Look here you young pop whippersnappers, for the last time, the ‘80s weren’t funny. Yes, I know its tres chic for modern beat combos to get all cute and retro from the safety of 20 years’ hindsight, playing dress up in pastels and puff sleeves and bouffants while practising those castor sugar synth riffs. Except some of us lived the nightmare for real. Some of us still wake screaming and clawing at ourselves in fear of finding our ravaged 30-something frames clad in flecked baggy pants, grey slip-ons, cavalry shirts and white macs with the sleeves rolled up, flashbacking to the Cutting Crew and Huey Lewis on MT USA. You weren’t there man, you’ll never understand.
NYPC are not the most obvious offenders, mind. Three girls in cartoon strip colours, two blokes sporting Swedish porn star musses, do’s and neck scarves, all painstakingly schooled in B52s-lite, quirko-pop embellished with Tubeway Army keyboards, scratchy white funk guitar and the kind of gated snare and kick patterns custom made for ironic robot dancing (‘The Cream’, ‘Get Lucky’). Each of these tunes comes recommended by singer Tahita Bulmer’s laconic big sister delivery, some natty Casio percussion effects and a Mr. Sheen production job last heard on Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’.
If anything, the whole shebang suggests an early ‘80s NY time warp where the rockers and socialites met uptown at the Tom Tom Club and the Ze label weirdo convention. ‘Hiding On The Staircase’ and ‘Jerk Me’ could be Bow Wow Wow after a designer makeover. ‘The Bomb’ and ‘The Get Go’ are primetime MTV 1984 Brit invasion fodder. I could go on and on excavating names and dates, but perhaps it’s enough to say that Fantastic Playroom sounds exactly like it sounds: often cute, occasionally lurid, always novel, a record with one eye on the alt-style supplements, the other on the charts. This tape will self destruct in five seconds, but in pop terms, that’s a lifetime.
C-30, C-60, C-90 go!