Lost In Music: Fini Tribe*

If Pet Shop Boys are perceived as the pop Gilbert and George, then Edinburgh’s Fini Tribe (sometimes written as finitribe) were DADA. Formed in 1982, there were originally six members:

Phillip Pinsky, Chris Connelly, Davie Miller ,John Vick, Andy McGregor and Simon McGlynn.

Together, they fused post-punk radicalism with strong visual art, samples and beats, and became a beloved cult band on indie dancefloors all over the UK. Live sets often felt more akin to performance art than conventional gigs, what with their nods to Tristan Tzara, Rene Magritte and other such art pranksters.

Unlike artists like, say, The KLF and The Shamen, the band wilfully refused to make “verse-chorus-verse” pop songs: they instead dipped into monk chants, bells, jarring film samples and high-camp, long before MARRS had an accidental hit with ‘Pump Up The Volume’ in the mid -eighties.

Their sound and approach leaned more into the esoteric, traversing roads less explored. There were no gimmicks, populist influences, wacky characters like Mr C ,or catchy, facile singalongs- yet, they were magnificent.

Tracks like ‘De-Testimony’ scorched John Peel’s radio show and was an early club hit, with its classical samples and staccato beats. But of course, it wasn’t commercial enough for daytime playlists. Later club tracks like ‘Monster In the House’ and ‘Forevergreen’ saw them move into more squidgy, porous acid house territory, but the cut and paste approach was still evident; they stayed true to the perverse and otherworldly ethos, still stubbornly DIY and punk in attitude.

Even their cheeky album titles set out their stall: ‘Noise, Lust and Fun’, ‘Sleazy Listening ‘ and, playfully attacking the prevailing yuppie culture at the time,’Grossing 10K’.

Their sense of humour was such that the videos became increasingly satirical, with the band, whose line -up changed over the decade, mocking machismo in absurdist, homoerotic, “taps aff” art school gestures. They even covered Can’s ‘I Want More’- it doesn’t get more audacious than that.

They should have been massive, but rarely do such clever types make the charts. Their legacy remains though, and those tunes still slap.