Although Foreheads in a Fishtank had started the new year with an unprepossessing rebrand as F.I.A.F., their music remained as dementedly loopy and irresponsible as ever. Mr. Whippy seems to suggest that they had looked at the attention and notoriety that The Shamen had had with Ebeneezer Goode and so decided to try and court chart success themselves with a poppier sound, but in typical Foreheads in a Fishtank style, they blew away any notions of subtlety about whether they were singing about drugs or not.
If you can make it through the opening 30 seconds, which sound like they were actually recorded inside an ice cream vending machine, you'll find yourself treated to the sound of Foreheads in a Fishtank as the wedding band from Hell. I say that, because I'm convinced that if a copy of the Mr. Whippy single, or the Yeah Baby Wow LP ever made it to a record shop or radio station in Miami, it clearly influenced The Mavericks when they were putting together the arrangement on their party staple, Dance the Night Away.
With singer, Jeff Leahy trying to charm grey record buyers by adopting a Morrissey croon, Mr Whippy reflects on the way that a life of shallow experience can still be a rewarding one before death comes along. It even provides a brief bit of advice on the best ways to enjoy this, but I would have been struggling to put any of this into effect in 1993. I didn’t drink gin then, and still don’t now, and while I was certainly on the lookout for sex, it wasn’t looking for me at that point. My naivety at the time would have also meant that any fun to be found with capsules would likely have led to me trying to get high by popping Anadin rather than recreational drugs.
On a John Peel show, the chorus of a record in which a demonic goblin exhorts listeners to TAKE MORE/TAKE MORE/TAKE MORE DRUGS would pass off without anyone giving it a second thought, but it was never going to fly on any other Radio 1 show going out before 11pm. Not least because of the uneasy suspicion that as far as Foreheads in….sorry…F.I.A.F would have been concerned, this was not a joke, but a design for life.
Video courtesy of KILLblinton
All lyrics are copyright of their authors.
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