LIVE REVIEW - Astoria, London
Don't sneer, no matter how much senility becomes you. Anyone with taste would know it was love at first sight - 'Maximum Security Twilight Zone' tangled up in germs, spluttering out the first spots of hydrophobia. Nik Fiend slips away, to return as Alice and then, just as swiftly, returning as himself. No explanation. Just perfect understatement.
The most tragically misunderstood of English bands, the Fiends exist in a speculative limbo, placed there by bimbo's who own time. Ironically all the dirty new boys like Public Enemy would probably take one look at Nik with a thousand fags in his mouth, upstaging anything Karloff once offered crawling into the beat that they can't leave alone, and appreciate it.
Critics have become crippled by paranoia. It's no good having "lived" and looked only. You need to have thought before you can even listen properly. ASF are IMMENSE tonight, particularly when it comes to 'Dead and Buried', everyone living inside their avalanche.
What do you expect of them? What is hip? Most of us appraised, then forgot. The Beastie Boys before ASF even formed! Yet the Fiend's stand dammed, convicted of some heinous fashionable crime they never committed. Forever on the scaffold, they plough on with 'Hurricane Fighter' and shatter our ears, the building can't take it!
You can't dismiss my ravings, you weren't there. Never before has so much by so few been ignored by so many w**ke*s.
MICK MERCER - MELODY MAKER, 25 April 1987.
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