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+ Fast Product was a castle (or perhaps a shack) in
the sand, we kicked it over before the end of the 1970's. Should
Fast Product be ashamed or flattered that three of its twelve
releases were in Mojo magazine's October 2001 top 100 Punk
Scorchers?
Is it just nostalgia? Just in case something
else is going on, in case there's some other value to the echoes
bouncing back into the 21st century, we are beginning to put an
archive on line.
This page lists and quotes various Fast Product
references in the print media.
01/02/2005 With the Pratts in a Jonathon
Demme film and the Scars at where they deserve to be at no21 in the
UKwith Lemon Jelly's sample of Horroshow its starting to feel that
time is going in reverse.
It's very exciting that the very best assesment of
Fast Product to date can be found in the totally contemporary
opensource encyclopedia Wikipedia- see our links page for wikipedia
and other sites that know more about us than we do.
Scotland
on Sunday 11/1/2004
In a story
about our friend Richard Jobson " The disposable nature of punk
flourished in the east of Scotland with the revolutionary Fast
Product .... Club nights dedicated to Fast Product are back on
the agenda." Richard Purden, Scotland On Sunday
The
Creation Records Story
"(Last) started the Fast
Product label in December 1977 with the intention of combining music
and design in a hard-hitting audio-visual packages. Fast Product's
house style, a farrago of humorously incongruous slogans and
photographs, attracted the sort of aficionado who liked records to
look arty and highbrow, but it also talked a language that the
market in general was becoming used to hearing. In essence this
said: records should be brilliant for an instant, relevant for a
moment and forgotten in a flash .... As Brian Hogg noted ... (Fast
Product's) notion of corporate identity encouraged fans to buy every
release - complete the set, so to speak - irrespective of artist,
or, more perversely, merit." David Cavanagh in his history of
Oasis's label "The Creation Records Story" 2000
45
"Bob Last, The Man from
Fast. The sound of serious young men. The definer of Post Punk"
from "45" by Bill Drummond of the KLF.
The 500
Greatest Singles since Anarchy
+ "Fast Product discovered
The Human League, Gang Of Four, The Mekons and The Fire Engines, and
put out a set of singles between 1978 and 1981 so extreme, prophetic
and whole that you imagined Fast as some self-contained planet
located conveniently in the north of England. It was as important an
indie label as Rough Trade, Postcard or Creation" Gary
Mulholland in " The 500 Greatest Singles since "Anarchy in the UK"
published by Cassell & Co in 2003.
England's Dreaming ,
Jon Savage, Faber and Faber
Sleeve
notes
"+ You could say that Fast
Product stands at just the point where Postmodernism fully moved
into popular culture - a 1979 Harpers & Queen article by po-mo
architect Charles Jencks featured Fast Product sleeves - and that
all the discussions about packaging, consumerism etc were just a
prelude to a more intense, reference laden consumption. You could
point to the label as containing all the cutting edge elements that
would become mainstream styles: New Pop, synth pop, rock funk. You
could say that for all that period's speed, wit and passion, that
the drive of the media industries was unstoppable: and you would be
right." Jon Savage sleeve notes1993.
... and the following authors in some cases know
more about what Fast Product did than we do:
Punk Diary 1970-79
George Gimarc, St Martin's Press
The History Of Scottish
Rock and Pop, Brian Hogg Guinness Publishing
The Great Rock Discography
5th edition, Martin Strong, Mojo Books-, The Great Alternative &
Indie Discography, Martin Strong, Canongate Books. If Martin Strong
says we released it then we probably did.
Up Yours a guide
to UK Punk, New Wave and early Post Punk by Vernon Joynson,
Borderline Productions. 2001
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