Today I’m thrilled to bring everyone the new single and video from Pete Fij (originally from the 90’s Brit-pop band Adorable) called “Cuckoo.” Pete Fij shared about the inspiration behind the single/video by saying:
I’m a cold war kid, whose parents escaped from behind the Iron Curtain (my dad was sent to Siberia by the Soviets but managed to escape through Afghanistan, whilst my mum used forged papers to slip over the western border to escape from Communist Poland), and perhaps it’s this background that has led to my fascination with the murky world of espionage. One of my favorite films of recent times is David Leitch’s 2017 spy thriller ‘Atomic Blonde’ with Charlize Theron kicking traitors’ butts in late 80’s neon-lit Berlin. Cuckoo is my take on the spirit of that film, with Siouxie Sioux driving the getaway car as Phil Oakey from The Human League aims a nighttime telescopic viewfinder. The lyrics are made up predominantly of espionage terms, though as the song progresses, they get mixed up to create their own code.
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“Cuckoo” feels like a spy film compressed into a song — how consciously were you trying to build a cinematic world rather than a traditional narrative?
I love spy films, and musically I wanted to create something with a darker edge, without falling into the traditional John Barry spy trope (much as I love it). The idea was to create something that felt like a soundtrack, with the echoed guitar stabs creating a sense of tension. Lyrically its far more abstract and stripped back than many of my songs. It’s a song of shadows, atmosphere and intrigue….that, and also reverb.
The lyrics start out as recognizable espionage terminology and then blur into something more abstract — was that breakdown into ‘code’ intentional, and does it mirror how truth gets distorted in intelligence work?
I was reading up on spy terms and was struck by the cool sounding poetic nature of many espionage terms (eg ‘False Flag’ is a covert operation designed to look like it was carried out by someone else, ‘Blow Back’ is the unintended consequences of a mission, ‘Dead Drop’ is the secret drop off of documents or microfilms, ‘Bird Watch’ is the term for spying..etc etc.). The linguist in me noticed a lot were made up of 2 syllable words, each syllable being an identifiable word in it’s own right, so when I came to the 2nd verse, I then decided to start cutting up the phrases to mix them up – jumbling them into a kind of code of their own, which seemed appropriate. It’s all smoke and mirrors, cyphers & sirens. Spies hide behind aliases and cover stories, much as some artists hide behind an image and impenetrable ‘poetic’ lines.
Given your parents’ real experiences escaping the Iron Curtain, do you see “Cuckoo” as pure stylized fiction, or does it connect emotionally to your own family history of secrecy and survival?
The whole shadow of the Iron Curtain has a strong link with my family history. My father was sent to Siberia under Stalin’s orders, but managed to escape though Afghanistan & Iraq by forging papers with official looking ink stamps that he made by cutting up & carving a potato, whilst my mother used bribery & false documentation to pretend to be a French refugee to escape Communist Poland in the back of a lorry – the network who helped her escape got discovered a week after she got across the border. 7 days later, and she wouldn’t have made it to the West, and I wouldn’t be here now to tell you this tale .
Perhaps this was the basis for my fascination with the whole subject, but Cuckoo is more stripped down story of the underground world of covert double crossing – perhaps in the dimly lit cobbled back alleys of East Berlin, or perhaps in the shadowy world of someone’s heart.