To say Adorable’s career had its up and downs would be an understatement. After a couple of false starts the band, formed in Coventry in 1990 and led by Pete “Fij” Fijalkowlski, signed to Alan McGee’s Creation Records. NME made their debut for the label Single Of The Week, which propelled it to the top of the indie chart. Problems began when they started doing interviews. “The cockiest new band in pop,” declared the NME.
“I was really into attitude,” Fij says of his band’s, er, confident presentation. “But there was this inverse snobbery going around. We loved how Manic Street Preachers dealt with the press, but they were working-class, and we were clearly not.”
After stumbling at the first hurdle, the next obstacle for the band was navigating the music press-created scenes. Were they baggy, shoegaze, new wave of new wave?
“I definitely saw us as art rock,” decides Fij, citing Echo & The Bunnymen, The Psychedelic Furs, The Sound and House of Love as blueprints. Although they were too song-based to be shoegaze and too early for Britpop, Adorable nonetheless had the backing of their high-profile record label boss. Until they didn’t.
“We were very much McGee’s signing,” Fij recalls. “The rest of the label thought he was mad to sign us.” But partway through recording their first album, McGee withdrew into a reclusive spell, running things remotely, and Adorable found themselves with few allies in the building.
That first album, Against Perfection (1993), is now considered something of a lost classic and again topped the UK indie chart. Yet the critical response was muted and its follow-up, 1994’s Fake, failed to turn things around. It was while promoting that album, just before a gig in Colchester, that they were informed they’d been let go. Labelmate Noel Gallagher gave them his patronage, telling McGee that dropping Adorable from Creation ranked among his biggest mistakes. “For the longest time my memory of Adorable was the shitty end of it,” Fij says, “It was like the last six bad months of a relationship blotting out all the good years before it.” Faced with no one coming to shows, an indifferent label, and a press that couldn’t even be bothered to hate them, the band split.
Undeterred, Fij dusted himself down and, along with his brother Kryzs, formed Polak and signed to another well-respected indie, One Little Independent (née Indian). The band released two albums, Swansongs (2000) and Rubbernecking (2002), but again they struggled to connect to an audience big enough to make it viable to continue. Polak folded when a third-album deal arrived just as the rest of the band reached the mortgages-and-young-families stage. Fij could have carried on but turned the deal down rather than go it alone. What followed, in his words, was “a musical breakdown” – a stark solo record, made alone under the shadow of Johnny Cash’s American Recordings. Fij shelved the album for five years out of what he now identifies as fear of rejection.
But in 2008 Fij was offered a show at the Brighton Fringe, which inspired him to reach out to local legend Terry Bickers of House of Love/Levitation. Fij had unsuccessfully tried to recruit the guitarist for Polak, but Bickers was agreeable this time around and the partnership resulted in two albums of melodic melancholy – Broken Heart Surgery (2014) and We Are Millionaires (2017). Both were rapturously reviewed but nonetheless remained well-kept secrets.
For most jobbing musicians, alternative revenue streams are essential to maintaining a musical career, but Fij managed to find a way to utilise his wordsmithery and stagecraft in the most unlikely setting. Years spent as a part-time care-home activities coordinator, Fij got used to being around people in the twilight of their lives and ended up going to a lot of funerals as a result. This experience inspired him to train as an end-of-life celebrant.
“Storytelling had started coming out in the music I was making with Terry, both in the songs and in between them onstage – I actually started talking to audiences, which was something I’d never done in Adorable.” Writing and conducting such services gave him both an insight into how people face their final days, both those entirely at peace with their lives, and others regretful of missed opportunities.
“You’ve only got a certain amount of time on this earth,” is Fij’s main takeaway from his side hustle, “And you need to leave with as few regrets as possible. Time is ticking.”
With this in mind, Fij started focusing again on new music, but a strange, happy coda arrived before the songs did. Adorable reformed for a run of shows in 2019, that sold out within minutes, in rooms bigger than they’d ever filled first time around, and drew obsessives who flew in from as far as Australia. “It rewrote the ending,” says Fij, “It felt like getting the director’s cut. When I play those songs now, I own them again.”
And now the man The Independent once called “the finest lyricist since Jarvis Cocker last put pen to paper”, is releasing his first solo album, Up’s The New Down. Those looking for the spiky introspection of Fij’s previous output may be surprised. “There’s a lot more positivity in my life now,” he says, “I haven’t consciously written about it; the songs just came.”
Less inward-looking, the new album is a celebration of life, love and electric guitars, with a growing affection for programmed synths. Musically he’s been “happily magpie-like”, raiding his record collection as well as keeping an ear to the ground for contemporary sounds. “I’m not saying I’ve got my finger on the pulse exactly, but I’d like to think some newer bands have influenced me – just the sheer vitality and energy of them.”
He hopes some of that vitality might bring in the curious and not just those familiar with his past achievements. “I’d love the album to reach a new audience – people who don’t know my old music at all. That would be the ultimate result. I know that’s a big ask for a heritage artist. but I don’t find that discouraging.”
Fij didn’t have to look too far for reassurance. “One of my stepson’s friends turned out to be a massive Adorable fan without knowing I’d been in the band,” he says. “His top three Spotify end-of-year list tracks were all Adorable. It blew his mind, and it blew mine, too.”
Words: Wesley Doyle
Up’s The New Down is on Tip Top Recordings. Pete Fij tours the UK through the autumn.
