The Wreck of The Fairchild (aka Some Fruit Are Sweet And Some Are Poison)

As we saw from Marge Simpson's hair-raising encounters with air transportation, the case of the Andes Flight 571 disaster represents the very pinnacle of an aerophobic's worst fears. The one thing more purely nightmarish than the thought of hurtling to your doom in a malfunctioning aircraft would be surviving such an experience and finding yourself stranded atop some god-forsaken mountain, gnawing on a hunk of your companion-cum-sustenance, whilst looking up at the skies from whence you fell in the forlorn hope of spying the rescue mission that isn't coming. One prominent aerophobic with whom the story struck a particular nerve was English synth musician Thomas Morgan Robertson, better known as Thomas Dolby, who used it as the basis for one of the tracks on his 1982 debut album The Golden Age of Wireless, although unless you grabbed the album in its earliest incarnation then odds are that it passed you by. "The Wreck of The Fairchild" had the privilege of kicking off Side B on the original UK release of the album, but was later jettisoned from the US release, among other alterations - an unfortunate loss, as not only was "The Wreck of The Fairchild" designed to segue directly into the following track, "Airwaves", it meant that American audiences missed out on the most profoundly sinister moment of Dolby's initial output. The track was also sadly excised from subsequent UK releases of the album, including its first CD release in 1983, but was finally restored for the special edition in 2009. In the sleeve notes for this edition, Dolby describes the genesis of this much-mistreated track: "I'd been reading Peirs Paul Reid's book Alive about a rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes, and they ended up eating each other." Dolby's description is admittedly a trifle misleading - if you didn't know the story, then you might assume that the survivors of the Flight 571 crash were murdering one another for food, which was not the case, as they only ate the bodies of those who had already died. In "The Wreck of The Fairchild", the cannibalism is referenced only indirectly, and the bulk of the track consists of a dramatised communication between the pilot of Flight 571 and a military base, as the plane hits dire straits, and his request for an emergency landing is denied.

"Wreck" serves in some respects as a counterpoint to the album's opening track, "Flying North", in which Dolby ruminates more explicitly on the discomforts of air travel. In the aforementioned sleeve notes of the 2009 edition, Dolby describes how the track was indebted to his personal fear of flying, although he insists that his was not your common or garden aerophobia: "Not the usual one that the plane would fall out of the sky, that didn't worry me. I was concerned that we would fly so high we'd break free of the Earth's atmosphere and zoom off into space. I'd look up into the dark blue and picture us drifting silently off into orbit." Nevertheless, the only hint of genuine terror in "Flying North" is in the lyric, "Up goes the useless prayer"; overall, it's a fairly subdued commentary on the simultaneously overwhelming and underwhelming experience of being jetted from one dreary airport lounge to the next. It captures not only the solitude and alienation of our weary traveller, but also the allure of the dislocation, and the extent to which the protaginist is addicted to it without fully understanding why - they claim that they are "drawn in like a moth". The song suggests that there is a seductive quality to the state of being perpetually unsettled, as if chasing something on an instinctive level.

By contrast, "Wreck" relates a catastrophic vision of air travel gone fatally wrong, although it does not make its own meaning quite so explicit. The greatest clue is in the track title, which refers to the model of plane carrying those ill-fated passengers across the Andes (it is also, Dolby tells us in the sleeve notes, a "rare and famous valve limiter which, while warming up, generates a terrific distorted radio sound"). To get the full benefit of this track it helps if you a) know the basic background details to the Flight 571 crash and b) understand Spanish, or at least have a translation to hand. Fortunately, Dolby has provided a translation of the dialogue heard throughout "Wreck" (the vocals for which were supplied by a retired Argentinean pilot from whom Dolby had purchased a used car) on his official website. As per Dolby's translation, this is what we're hearing throughout the track:

WZ: "Whiskey Zulu to Tower, aircraft in difficulty, request immediate permission to land, over!"
WZ: "Whiskey Zulu to Tower, trying to level up, zero visibility, engine not responding, over!"
WZ: "Calling Base, repeat, 15 minutes of fuel remaining, emergency, emergency!"
Tower: "Base Control to Whiskey Zulu, permission denied, permission denied, over and out."
WZ: "Engine failure, Engine failure, engine one down, please..."
Tower: "Base Control to Whiskey Zulu, the military airport... permission denied"
WZ: "Undercarriage (not altitude?!) too low, I don't think we can make it, I don't think we can make it!!"
Tower: "Control to Whiskey Zulu, slow down, slow down"
WZ: "Whiskey Zulu to Tower...$&%/...gk&$/&ls... radar not working"
Tower: "I repeat., one, two, three... meg.. 123 FM MegaHertz, MegaHertz"

"Wreck" is a tale of technological disaster, but like many tracks on The Golden Age of Wireless it is also about communication. The dialogue we hear represents the final moments of contact between the occupants of Flight 571 and the wider world before the plane went down and the world became inaccessible to the crash survivors. If we are not well-versed enough in Spanish to comprehend the exact words being exchanged (although the appearance of the NATO phonetic alphabet provides a momentary connection) then the language barrier only adds to our sense of discombobulation. There are enough clues that this is not a routine exchange between pilot and air traffic control - the ominous seven second silence (an eternity in pop song time) following the initial transmission and the frantic ska-influenced instrumentals convey a definite air of danger. We feel the perturbation of being caught up in the middle of a situation in which something is blatantly not right, but being unable to comprehend the precise nature of the problem.

There can, nevertheless, be little confusion as to what is being uttered at the end of the track, when the radio exchange has long ceased and multiple voices are heard chanting: "En el nombre del padre, y del hijo y del espíritu santo, Amén", or "In the name of the father, the son and the holy spirit, Amen." Coming out of the implied disaster, this might bring us back to the "useless prayer" cited in "Flying North", although in this case the prayer is anything but useless. To those familiar with the details of the Andes crash, it carries a disturbing significance, for it indicates that the most notorious aspect of this story - the cannibalism - is currently unfolding on that desolate mountain top. The survivors, who were Roman Catholic, were so (understandably) repulsed by the prospect of having to eat the flesh of their former companions that the only way they could overcome their revulsion was to rationalise the process as a kind of Eucharist. (Meanwhile, Dolby's vocals appear only briefly, providing us with the track's only English-language lyrics: "Some fruit are sweet and some are poision". I initially assumed that this, too, was a coded reference to cannibalism - perhaps even a morbid play on the proverb "one man's meat is another man's poison" - but it transpires that this line was all that remains, lyric-wise, of the track's former incarnation as a more conventional pop song, "Sale of The Centry", which is included as a bonus on the 2009 special edition).

Both "Wreck" and "Flying North" are indicative of the album's overall mixed perspective on technology. Dolby seems at once optimistic but also alienated with so many whirring airplane propellers and buzzing radio transmitters never more than a stone's throw away, and "The Golden Age of Wireless" plays like a concept album about the paradoxes of living in a world that is more connected than it has ever been but also curiously at odds. Some commentators identify a wartime theme across the album, even if it's not always as prominently felt as in the track "One of Our Submarines" (featured on the 2009 release as a bonus track, although it was included in previous US releases of the album). Joseph Stannard, in his Drowned In Sound review, observes that: "the songs are sort of about relationships in the face of something happening on a world level...a lot of them are very much about the extra weight that's added to emotional feeling in the context of wartime." A general sense of displacement runs throughout the album, making it unclear if Dolby is looking back to the world wars of yesteryear or to a fictitious one from a parallel universe. Ted Mills, on We Are The Mutants, responds to Dolby's own suggestion that the album represents a glimpse into an alternate Britain under Nazi control with the observation that: " I’ve never considered The Golden Age of Wireless...to be post-apocalyptic...The “copper cables all rust in the acid rains” from “Airwaves” didn’t make me think of a dystopian wasteland—it reminded me of pulling into Liverpool Street Station." Emily Bick of The Quietus argues that the appeal of Dolby is in the beguiling fashion in which he juxtaposes the cataclysmic with the wistful and the banal, noting that, "something goes wrong in almost every song. Plane crashes, traffic jams, lost signals, missed connections, acid rain…these themes sit with lyrics about everyday stuff like Coldrex and pylons, film posters, junk food and vague - but powerful - feelings of romantic loss." The final track on the album, "Cloudburst at Shingle Street", strikes me as having the most obviously post-apocalyptic vibe, although it is conversely the most purely euphoric of the lot; to my mind, it describes the experience of a man reconnecting with the world (this time not via technology, but through a direct encounter with the natural world) having concealed himself away in a bomb shelter (either literal or metaphorical) for an extensive period of time. The location Shingle Street, a coastal hamlet in the English county of Suffolk, carries its own connotations, being the site of a reputed (and disputed) attempted German invasion in World War II, and also personal significance for Dolby, who would regularly visit the beach at Shingle Street, and in the 2009 sleeve notes describes his fascination with the assorted "strange concrete shapes left over from the world wars" that littered the sands. Above all, "Cloudburst" speaks of the indifference of nature toward human exertion; the world keeps on turning long after the devastation has occurred, and this is something the protagonist, the survivor of an unspecified conflict, learns to embrace as he traverses his own war-scarred landscape (literal or metaphorical).

"Wreck of The Fairchild" is likewise a powerful track, in part because it is suggestive of its own miniature apocalypse. We catch the world just as everything is falling to pieces, and while we miss out on the critical moment of destruction, we are party to the aftermath, in which the survivors, deprived of domestic and technological luxuries, are forced to make use of the extremely meagre resources at their disposal. There is, nevertheless, a twisted optimism to its macabre conclusion; it presents a scenario in which technology is failing but the basic human drive for survival endures. The mixture of religiosity and cannibalism is unsettling, for it has associations with ritual sacrifice, but it represents a connection, a means by which the participants are able to hold together as a community, acknowledging their indebtment to and physical intimacy with the dead comrades they are currently consuming, and asserting their place within the wider world from which they are seemingly disconnected. It is perhaps a glimpse into a future world in which civilisation has crumbled and humankind exists in tiny, self-contained pockets, banding together for the common cause of survival. As the opening track to Side B, "Wreck" is effectively bookended with "Cloudburst" in exploring the tension and subsequently the catharsis in the notion of the world coming apart at the seams. Both are essentially redemptive stories of man co-existing with the elements following some prior, dislocating trauma; one achieves its redemption by plunging us, somewhat paradoxically, into full-blown nightmare territory, while the other revels in the anticipation of physical and emotional cleansing. In both cases, though, the tracks convey a common aspiration, which is to navigate our way out from the smoking wreckage and continue forward, long after the damage has been dealt.