TFD are Torquil Campbell (Stars) and Stephen Ramsay (Young Galaxy).
The true offering of late 80s British pop – Pet Shop Boys, New Order, & co – was that yes even under Thatcherism, yes even amidst dying empires in crumbling brick council houses, yes you could still, still look across a cigarette-cloudy room and be met with eyes of love. Yes, love would shine through coal smoke and refract through alleyways. Yes, loneliness was a temporary state and, armed with dented mopeds and cheap synthesizers, we could build our own and better world.
Yes. But actually, no. Death to fascists…death to love, death to the revolution. No one has blue eyes or green eyes; the eyes you meet across the room are cameras, owned by vast machines. A huge grey panopticon in place of love. We get older, but the drum machines stay the same.
Enter TOTAL FUCKING DARKNESS with their first song TOTAL FUCKING DARKNESS created in TOTAL FUCKING DARKNESS for an age of TOTAL FUCKING DARKNESS. Everything clouded, only the trunks of trees, the ground hard under three inches of dust. Two withered souls wander through a lengthening night, greying troubadour-types strapped to keytars, surrounded by fog and desperate for a sop of old hope. If there’s nothing left to lose it can only get better. It was beyond time for a band to form from the ashes of long-dead late-80s joy and now one has. BLEEP BLOOP ASSHOLES, IT’S TOTAL FUCKING DARKNESS.