Fad Gadget

Francis John "Frank" Tovey, known also by his stage name Fad Gadget (8 September 1956 – 3 April 2002), was a British avant-garde electronic musician and vocalist. He was a proponent of both new wave and early industrial music, fusing together a unique blend of pop structured songs mixed with mechanised experimentation.

As Fad Gadget, his music was characterised by the use of synthesizers in conjunction with sounds of found objects, including drills and electric razors. His bleak, sarcastic and darkly humorous lyrics were filled with biting social commentary toward subjects such as machinery, industrialisation, consumerism, human sexuality, mass media, religion, domestic violence and dehumanization while often being sung in a deadpan voice.

Early years

Tovey was born in 1956 in the UK. At school, Tovey tried to learn many different musical instruments. He realised he did not have the co-ordination to be able to play any of them really well.

Tovey drifted away from the idea of playing music, and began getting involved in other art forms instead. He later studied visual arts and mime at Leeds Metropolitan University, known as Leeds Polytechnic at the time. He felt the need to give his mime act some sort of musical accompaniment so he went back to the idea of recording music. The initial musical pieces were formed of sound manipulation using tape recorders.

New People

New People were civilian Cambodians who were controlled and exploited by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia from 1975-1979. Generally, anyone who was from an urban area was made a New Person and people from rural areas were made Old People.

New People were not allowed any property and they were forced to work at least 10 hours a day, and often more. Their food rations were so small they led to starvation. Disease was rampant and in 1976 it was estimated that 80% of the Cambodian population suffered from malaria.

One of the Khmer Rouge mottos, in reference to the New People, was "To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss."

See also

References

Gadget

A gadget is a smalltool such as a machine that has a particular function, but is often thought of as a novelty. Gadgets are sometimes referred to as gizmos. Gizmos in particular are a bit different than gadgets. Gadgets in particular are small tools powered by electronic principles (a circuit board).

History

The origins of the word "gadget" trace back to the 19th century. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, there is anecdotal (not necessarily true) evidence for the use of "gadget" as a placeholder name for a technical item whose precise name one can't remember since the 1850s; with Robert Brown's 1886 book Spunyarn and Spindrift, A sailor boy’s log of a voyage out and home in a China tea-clipper containing the earliest known usage in print. The etymology of the word is disputed.

A widely circulated story holds that the word gadget was "invented" when Gaget, Gauthier & Cie, the company behind the repoussé construction of the Statue of Liberty (1886), made a small-scale version of the monument and named it after their firm; however this contradicts the evidence that the word was already used before in nautical circles, and the fact that it did not become popular, at least in the USA, until after World War I. Other sources cite a derivation from the French gâchette which has been applied to various pieces of a firing mechanism, or the French gagée, a small tool or accessory.