POP MUSIC REVIEW : Manchester’s Fast Daffodils: After the Fall

A former British soap-opera star fronting a Manchester-originated rock band? Sounds like the worst kind of celebrity trend-hopping. Yet the Los Angeles debut of the New Fast Automatic Daffodils at the Whisky on Wednesday had no sense of celebrity gloss, and virtually nothing (save for a strobe light) to do with the recent Manchester acid-house frenzy.

It had a lot to do with an earlier Manchester trend: the didactic, no-nonsense style developed more than a decade ago by the Fall, though Leeds’ Gang of Four came to mind just as readily from the NewFADs’ clipped, dry rhythms and stark, indicting imagery.

With his crew-cut, round, wire-rim glasses and white T-shirt, singer Andy Spearpoint looked like your basic British radical intellectual. He could have just as well been whipping up a miners’ rally as fronting a rock band as he purposefully paced the stage, using his actor’s projection to effectively put across such lines as, “You can save your money, ‘cause you’ll never save your looks.”

The NewFADs’ music--basic guitar-bass-drums, but with a second percussionist giving a textural twist--was a pleasant change of pace from the recent Manchester psychedelic disco sounds of Happy Mondays et al.: not a single sample or electro-trick was used! On its own terms it was compelling and forceful, though limiting and humorless--a Devo-ish encore of “Purple Haze” seemed a bit out of place. But how brightly the Daffodils flower depends on the group’s ability to build on its illustrious influences in future efforts.