Best tunes of 1992: #19 New Fast Automatic Daffodils “Stockholm”

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Near the very end of 1994, a bunch of my high school friends and I converged upon the city of Waterloo, Ontario, where our friend Tim was attending university. He was renting half of a house with a couple of friends he had met at school and they had planned for a New Year’s Eve party from which seemingly no one would be turned away. Some of my friends arrived for just the one night but I was amongst a handful that made a whole weekend out of it. We arrived a few days in advance and spent a few days warming up the apartment and our livers, visiting local watering hole, Phil’s Grandson’s Place, playing video games, listening to tunes, and having a lot of laughs. The New Year’s Eve party was epic and one from which I took many days to recover. But that’s a tale for another day.

One of Tim’s two roommates at that time was Mark, whom I’ve since met and with whom I’ve become quite good friends over the years. However, I didn’t meet him that weekend. (He didn’t make it back from St. Catharines in time, due to a miscommunication with the other roommate, Terry.) Instead, I met his CD collection and his stereo, with both of whom I immediately became enamoured. The day after arriving at the house, I made sure to find an establishment from which to purchase some blank cassette tapes so that I could bring home some pieces of Mark’s collection.

One of the albums I recorded from the grand selection on Mark’s CD shelves was “Body exit mind”, the second album by Manchester’s New Fast Automatic Daffodils. I had heard the second single from the album, “Stockholm”, many times over on Toronto’s alt-rock radio station, EDGE 102.1, and had recorded the music video to one of my by now multiple video cassettes filled with music videos, but had never seen any of the band’s music out in the shops. The high quality recording I was able to make of the album spent lots of time in my tape deck in the early weeks and months of 1995, with this particular track getting the multiple rewind and re-play treatment.

For a band so short-lived, the New FADs had a sound that was all their own and produced a hell of track here that made an indelible impression upon me. Not quite Madchester baggy and not quite shoegaze or noise rock, “Stockholm” was all of these. That jangly guitar hook does a freaky dance with a bongo drum and frontman Andy Spearpoint produces an iconic introductory lyric in that drawling sing speak he does. “Lately, lately, I find I rush.” And then he belts out, as much as one could call what he does belting: “Can’t piece together the sun in the sky or the spots on my face.” I don’t know what any of it means but the groove and the noise gets to me every time. It just feels so powerful. And when the gritty guitars chime in at the midway point, you just have to turn it up and close your eyes.

I’ve since thanked Mark many times over for the use of his CDs and stereo and he can only shake his head at the memory of missing that legendary bash.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 1992 list, click here.