Album Reviews # 90 Fun Boy 3 - Waiting

 

The Fun Boy 3, the band Terry Hall, Lynval Golding and Neville Staples formed after fleeing the nest of The Specials in 1981 were not all about fun by any means. They brought some of the mischief that band were known for but also plenty of its mordant, intense sense of scrutiny, and had plenty of hit singles over the next couple of years, always keeping in mind that the best Pop music could and perhaps should be both frivolous and throwaway but also serious business.

Second album Waiting, from 1983 is gallows humour and social commentary at its very best. Britain was in a mess at that time and The Fun Boy 3 were well aware of the fact. The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 had truly sent the cat amongst the pigeons and four years on, feathers were continuing to fly with The Falklands War, social unrest and the impending Miners Strike further muddying the waters. 

Waiting perhaps doesn't provide all of the answers but it does ask plenty of the right questions and manages to have a lot of fun and be deeply listenable at the same time. Hall, Golding and Staples were the front line of The Specials and make and convert plenty of goal chances here. Not many Pop bands, who were equally welcome in Smash Hits and The NME were operating on the same level in 1983.

The album probably isn't a classic on the same level as the first three Specials album but it's not far off. Fun Boy 3 were probably working as artists between single and album realms and they perform this balancing act remarkably adeptly here.

The Tunnel of Love was the biggest hit single from the record and sounds like something of a classic in itself. It punches to the solar plexus in the way that the best Specials singles, Gangsters, Too Much Too Young, Stereotypes, Gangsters and well, all of them did. 

Thematically it's a retread of Too Much Too Young, but in its way just as good, reminding the listener of how lucky they are to be listening to this on the radio, or watching it on Top of the Pops rather than having to face the consequences of dealing with mistakes like this that you've made when you were too young really to realise the awful places they might take you.

But there's plenty else to wonder at here too. Our Lips Are Sealed, the song Hall wrote with Jane Wiedlin of The Go-Gos and already a hit for that band, gets a well deserved second run out. You also get Ireland,  drug dealing what they like to do in their free time, a cover of Murder She Wrote, plenty of what made The Specials so wonderful and groundbreaking at the time but from a different angle and point of attack.

Nothing seems out of place. Bedroom existentialism, good humoured jesting and they save the hardest hitting moment untile last Well Fancy That the story of how Hall was sexually abused repeatedly by a teacher, on a school trip to France. 

I really remember being shocked by it at the time as a pretty innocent seventeen year old and it hasn't lost anything of its impact almost forty years on. Fun Boy 3. The jesters in the pack. They never lost sight of the fact that this is all actually deeply serious and deeply important stuff.