Interview – Fairground Attraction

After a 35-year hiatus, Fairground Attraction are back – and finally ready to make that long overdue second album. In a Classic Pop exclusive, Eddi Reader and Mark Nevin share their emotional story of “reconciliation, resolution and healing”.

It has been a long time coming but, 35 years on, Classic Pop can finally reveal the true reason Fairground Attraction suddenly split up at the height of their chart-topping, Brit Award-winning success.

“It was when they didn’t let me have ‘ladling’ during a game of Scrabble on the tour bus,” declares singer Eddi Reader, clearly still nursing a grievance over this lexicographical injustice. “They were fucking wrong!”

“That’s what it was,” concurs guitarist and songwriter Mark Nevin. “It was a Scrabble problem.”

They’re joking, of course. The real reasons for the folk-rock four-piece’s sudden immolation – less than two years after they’d come from nowhere to score a No.1 hit with their debut single Perfect – are as messy and complicated as any break-up. But three-and-a-half decades on, Fairground Attraction are back in business – and no one is more surprised and delighted than them. So, what kept them?

Back In Business

“It’s a good question, and we don’t quite know how to answer it ourselves,” admits Nevin, talking to CP over Zoom from his home in London. “Eddi and I didn’t really speak to each other for decades, and… it’s almost like she’s not a real person any more,” he smiles. “When we first spent time together again, in Glasgow, Eddi was sitting at the piano, and I looked over and thought:

Is this actually happening? Is she real? I almost wanted to reach out and make sure she wasn’t a ghost.”

Reader, looking on from her native Glasgow, smiles affectionately. Having reopened communications last year – when she jumped on stage at one of Mark’s solo shows for an impromptu version of FA fan favourite Allelujia – the two are clearly enjoying each other’s company again, along with fellow founding members Simon Edwards (guitarrón) and Roy Dodds (drums).

“There were a number of factors [that led to the rapprochement],” reflects Mark. “I think we’ve probably grown up, finally. Also, you look around and you see people like Terry Hall, Sinéad O’Connor and Shane MacGowan all leaving us. You think: hold on, this isn’t going to go on forever. I remember thinking that the day after David Bowie died. I used to worry that one day I’d run out of ideas, and when Bowie died I thought: you don’t run out of ideas. You just run out of time.”

“I think the big C word – Covid – was also a factor,” says Eddi. “Mark and Roy both had real run-ins with it, and it’s kind of frightening how fragile life is. How quickly it could be over, and there would be no opportunity for reconciliation or resolution or healing.”

Resolution & Reconciliation

A more immediate impetus for the band was being offered a gig at Club QUATTRO in Shibuya, Tokyo, where Fairground Attraction – who, industry cliché though it may be, genuinely were big in Japan – had first played 35 years ago. “It just seemed really interesting that we could maybe go to where we kind of finished, and just depress the pause button,” says Reader.

“That just seemed right to me. I thought: I want to go there and celebrate that thing that we did. Because I’ve missed it. I’ve missed Mark and Simon and Roy. I missed that collective. But I’ve also missed Mark’s songs. They’re manna from heaven for singers. They demand your authenticity.”

“It’s the same for me, with Eddi,” adds Mark. “She just connects to the songs, to the way I write them. There’s just something between us. Eddi and I are both from big families – she’s number one of seven kids and I’m number six of eight – and we were born two weeks apart [they’re both 64]. So, we have very similar musical influences.”

Having agreed to play the Tokyo show, things quickly escalated: firstly, into a tour in Japan, then a UK tour, to be accompanied by a brand new album, Beautiful Happening – only the second in Fairground Attraction’s stop-start (but mainly stop) career.

Beautiful Happening

So, what was it like when, earlier this year, all four of them finally got back in a rehearsal room again and started playing together? “It was emotional, but it was also quite funny,” remembers Nevin. “Because it was just exactly the same as it used to be. We all just slotted into the roles we were so familiar with.”

“There was a lovely moment for me,” recalls Eddi, “when me and Roy were visiting Mark, and his son was playing piano. I said to Roy, ‘let’s go help him out – I’ll sing along and you can batter something’. And I just thought: ‘God, this is lovely’. This is how it should be. Families, and our children, experiencing what we are, as a group of human beings on the planet at the same time. How remarkable is that miracle? The world is billions of years old, and we’ve all landed at the same time.”

While Beautiful Happening, due for release in September, is still a work in progress (with Mark teasing that it will be “the story of us”), in March fans got to hear the first fruits of the sessions with the release of the single What’s Wrong With The World? Sounding reassuringly like the Fairground Attraction of old – Reader’s mountain-clear voice soaring and swooping over a warm, laidback folk shuffle – it’s a more personal, self-lacerating song than its title might suggest, built around the idea that “you can change the mirror, but not the reflection”.

“I really liked that line,” explains Mark. “And then I was reminded of the famous story of GK Chesterton, who wrote a letter to The Times where he said: “In response to your question, ‘What’s wrong with the world?’ – I am.’”

Along For The Ride

Another line sees Reader singing of “coming face to face with my imperfection”. There’s an irresistible symmetry, suggests Classic Pop, to a band who became overnight stars with a song about how it had to be perfect, returning three-and-a-half decades later with one acknowledging their imperfections. Was that deliberate?

“Well, no. It only came about because I needed a rhyme for reflection – and we couldn’t have an erection!” chuckles Nevin. “So, I came up with imperfection, and I was delighted when I realised that it not only rhymed perfectly, but also with the significance of it… Of how it resonates with our past, and our story. My favourite part of the video is when Eddi sings that line and looks directly into the camera. It’s such a moment.”

Released in March 1988, no one expected Perfect to be a No.1 hit – least of all the people who made it. Going into the studio to record their album The First Of A Million Kisses, the band’s brand of mellow, acoustic folk-pop couldn’t have been more out of step with the era’s acid house scene. So worried were they, in fact, about a producer trying to make them sound more contemporary, they persuaded their record company, RCA, to let them produce the record themselves – despite having no real production experience. “We definitely had our youthful opinions: ‘That’s shite, that’s good, all of that,” says Eddi. “Everybody watched Top Of The Pops and went: ‘no, no, no, yes, no’. But by the time the band came along… You know when you’re starving, and you don’t really know it? By that time, I was starving.

Perfect Moment

“I’d been singing since I was four, so by the time I got to 28, I thought: if I have to do another ‘ooh baby’… I needed songs with meat on them. Stuff that broke your heart. And Mark was just walking about with his bag of songs.”

While Eddi had built a reputation as an in-demand session singer and backing vocalist for the likes of the Eurythmics, Alison Moyet and Gang of Four, a teenage Mark had arrived in London in the late 70s with a guitar and a headful of dreams. By the mid-80s, he was performing in a Motown covers band called Gina And The Tonics, with former Kinks backing singers Debi Doss and Shirlie Roden. But that creative alliance came to a bruising end in a hospital A&E department, after the thug landlord and bouncers of a Tooting pub had set about the band with baseball bats.

“We had another gig a few days later, and Debi and Shirlie decided they didn’t want to do it, unsurprisingly,” recalls Mark. “So, we urgently needed a new backing singer. I called up my friend Anthony Thistlethwaite, from The Waterboys, and he said, ‘I know this girl called Eddi…’”

By the time Fairground Attraction went into the studio, then, both Eddi and Mark had been paying their dues for a good 10 years. Even so, they had zero expectations of commercial success – so were astonished when Perfect became a huge hit right out of the gate, landing in Top 10s around the world, and topping the charts in the UK, Ireland, Australia and South Africa.

Kiss Goodbye

“It was completely weird,” says Nevin. “We used to go play at alternative cabaret clubs – little back rooms in pubs, where we’d be the music and Vic [Reeves] and Bob [Mortimer] would be the comedians. We just saw ourselves like that. It was a surprise to get a proper record deal. And then when Perfect went to No.1 it was just like: ‘What?’”

The First Of A Million Kisses, released just two months later, also reached platinum status, and at the following year’s Brit Awards, Fairground Attraction became the first band in history to scoop both the single and album of the year gongs.

And then… as quickly as they had arrived, it was over. In January 1990, in the midst of recording their second album, the band suddenly announced that they’d split up. (A second LP, Ay Fond Kiss, was released in June that year, assembled from B-sides and unreleased songs from sessions for The First Of A Million Kisses.)

Even by rock’n’roll’s boom-and-bust standards, it feels like a hyper-accelerated trajectory, suggests Classic Pop. “Everything was hyper-accelerated,” agrees Mark. “We weren’t prepared for [success], and we had no idea how to deal with it. Everything was confused.”

Back To Nothing

“I was so traumatised,” remembers Reader of the split. “I went on holiday with my mum and dad, in a caravan from Glasgow to County Kerry. And I was in the back of the caravan, with a new baby, just thinking: ‘This is it. Back to nothing. Back to where I was’.”

“I was heartbroken,” says Nevin. “I was playing and writing with Morrissey, and everyone was like: ‘Wow, you’ve got the ultimate gig of stepping into Johnny Marr’s shoes. But I couldn’t care less. I just wanted to be with Eddi and the band.”

“There was a time when I didn’t sing any Fairground Attraction songs, because I was full of hurt that it was gone,” admits Eddi. “It felt like my dead child or something. Also, I didn’t feel I could do them without the boys. But then I started to fall in love with them again, one by one, like little bubbles coming up to the surface. They wanted to be sung.”

“We both just carried on, because to stop would have been absolutely unthinkable,” says Mark, of the pair’s subsequent solo careers. “We carried on until we found each other again. And here we are.”

Fair Play

Classic Pop wonders if they wish they’d sought each other out sooner? “I can’t imagine anything being any different to how it is,” says Reader. “There’s no knowing who I’d be, or who Mark would be, had we continued with Fairground Attraction… I could have been dead under a table in Los Angeles by now.”

“No, it is absolutely right that it happened,” agrees Mark. “It was very difficult. But we’ve learned a lot as musicians, and as human beings.”

“We needed to be threshed with life,” suggests Eddi. “We had to be threshed with families, divorces, bringing up kids…”

And have they dared contemplate how long the ride might last this time? Might they even make it to a third album? “Well, we’ve got until the end of the UK tour,” says Mark, cautiously. “Anything after that is a bonus.” “I have ambition, and I can put it in the universe as a want,” reflects Reader. “I would love to do the things that we didn’t do – maybe play some gigs in America, go to Australia, New Zealand…

“But I don’t really give a monkey’s about what happens, as long as we’re mates. Everything else is just minor details. Whether we sell one ticket, one record, or gazillions of them, is irrelevant. The bottom line is that, at the end of this, we’re still friends.”

Beautiful Happening is released on 20 September via Raresong Recordings. Tickets for the upcoming UK tour are on sale here

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