It looks like the Flying Lizards are going to have the third hit in a row with “TV” Out a few days it already sounds familiar and—more surprisingy—I'm singing it. Which may not sound particularly odd except that the Lizards are not the kind of organization set up to make you respond in quite that way. Or so I thought. They ve become the “commercially acceptable” face of experimental post-punk avant garde. Categories, my dear Watson, mere categories. Into sound, electronics, tape bops, minimal lyrics, their tracks hiccough and insist.

I suppose it’s the divide between intent and response but I thought they were somehow attempting to revolutionise rock listening habits. To wedge themselves between expectations from the listener to the track, much as Brecht a nd Weill revolutionised theatre in Germany in the early 30’s so that an experience which, up until then, had been for the elite was socialised in the true political sense. To that end it hardly seems surprising that the Lizards’ opening track on their first album is Brecht/Weill’s “Mandalay Song.” But am I wrong? David Cunningham, master of studio decks, tape splicing and the paraphernalia of recording, the brains, as it were, behind the Lizards says in a recent Melody Maker interview that the Lizards was just an idea to get some musicians together and experiment with sounds and now look what’s happened—they’ve become a rock identity. They are successful (how many groups would give their eyeteeth for three hit singles in a row?) yet, according to Cunningham they set out1 to be no more politically important than Gary Numan and HumanLeague.