Fabulous – ‘Get Fucked by Fabulous’ [Album Review]

Fabulous are a riveting case study of how acting punk isn’t terribly sustainable, and, unless someone died in the bargain, no one’s really going to care. This is particularly true when you regard the simultaneously-occurring dual timelines at the time between the punk rock revival and grunge movements in the early ’90s. Fabulous represented the former, while we are well aware of the acts of the latter. While both were rooted in the same ethos, they took utterly different routes towards success. Fabulous is a case of a band burning bright and then just as quickly diving into obscurity. Of course, their appearance and behaviour infamously wasn’t, and was, what ultimately resulted in their subsequent implosion.

So, Get Fucked by Fabulous, is an archeology exercise, really. A fashionable, comprehensive, polished obit to a group that is as brazen in its antics as a band could have hoped at the time: going to a practice with Keanu Reeves locked in the boot of the trunk, stealing the carpet from a major record label, and taking the piss with two of the biggest label execs in the world at the time, to name a few notable examples.

But what holds up is the raw energy of what these recordings hold. While the story around the bands helps with PR, it’s ultimately the music that decides their relevance to audiences. To that end, they stayed true to their Stooges and MC5 roots, though they are more polished on these recordings than those influences.

Listening to a band like Fabulous in an age where bands like Metz and Idles have their respective sway over rock and punk seems positively nostalgic. It’s a smorgasbord of early Celtic punk, ’90s alt-rock, proto-punk, and, yes, some grunge as well. It’s a love letter to a band that itself wrote its entire, short discography as a love letter to an era when punk was actually dangerous and music was exciting. While it chewed up its members and spat them out into relative obscurity, at least we now have this well-packaged artifact from that era.

Fabulous as shot for NME on February 11, 1991

Get Fucked by Fabulous Track Listing:

1. Personality Recession
2. Pour Petrol In Her Face
3. Contribution
4. The Faces
5. There’s A Riot Going On
6. Lady Day
7. Dead Friends
8. Destined To Be Free
9. Capital Gold
10. Get Off My Cloud
11. Bus Stop
12. Everything’s Fine
13. The Great British Showbiz Show
14. Right Out Of Here
15. Manic Street Preachers

Run Time: 41:55
Release Date: June 24, 2022
Record Label: Supermegabot Records