The Rezillos: Zero

New album from the Banana Splits of punk.

By Stephen Dalton
( Classic Rock )
published

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Best known for their 1978 Top 20 hit Top Of The Pops, The Rezillos were like Scottish cousins of The B-52s, Edinburgh art students who brought a dayglo trash-pop aesthetic to new wave.

Rebranding themselves The Revillos for legal reasons, they disbanded in the mid-1980s and pursued other careers. Singer Fay Fife (aka Sheilagh Hynd) studied acting, landing roles in Taggart and The Bill, then retrained as a clinical psychologist. Guitarist Eugene Reynolds (aka Alan Forbes) launched a motorcycle import business.

But they reunited in 2001, and Zero is their first new album since 1978. Little has changed in their schlocky-horror junk-shop aesthetic, with wilfully dumb riff-jerkers like The Groovy Room and Spike Heel Assassin sounding agreeably goofy but pretty disposable.

However, the polished and emotive power-pop chuggers She’s The Bad One and Sorry About Tomorrow show more midlife maturity, recasting Fife as a Scottish Debbie Harry./o:p

Stephen Dalton
Stephen Dalton

Stephen Dalton has been writing about all things rock for more than 30 years, starting in the late Eighties at the New Musical Express (RIP) when it was still an annoyingly pompous analogue weekly paper printed on dead trees and sold in actual physical shops. For the last decade or so he has been a regular contributor to Classic Rock magazine. He has also written about music and film for Uncut, Vox, Prog, The Quietus, Electronic Sound, Rolling Stone, The Times, The London Evening Standard, Wallpaper, The Film Verdict, Sight and Sound, The Hollywood Reporter and others, including some even more disreputable publications.