the north of the city, we often would go for a night time wander across Port Meadow. Because it was idyllic but also a little spooky -- water bird sounds carrying eerily across the pitch black dark. One summer night we set out only to find ourselves in the midst of a free festival. We had little idea such things even existed, I don't think.  This is 1984, 85, so pre-Battle of the Beanfield. I remember a hippie girl, tripping out of her head and tripping on the guy-ropes of all the tents, as she ran in a panic through the camp ground.

If it had been your typical free festival fare -- Hawkwind/Here and Now type music, Magic Mushroom Band et al - we might have stuck around longer, enjoyed the trippy spacey-ness of it. But no, strangely, it was the Cardiacs, herky-jerky to the power of 10000. To say I was appalled -- grimly mesmerized, too, but mostly appalled -- would be an understatement. It was so not - so the antithesis - of what I was about at that point, which was Husker Du type blur, or The Smiths. We left pretty quick, which I kinda regret. The Cardiacs drove me away from an alternate destiny, of becoming a crusty-traveler. (Unlikely scenario)

I guess below (from a 1984 videotape) is what they would have sounded like when we saw them.

Almost Eastern European...  coming from not dissimilar places as that Soviet band Zvuki Mu, maybe.

Are the Cardiacs also a little bit like what pre-New Wave, late-prog Split Enz sounded like?

Sad to hear about the health torments of singer/mainman Tim Smith.