FACE ACADEMY
FACE ACADEMY: AN INTRODUCTION
Notes for the album’s 10th anniversary
digital release, written May 2013
It's impossible to overestimate the effect the Perrier
Best Newcomer Award had on my career. Before
August 2003, I was an underachieving data entry
clerk who occasionally did strange things on stage
and once made a low-budget animation about a boy
nobody likes. By the end of the month, I was an
award-winning professional comedian, the
celebrated 1980s parodist Gary Le Strange, who left
the Edinburgh Fringe clutching a ream of five-star
reviews and a stack of job offers that would keep
him out of data entry for the rest of his life. All I
needed to do was follow it up with an even better
show which everyone agreed was several hundred
times better than my award-winning five-star mega-
triumph and the world would finally be mine for the
taking.
From my success-addled point of view in the
summer of 2003, this didn't seem difficult. After a
month belting out Polaroid Suitcase night after
night, I was all too aware of its shortcomings. The
live show was a rigid character monologue,
interspersed with songs, in which a failed pop star
catalogued dreadful incidents from his life. An
earth-shattering success in its own small way, but
the general consensus told me the talky bits
between the songs weren't quite as entertaining as
the songs themselves. And when it came to the
music, I knew I could do better. Gary Le Strange's
first album had been an introduction to the
character, a series of snapshots painting a broad
picture of who he was and what he liked. The
second, I reckoned, would be a much deeper affair,
a fuller exploration of the character and the world
around him, a dynamic experience which brought
the character firmly into the present day and placed
him right in the centre of your brain.
There were plenty of other things I wanted to
change too. Cut his hair, for one thing, and get some
better clothes. Widen his sphere of influences so it
wasn't so rigidly stuck in 1981. I wanted to
demonstrate to people that I wasn't just a vapid
1980s-obsessed nostalgia merchant and that Gary
Le Strange was a formidable comedy character who
could go anywhere, do anything and had a lot to say
about the world around us. I wanted to make him
more confident, more approachable, more real, to
delve deeper into his psyche and become one with
the character. I wanted more songs, more chat,
more ridiculous dancing and more work at the end
of it. In truth, I wanted nothing more complicated or
ambitious than to improve it in every respect -
better writing, better acting, better music and
better comedy, made by a better professional who
was better than anyone else.
But I was way too busy for that. Overnight, I shot
from try-out spot to headline act, doing countless
gigs up and down the country and giving countless
interviews to publicise them. Within two months of
winning that award, I'd landed a script development
deal with the BBC and a regular role in a new radio
sketch show, managed a sell-out run at the Soho
Theatre, met Tony Hadley on a chat show, had
dinner with Steve Strange and performed my entire
show to a packed house at the Palace, where they
usually did Les Miserables. Over the course of the
year, I did a national tour, wrote a half-hour TV
script, made several TV appearances, did a video
taster tape for the BBC and appeared in twelve
episodes of Radio 2's The Day The Music Died,
supplying an original three-minute pop song each
time. Finding the time to write and record a new
album while devising and rehearsing a new hour-
long show would be a challenge to say the least.
The only solution was to start straight away.
Thankfully, it didn't take me long to find the starting
point. At the end of my 2003 show, Gary had invited
the audience to throw off their shackles and join
him in his crusade against conformity. The obvious
next step would be to show that plan coming into
action. And what better way to illustrate the
shackles of conformity than by looking at the state
of the music industry?
In a stroke of unlikely good fortune that adds weight
to the idea that I am merely a two-dimensional
supporting character in someone else's TV series, in
October 2003 I landed a job on a music-based
sketch show for BBC Radio 2 called The Day The
Music Died. Presented by Andrew Collins with
special weekly features from Jon Holmes and Robin
Ince, the first two series featured Gary as a
recurring guest star, who, each week, sings a crazy
new song shedding witty light on some hilarious
facet of the music industry. This forced me to focus
on the realities of what was happening to the music
business in 2003. Things like falling singles sales and
whether or not downloads would catch on, or the
cultural reassimilation of 80s-style electronica and
whether it could truly survive when stacked up
against the ubiquity of hip-hop and boring guitar
bands who all sounded like Travis. None of which
really interested me. But there was one thing at the
time which stood out above everything else,
something Gary was exactly the right person to
explore, something I passionately loathed and
which I felt represented the first step towards the
utter destruction of our society.
Pop Idol. Formerly known as Popstars and soon to
be usurped by The X Factor, the talent competition
for wannabe singers had taken a vicious
stranglehold on British culture and represented
everything that was wrong with modern pop music.
It wasn't that it wasn't entertaining or that the
participants had no talent. It was more that it
removed all of the danger and creativity from pop
music. In its mission to appeal to as many people as
possible at any one time, it created a new lowest
common denominator form of entertainment in
which singing someone else's song rather than
writing your own was prized above all else, in which
the tastes of millions were dictated by a panel of
judges and the guy with the cutest smile and least
weird haircut was probably going to win. It glorified
karaoke over artistic expression, the extravert over
the introvert. To me, it seemed like proper
democratic pop music had died and been replaced
by an evil cabal of shady businessmen intent on
filling the charts with cheap disposable rubbish, and
I just didn't think Gary would stand for it.
Such concerns formed the philosophical basis of my
work for the coming year. I reimagined Gary not as
a failed pop star, but as a ridiculous revolutionary.
In the first show I had christened him a 'Face
Warrior'. In the second, I would declare a 'Face War'
on the music industry. Gary Le Strange would be the
creative alternative to Pop Idol, the anti-Will Young.
Working titles for the new show included Captain
Peacock, Escalators to Glory, Silicon Warlord and
Dancing in Disguise. But a misreading of the BBC's
short-lived Pop Idol clone Fame Academy gave me
the title I needed. The new show would be a lecture
at the Face Academy, in which the audience would
be Face Cadets, training to be Face Warriors at the
onset of the Face War. It was just like all those
things I'd adored about Adam Ant when I was a kid.
He didn't just write 'music' for his 'fans'. He wrote
'Antmusic' for 'Sexpeople'. His Prince Charming tour
wasn't a gig, it was a 'revue'. This was the kind of
pop star I wanted to be. The kind who didn't give a
shit what you think about him. The kind who had
fun with ideas.
Returning to the Edinburgh Fringe the following
year was a fixed point, a deadline I couldn't miss, so
if I wanted to record a new album too, I had to start
straight away. Even then, I had my work cut out.
The previous eight-track album had taken me
roughly eighteen months to write and record. To
aim for ten tracks on the second was tantamount to
insanity. But I was sure that, if I stayed focused and
stuck to my schedule, my lofty ambitions would
somehow translate into a tangible achievement. So
on January 2nd, 2004, I set about recording my
second album.
Musically, Face Academy is bolder, sleeker, more
Spartan than its predecessor. With Polaroid
Suitcase, I tried to ensure that each song had its
own unique sound. Face Academy began in the
same way but early demos proved both
disappointing and time-consuming. So, for practical
reasons as much as anything else, I decided to give
all the tracks a uniform production style. Inspired by
Japan's Tin Drum (one of my favourite albums and
arguably the best album made by any of the so-
called New Romantics), I wanted to de-clutter the
soundscape by limiting the number of instruments.
In my head, Face Academy was played by an
imaginary band of four musicians - a drummer, a
bassist and two synth-players (one of whom is
probably Gary). It's rare that you'll hear more than
four sounds at any one time. This gave the music
more room to breathe and forced me to be more
creative with my arrangements. Realising also that I
didn't have the gear to reproduce the sound of Tin
Drum exactly (though I had a good go at emulating
Mick Karn's quirky bass-playing on Electric Dance), I
spent a lot of time listening to other early 80s tracks
to find something my PS2 software could safely
copy. In the end, I decided to aim for a sound
somewhere between The Human League's Mirror
Man and a song called After a Fashion by Midge
Ure. Even down to the stereo spacing of where the
instruments sat in the mix.
This still didn't mean I had it easy. I hadn't the time
or the money to update my studio set-up from the
previous year, so I made the second album in the
same over-complicated, idiosyncratic way I made
the first. The basic backing tracks were all created
over 12 exhausting days in January 2004 on a
program called MTV Music Generator for the
PlayStation2. Over the next few weeks, between
other jobs, I transferred each track in real time, on
an instrument by instrument basis, onto a Minidisc,
and then retransferred them all manually in real
time onto my PC, where I edited each of them, one
by one, in a sound-editing program called Sound
Forge, adding effects like EQ, compression, reverb
and distortion, before reassembling each song,
instrument by instrument, in a film-editing program
(Adobe Premier if you really want to know), which
allowed me to mix each song down to a finished
track. All I had left to do was write the lyrics, record
the vocals, edit and process the vocals (again in
Sound Forge), add the vocal line to the backing track
and whittle everything down to a final mix. So long
as I didn't experiment or deviate from my plan and I
came up with amazingly funny lyrics to match my
marvellous tunes, I reckoned I could get the whole
thing finished by the end of April, leaving me a
whopping three months to write and rehearse the
show. You don't have to be Mystic Meg to predict
how that turned out.
The rational side of my brain sometimes tells me
that, had I not recorded the album, I would have
had more time for everything else, and life might
have turned out slightly better. But the rest of my
brain knows that's sacrilege. Of all the things I did
that year, the one thing I never doubted was the
album. Again, my rational brain tells me that's
stupid - no one was ever going to buy my album if
they didn't know who I was, and telling people who
I was meant I had to get off my backside and crawl
up and down the country trying to make people
laugh in pubs.
But that was never going to work. It didn't take me
long to realise I hated the stand-up circuit.
Unsurprisingly, a bloke in tights and make-up
singing weird songs about ballet and toasters and
reciting subtly-shaded character monologues about
his failure to succeed in the music business turned
out to be a bit of a Marmite act and invariably
ended in plentiful jeering. On one occasion, booked
to play in a packed rowdy student bar, I was so
hated by the audience and so stubborn in my
refusal to leave the stage that, by the end of my set,
there were only two other people left in the room.
Given that the bar was serving free alcohol at the
time, I consider this one of my greatest
achievements.
I was under no illusion about any of this. I never
wanted to be a stand-up and, though I respected
and enjoyed a lot of stand-up comedy, it wasn't
what I was trying to break into. I was an actor
playing a part, not a stand-up telling jokes. I was
hyper-aware that the only reason I got the gigs was
because I'd won an award. But I'd won the award
for writing an hour-long theatrical monologue, not
for doing a twenty-minute set in a pub. I hated
being bad at it and seriously wanted to be better,
but life on the road just wasn't much fun. I don't
drive so if I couldn't car pool with another act, I had
to spend most of my time - and my earnings - in
trains and hotels. More work meant less time spent
with my wife, with my friends - I started missing
important birthday parties and on one occasion
missed my own when I failed to turn up to receive a
Chortle Award.
If this all sounds ungrateful, I was certainly always
mindful that my new job was much better than
being a data entry clerk. But after a while I realised
that, in terms of not doing what I wanted to do (and
instead doing what I thought I needed to do in order
to pay my share of the rent), stand-up and data
entry were pretty much the same, except stand-up
is more lonely and humiliating.
It may not be the popular choice - it's usually either
Polaroid Suitcase or Beef Scarecrow that people ask
me about - but of the three albums I made as Gary
Le Strange, Face Academy is probably my favourite.
It came closest to achieving the vision I had in my
head and, at the time, I considered it far superior to
its predecessor. The lyrics were cleverer, the
arrangements cleaner, the performance more
confident. My new microphone (a Chinese mic
called a Studio Projects C1 which I still use today)
added a professional sheen to the vocals and made
the whole thing sound much more intimate. With
ten tracks and a running time of 45 minutes, this
was far more like a proper pop album than my first
had been. Where Polaroid Suitcase was a set of
disparate song parodies sung by a hopeful amateur,
this was a solid, coherent album made by a fully-
rounded character with his own distinctive voice,
and I really, really liked it.
Lyrically, Face Academy is all about conflict. Though
Warriors of Style and Photocopier are the only songs
to deal with the music industry directly, all the other
songs are about war or despair, depicting outsiders
standing at odds with the society they live in or
losers who don't understand why they lost. Metal
Boy is about a bunch of slaves rising up against an
evil overlord. Electric Dance is about a virulent
dance which destroys the whole of Europe (whether
this is meant to be Nazism or Pop Idol is anyone's
guess, but I imagine Gary can't tell the difference).
Even the buoyant Heart of Tears ends with the
singer committing suicide. And The Golden Age
speaks of a wonderful halcyon time which, by the
song's end, obviously wasn't as glorious as everyone
makes out. Where Polaroid Suitcase had all been
about the lovely silly things Gary liked - triangles,
ballet, Japan and the colour grey - this was all about
the things he hated, the things he suffered and the
things he opposed. The humour may have been
more subtle and the jokes less obvious, but it wasn't
any less real.
The packaging was much better too, having had way
more time and money spent on it. The superb
photos, snapped by the brilliant Andy Hollingworth
in April 2004, show a much more confident and
dynamic Gary than the previous year. Gone is the
man who cobbled together his costume in Oxfam
and painted his face with make-up stolen from his
sister's drawer. This version of Gary is a professional
pop star, a true dandy warrior complete with
expensive leather jeans and bespoke military
greatcoat (designed by my Dad's wife Debbie).
Perversely, however (though still in keeping with
the anti-commercial theme and Gary's pretentions),
all these things are eschewed on the front cover.
For some reason, it amused me that the central
image for an album called 'Face Academy' should be
just a quarter of someone's face. A terrible idea for
an Edinburgh Fringe poster but a great image for an
album cover. Shame I can't reproduce the whole
package for a digital download but look in the
Gallery section on my website and hopefully it will
make itself known.
Time ran away with itself. The gigs, the tour, the TV
script and my steadfast refusal to ever make things
easy for myself all conspired to push back the
deadline. In the end, I didn't send the master CD off
for duplication till June 19th. Instead of my
whopping three months, I was left with only five
weeks to write and rehearse the show, during which
I had to undertake a hefty series of press interviews,
write and record four more songs for a second
series of The Day the Music Died, rewrite and re-
record two of those songs when they were deemed
unsuitable for broadcast, deal with a massive heap
of admin and website maintenance and replace a
broken tooth which fell out from all the stress.
But I was Gary Le Strange, the pop star superhero
who didn't need sleep or days off, or teeth.
Somehow, I managed not only to write my show,
but also to preview it a whopping five times, all of
which went brilliantly. When the pop journalist
Andrew Eaton hijacked his own article in The
Scotsman on July 30th to rave explosively about my
new CD, calling it "inspiring" and ending with the
words "The campaign starts here. Gary Le Strange
will have a Number One hit. He shall go to the ball.
Oh yes," I was utterly convinced I had a surefire hit.
All I needed to do now was conquer Edinburgh and
collect my prize. Next stop, Everlasting Fame and
Glory!
Sadly, it was not to be. Lots of people enjoyed the
show and the press was generally positive, but Face
Academy didn't quite set Edinburgh ablaze. Apart
from the odd one or two nights, audience figures
were low, some shows pulling in as few as 15. Over
the course of the month, I fell dreadfully ill, lost my
voice, spent several days being followed by a stalker
and generally had a deeply miserable time. The Face
War failed to ignite and I left Scotland at the end of
August utterly disillusioned, anticipating a debt
somewhere in the region of four or five thousand
pounds.
When a show fails, everyone involved starts flailing
around looking for someone to blame - the venue,
the management, the press, or more often oneself
for being rubbish at making shows. Looking back at
Face Academy nine years later, it's far clearer what
the problem really was. Success killed Face
Academy. The previous show had done so well that I
was inundated with work, to the point where I had
very little time to put into the sequel. Looked at like
that, It's a miracle I managed to do it at all, and an
even greater miracle I managed to make an album
to go with it. The cruel irony is that, because the
second show didn't catapult me to the next level or
create any serious new buzz, all those job offers
started dropping away. And when that dried up, so
did the requests for the album. My year as the Next
Big Thing was officially over and now it was
someone else's job.
I wasn't totally unaware of this. I had closed my
Polaroid Suitcase show with an invitation to join me
in my crusade against mediocrity. I closed Face
Academy with the idea that I didn't really want to
be a leader, and that people should find their own
way to fight mediocrity from now on. I've no idea
whether I knew it at the time, but subconsciously I
was preparing to relinquish my year of Everlasting
Fame and Glory and fade back into the shadows.
Success wasn't anywhere near as much fun as it
looked and, to be honest, I needed a break from it.
Not that I expected the break to be permanent, but
you don't always get more than one shot at
Everlasting Fame and Glory.
But Gary wasn't beaten yet. The BBC bosses gave
my TV script a thumbs up and asked me to write
another one. I decided to give Edinburgh a year's
break but I knew I'd be back again in two years with
a new show - a better show with better writing,
better acting, better music and better ideas. But
now it wasn't all about the show. Gary Le Strange
made albums too. For the first time in my life, I was
regularly making music, and once I'd started, I
couldn't stop. From now on, I would make more
music - my music - better music with better lyrics,
better equipment and better tunes! I would start
my own comedy club, make my own TV series and
finally conquer the world!! Gary Le Strange may not
have been the Next Big Thing anymore but he was
far from dead. He'd barely even started.
If only I'd known about the battering to come...
TO BE CONTINUED
Waen Shepherd, May 2013