Garbage Days Revisited #56: Cuddly Toys - "Trials And Crosses" (1982)

 

"And you make another vow that you're never going back on your own again/And you find another way to replace them but replacing them is not the same..." - Cuddly Toys - It's A Shame

A frequent curse of bands who appear in both Garbage Days Revisited and Sounds From The Junkshop is that of plain old bad timing and the Cuddly Toys are yet another prime example of this. Had they emerged a couple of years earlier than they did then they'd have been in prime position to catch a ride on Bowie's coat-tails circa Station To Station. A couple of years later and they'd have had a ready made audience waiting for them in amongst the primordial soup of the Batcave club alongside bands like Alien Sex Fiend, Specimen and Flesh For Lulu from whence goth rock would spring in the early '80s. The reality? They emerged during the punk years and absolutely nobody knew what to make of them. They really were a band out of time.

The group would start out as a straight-up '77 punk band called Raped and played the Roxy, the Vortex etc back in the day. Guitarist Faebhean Kwest had started out in a band called Swank with future Lurkers bassist Nigel Moore and had actually auditioned for the Sex Pistols pre-Rotten - he even gets disparagingly referred to over this in Jon Savage's seminal punk tome England's Dreaming (I remember reading an interview with Faebhean many years later where he says that Savage was just jealous because Kwest wouldn't sleep with him!). After this, he linked up with singer Sean Purcell, bassist Tony Baggett and Japanese drummer Paddy Field. They were very nearly managed by Marc Bolan but his death soon afterwards put the kibosh on that. Unfortunately their band name was a millstone around their neck and they would change it to the Cuddly Toys in early '78. They did put one single out as Raped (Foreplay Playground) and there's a compilation on Cherry Red's punk imprint Anagram with those four tracks plus a load of demos. It's...well, it's basically standard thrashy "and we don't caaaarrrrre!" '77 punk and doesn't really give you much of an inkling as to what would follow.

The group would strike a bit of good luck by coming across a demo of a song that Bolan and Bowie had written together, Madman, and covered it for their debut single. It got good press but did nothing chart-wise which was kind of the story of the Cuddly Toys' career really. They would sign to Fresh records and it was a compilation of Fresh records releases on Anagram that was my introduction to the band. I used to pick up a lot of those label compilations on the cheap from Out of Step records in Leeds as they were a good intro to some of the bands at the time. Often, especially with the UK82 era ones, it'd be 25 tracks that all sounded a bit like the Exploited or GBH but sometimes you got a label who were clearly thinking a bit outside the box - for example, labels like Flicknife would have bands like the Mk2 version of the Saints and notorious Soho scuzz-glammers the London Cowboys and Lightning records had all sorts of weird and wonderful one shot wonders from '77-'78 (including one band featuring Lloyd Grossman of all people!). Fresh though seemed to be dipping their toes into the waters which would eventually mutate into goth with the likes of the Dark (give The Masque a listen for a goth-punk classic), the Wall (likewise Hobby For A Day), Play Dead (who would quickly go full-out goth), Wasted Youth (ditto, especially mind-boggling when you consider they'd started as a splinter group from the Cockney Rejects!). And then of course there was the Cuddly Toys.

The group would put out four singles on Fresh starting with Madman - Astral Joe was a bubbly slice of synth-pop similar to what Bowie was doing around the same time with the Scary Monsters And Super Creeps album while Someone's Crying saw them going into almost proto-New Romantic territory and It's A Shame, arguably their best track (well, along with the superbly OTT glam-goth classic Bring On The Ravers) almost felt like Purcell (by this time the sole remaining original member) looking back reflectively on the band's career as if he knew it was coming to a close ("The idea of my life was never grow old/Being the age when you don't need to be told/Living as traders sharing money and lies/The final solution to end all the ties")

Honestly, I could have gone with either of the two Cuddly Toys albums in this column - their debut Guillotine Theatre (featuring the original line-up) is a sublime slice of swaggering glam rock which also takes in post-punk and goth. As I've mentioned earlier in this article, it seems as if no-one really knew what to make of it when it surfaced in 1979 but the likes of the frenetic title track, Join The Girls (which could almost be a much more androgynous Generation X circa Valley of the Dolls) and the Five Years indebted Fall And Decline Of The Universe have held up pretty well.

I decided to go with Trials And Crosses here though as while Guillotine Theatre has had a couple of retrospective pieces done on it down the years, this one hasn't and it's a pity because it's a good album in its own right. As I've stated earlier, by this point Sean Purcell was the only member of the band who'd recorded Guillotine Theatre three years earlier remaining and in places like One Close Step it almost sounds like an attempt to jump on the Duran Duran/Spandau Ballet style new romantic bandwagon with the bubbling synths and poppy choruses. However, there's enough enjoyably off kilter moments to make sure that they've still got that intrinsic weirdness that made them such a great band to begin with intact such as the title track and the epic closer Malice Through The Looking Glass (Pierrot Lunaire).

Cuddly Toys would disband soon after the release of Trials And Crosses and sadly Sean Purcell would pass away from a brain tumour in 1996 after moving back to his native Ireland. However, 2016 would see Paddy Phield put a new all-Japanese band together called Cuddly Toyz (the group had a strong cult following over there due to Paddy's presence) who've remained active ever since, picked up a decent following in their home country and even put out an album Tracy - The Beginning featuring a few re-recorded old Cuddly Toys songs as well as some new efforts. Their biog has them as being very into cosplay and dramatics onstage so it sounds like they're very much keeping the spirit of the original band alive!

As I said at the beginning of this article, Cuddly Toys were definitely a band who suffered from that old classic of bad timing and it's a real shame they never really graduated beyond cult status (although certainly I think a part of it may just be down to the fact that they were a bit too damn weird for the man in the street to handle - then again, in the immortal words of Sid Vicious "I've met the man in the street. And he's a c**t."). Certainly there's been a few bands down the years who've taken a similar template and run with it like my old favourites Jonny Cola & The A-Grades (another band who really should've had more of a bite of the cherry than they did and who I'd be amazed if they hadn't heard Guillotine Theatre at some point) and even Suede to an extent (albeit a much more guitar-heavy version). Anyway, if you want some wickedly decadent, dangerous and delicious glam-rock from the post-punk era then I'd heavily recommend Guillotine Theatre and Trials And Crosses for your listening pleasure. This lot really were a very unique and wonderful band.