THE RIGHT STUFF

Clothes-swapping with Ian Curtis? Teaching songs to Bob Dylan?? Miming with David Bowie? Getting punched by Mick Jagger? There’s a lot you don’t know about the pre-fame career of Right Said Fred, contends Joel McIver of their “avant-garde” years…

Fred Fairbrass chuckles at the thought: “When we say our first tour was with Suicide in 1978, people usually look at us like we’re completely mad.” Now, of course, he makes up half of the pop duo  Right Said Fred with older brother Richard Fairbrass. In fairness, though, the people to whom he’s referring have good reason to be taken aback by this fact, because on paper there’s little in common between the avant-garde synth pioneers Suicide and the massive hits for which RSF are known.

Dig a little deeper, though, and there’s an obvious logic to the partnership, because back in ’78 the Fairbrass brothers were playing in a pretty avant-garde band of their own, The Actors. Dig a lot deeper, as I decided to do in January 2020 when I contacted Fred to ask if Right Said Fred would be interested in doing a book, and you come up with a decade and a half of the Fairbrass brothers’ careers that has barely been acknowledged.

The book we wrote together, Still Too Sexy, came out in 2022 and goes into detail about that chunk of time, which runs from around 1977 to 1991. At that point, Right Said Fred suddenly became hugely famous with their song I’m Too Sexy, following up with the even bigger hit, Deeply Dippy. They toured America, made a fortune, and worked their way through a tsunami of groupies and drugs. Once the hits dried up, though, the brothers receded from the headlines, sickened by the fakeness and dishonesty of the pop industry.