Test Driving the New Prius – A Radio Play by Jim Fry and Luke Haines

This is the only place where you’ll find spy-scriber Len Deighton, folkloric monarch King Arthur, 1980s TV critiquer Nina Myskow, a recognition of the demise of adders in the English countryside, ambient surroundscaper and oblique strategist Brian Eno as upmarket dental technician, American Spirit tobacco, someone called Giles Coren and the beguiling spectre of Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s Martin Degville.

What’s not to love?

*or as we Limeys tend to say ‘Shop’

**River in Cambridge, England

***James Joyce’s Ulysses is an antecedent

**** corvine-fizzoged Rolling Stone who fancies himself as a bit of brush-stroker https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/aug/19/critics-tell-ronnie-wood-stick-to-music-ahead-exhibition-rolling-stones

This car will make you feel marginally better about your contribution to society  

Is the album title a metaphor for something else? Why a Prius? 

JF: The Prius has plenty of baggage attached to it, driving one is a righteous act for the middle England little man or women nowadays, it’s the poor man's Tesla which currently has even more baggage attached to it.

Our Endgame Man must approach the Toyota Prius with caution, in a perfect world he would never go near it or any climate saving future product or device, but Endgame Man is on the ropes right now he has no choice but to test drive if he is ever going to have a stake in the modern world, and it should be noted that it is a ‘test drive’, he’s only dipping his toe in as it were, rather than genuinely embracing it.

Anyway, he could never actually buy one, he lost his license years ago for drunken driving and it was never renewed.

What’s Endgame Man been up to (or down with) since the first airing of his internal musings 3 years ago?

JF: Nothing much, arguing with the voices inside his head, Pot Noodles, leaving the gas fire on. He went back to listening to vinyl for a while and exchanged his old CD copy for a LP version of Hergest Ridge by Mike Oldfield, which he always preferred it to the corporate sprawling Tubular Bells album by the same artist.

During the festive season he might upgrade from Excalibur vodka to Glen’s, but not last Christmas as money’s been a bit tight.

Is he an amalgamation of numerous pop-cult elements?

JF: I’m not sure he’s a pop cult figure, but you see this guy everywhere, certainly in North London. He may have had a decent acting role in a Sunday night drama back in the seventies or early eighties, Howards Way, The Onedin Line, something like that, he was the dashing good looking one with Housewives and the Radio Times at his feet, a bright future laid out in front of him, but he wanted more, a literary hero or celebrated playwright, something like that but it doesn’t always work out does it.

If you’re interested in mid-week afternoon drinking you can see this man in the pub, he looks like a red wine-stained unfinished Times crossword wearing an expensive Paul Smith jacket and Mickey Mouse t -shirt. He’s the one with the Costcutter carrier bag.

‘The’ bag for life 

When we were recording this, I would walk from Luke’s place past a triangular grass space between his flat and the tube station. There was bench on there, across the road was the off licence and the generic pub with no name.

That’s where our man is still sitting.

Perhaps one day soon this spot will get a mention on a passing British historical bus tour, but for now this interlude of North London greenery between the Costcutter and the pub is for ever Endgame Man.

What artistic or cultural influences or inspirations inform this prose and conceptual piece?

JF: Personally I’ve always wanted to do a budget radio play, with added BBC library sound effects.

Its timeline should be defined by an episode of Coronation Street or Emmerdale (which Endgame Man may have had a role in before the minor scandal)

Part one and part two with a short break in-between forming the whole drama. A lot can happen in that short space of time, and it’s as long as you can expect the modern listener to pay attention for. Or at least that’s what I assumed.

An afterthought, we should have sold advertising space in the break. Like the Sigue Sigue Sputnik album.

Possibly not Jim Fry (L) and Luke Haines (R)

You have Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky ‘standing in’ for you both as part of the promo-blurb. The exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, London, is on in until June proclaims it as ‘a new show of visceral, violent and anxiety-strewn drawings reveals a history of expressionist artists seeking to make the world a better place’. Was this a conscious aligning or total synchronicity? 

JF: Klee and Kandinsky stealing our ideas again …I do think Test Driving The New Prius is capable of being ‘visceral and anxiety strewn’ (it’s not very violent sorry) and like the Toyota Prius, its ‘seeking to make the world a better place’  so yes I’m happy to take that.

With Luke being out the country a lot recently, it was impossible to organise some new publicity photographs in time, so we just thought we’d borrow someone else’s and Klee and Kandinsky do look pretty cool in that photo.

Unknown 

How did you manage to cajole the literary debonair Giles Coren to not only listen to your artefact, but inspire him to be so gushing in his praise?

JF: To be honest, I don’t even know who Giles Coren is, is he important? His name sounds noble and privileged, is he the bass player in Mumford and Sons?

Any signs on the horizon for new Pre New product? Luke Haines?

JF: – With The Pre New we tend to talk about something for five years and then spend two weeks putting it together, not very prolific I know but the talking is nearly done. There is a soundtrack to a book that’s coming out, and it may well end up being a Pre New record by the time its finished and Luke has been involved in a couple of tracks.

It will be soon.