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After months of faceless, wordless, everyman bands, cocksure solipsism is back, pop fans! STEVE SUTHERLAND said 'Hello' to Piotr, frontman of ADORABLE, and got several hours of gale-force confidence in reply. Edited highlights below. PHIL NICHOLLS had a camera handy.
"WHY did we call ourselves Adorable? Well, think about it. What's the function of a name? Basically it's just to give people the idea that you're really cool, right? That's all it's about so why make any pretence? That's why we called ourselves Adorable. It's a semi-ironic statment. This is what all these other bands are trying to say in a roundabout kind of way so why not come straight to the point?"
Piotr Fijalkowski, Adorable's singer, guitarist, motormouthh, poet and visionary, has a lot of things to say and not much space in which to say it.
"I know this is gonna just be a small piece and that's really frustrating because it's imperative I get across that we represent an end to the cult of non-personality. Everyon's been reveling in the idea that you make these kind of soundscapes and that's sufficent, as if the music speaks for you. Well, I guess that's fine if you just want to stay an underground band but, if you want to be important, you've gotta embrace the essence of pop which is prejeting yourself and actually speaking out so that people can hear what you're singing. After all, op is about stars...
"Remember how people all wanted to get up onstage and kiss MOrrissey? The whole point was that it was very hard to do so - you'd run on and there'd be 10 bouncers so , if you managed to kiss him, it was special because he was untouchable. That's what makes a pop icon. I mean, the very word icon has religious connotations. You're looking for defication where you step onstage. You're almost like the Pope - people want to touch your clothing, they wanna get that set-list, they wanna get something you've touched.
"Let's face it, pop is fascist. You've gotta really look good or you don't stand a chance. I could be really bitchy at this point and state a while lotta bands who don't, but I'm not gonna lose friends at this early stage."
Piotr's handsome and having a good laugh. His band have just signed to Creation, they're about to tour the country with Curve and their debut single - a second stab at "Sunshine Smile" (the first did the rounds as a whitelabel on Money To Burn but was never officially released) - is due in about a month. Piotr says it will be an A-side with B-Sides, a characteristic stand against the cowardice and indecision of all the bands who just got into the habit of releasing E"s. "these people don't preach rebellion in any form," he sneers. "It wasn't even an aggressively apathetic movement like punk - which incidentally, I'm not much into either - it was just apathy for apathy's sake.
"They're all like sheep, following one another. Like all this stuff about rediscovering the Sixties. In my opinion the Bunnymen were better than The Doors and Television, and the Mary Chain were better than The Velvet Underground, but no one else ever says that because they're all too scared.
"The Mary Chain were really important. Their beauty lay in the juxtaposition of the original (introducing feedback to a new generation) and the al-too-familar (their bone-crushingly simple songs). That's an extreme version of what we're trying to do. There's two elements to a song -the sound and the melody, and the classic bands work somewhere in between. I've decided wheather we should veer more towards sound or melody but I know out future lies somewhere in there."
Piotr sees '92 as the year when bands should fight for the right to be preposterous and cites Suede, The Bardots and Verve as fellow revolutionaries. he says that sooner or later Adorable will release a single called "I'll Be Your Saint", and their debut album will be "a right peach, guvnor". Oh yeah, and he confidently predicts he'll be on "Top Of The Pops" before Christmas.
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