With a generous dose of imagination and suspended belief the experienced listener should be able to overcome the arse-over-tit sound production to bask in the presence of one of Scotland’s most testy and awkward beat combos, the Fire Engines. Revered and fondly replicated by the those tight-buttocked post-post-punk lotharios and fellow Scots, Franz Ferdinand, the Fire Engines tore along the same edgy strop-line as pop activists like Gang Of Four, the Mekons, Orange Juice and, believe it or not, the B52s. If this were a traditional revival you might have expected something along the lines of an ‘extras’ heavy compilation, the re-release of the band’s only album, ‘Lubricate Your Living Room’ (1980) with an impossibly clever foreword written by Paul Morley by way of introduction, but not the Fire Engines. Pleasing people was never actually part of the brief so what we got was a fuzzy, aggressive selection of distorted lo-fi demos and amateur live recordings. Inspired themselves by the Voidoids and James Chance, the songs are a tangy lobster-pot of short sharp shocks, chaotic riffing, unpredictable beats and vocal epilepsy. Why they chose the irascible Fast Records over and above the more affable Postcard is obvious; the Fire Engines was never intended to be a cosy conduit for the boys’ chart sensibilities even if their only hit, ‘Candyskin’ saw them graze it momentarily. This was far too arty and arsy for that. In fact the band’s unwillingness to get drawn into the popular channel is perhaps best illustrated by a snippet of an interview spliced as a clip between ‘the UNTITLED one’ and ‘MEAW Whiplash’ when Davy Henderson describes an upcoming gig:
”We’re going to do two fifteen minute sets…and we’re playing with this band called The U2. I’ve not really heard them yet. But I’m not really bothered about them.”
For those who still care, Davy Henderson and Russell Burn formed Win in the mid eighties and the two are still together today as Nectarine No. 9. The band ‘The U2’ meanwhile continue to be a band not worth bothering about.