Cy Curnin of The Fixx on UK touring, Tina Turner & Mount Everest

In March 2024, The Fixx returned to the UK for the first time in 21 years with a show at The Garage in London, with their most recent tour of the UK coming in 2003 when they performed in Swansea and London on the ‘Want That Life’ tour. Curnin explained the reasoning behind the long gap between tours.

“We just never really got the big market that we wanted in England. We are an English band; we make our records in the UK, and we rehearse in the UK, but our market was in the States. It was about trying to get the level of work we needed to sustain the outfit; it just didn’t connect, so we decided, ‘F*** it, we will do a show in London.’ But with social media, you’ll hear the fans, ‘What about England? What about us?’ and over the years there has been a real growth in fans.

“We didn’t realise how it was just slowly building with more of a human story of what this band is about, and we do have some fantastic musicians in this band. Jamie West-Oram is one of the best guitarists in the world, and eventually people will hear about things, and we’ve always dabbled in and out of the prog world a little bit. We’ve never seen ourselves as a prog band, and like realising that bands seem to swim in the prog world too and enjoy prog music, we’re like, ‘Maybe we should accept that aspect of it, and so that’s brought us into the UK market a bit more,” Curnin stated.

Despite being a band from the UK, The Fixx’s success predominantly came in the United States, where ‘One Thing Leads to Another’, ‘Saved By Zero’, ‘Are We Ourselves’ and ‘Secret Separation’ all charted in the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100, whereas their highest charting song in the UK was ‘Stand or Fall’, which reached no. 54 on the official singles charts in 1982. When asked if the band felt it was strange that the majority of their success came in the US, Curnin reflected on why it panned out in the United States and not in the UK.

“We kind of did. I mean, looking back, our first single in the UK was called ‘Stand or Fall’, and on Top of the Pops in those days, they would go just outside the Top 40 to pick any new music to give them a boost. We were at 42, and for some reason the guy who picked the song picked someone else and not us, and that was our window. That was the closest we got to charting. Had we got selected, maybe that Top of the Pops story would’ve boosted us up a bit more.

“But things were really happening in the States. TV picked up on us; there were college radio stations back then, and one of them was a very important one in Boston – a big college market. The guy there started playing our songs off the first album (‘Shuttered Room’), and we sold 100,000 albums in Boston alone, and the record company sat and paid attention, and they said we better start doing this in the other markets. Then MTV caught on and started playing us in their early days. This was when they didn’t have enough videos to fill 24 hours, so we were on 10-12 times a day, and that really shot us forward. We came back, recorded our second album, and one thing led to another, and it went platinum in about six weeks. It was surreal; we were just little kids from London until that point, and the rest was history. It’s a huge market; you can tour every year and never play the same place – just every three years playing back in that market, Curnin added.

One year after the release of ‘Shuttered Room’, The Fixx had the opportunity to open for The Police on their Synchronicity Tour across North America, where they performed in front of 1.5 million people in the space of six weeks, and Curnin offered some insight into what that experience was like for them so early in their career.

“Mind-boggling. I used to say you needed to see the whites of people's eyes, but when you just see the whites of the t-shirts of 80,000 people, it’s a completely different experience. It’s really the power of the audience that’s feeding you, and you’re just pushing your excitement back at them. It was mind-boggling. To do that so early in our careers, I think we played to 1.5 million people in six weeks whilst opening up for them, and so that’s where we sold four million records – we knew it was like hot cakes. It was a great experience, and I look back on it fondly.

“We ended up becoming a much better live band after that we ran our own shows that were 8-10,000 people a night, which for us that was massive with the odd 20,000 here and there. Now, it’s three to four thousand a night. Everything has a scale, but there’s still a connection with the audience. It’s always about the audience. When an audience comes together, they feel each other, feel their power, hear their noise, and that energy goes on the stage, and the music that is coming at them is their energy coming back to them,” Curnin stated.

As well as opening for The Police in the early 1980s, Curnin had the opportunity to sing backing vocals on Tina Turner’s tracks ‘Better Be Good To Me’ and ‘I Might Have Been Queen’. When reflecting on the impact Turner had on him as a musician, he admitted that working with Turner helped him in multiple ways.”

“Brilliant. I learnt from Tina. Her voice was so powerful, and the way she would hold her leg position when she was singing – that’s one thing I learnt from her. B: She was also the one who set me down a path to be able to switch off from the show person to become your own soulful and spiritual being. She had a good Buddhist sense of the world, and she opened that up to me, and from that I became very curious about all of that since then. She introduced me to an amazing alternative doctor who used to bend you in all kinds of positions, and I really needed it at the time; I was a bit beat up from being on the road. Plus, she showed me how simple it is to be at peace with your craft, and whatever fame can do to you, it can destroy you, or it can be your best friend. Like fire, it can burn you, or it can warm you,” Curnin reflected.

In 2007, Curnin had the opportunity to climb Mount Everest to help raise funds and awareness for the leukaemia and cancer charity Love Hope Strength Foundation – co-created by Mike Peters from The Alarm. Reminiscing about the experience, the 67-year-old admitted that the opportunity to climb mountains was a life-changing journey.

“It was absolutely amazing. A wonderful guy called Mike Peters, who has been suffering on and off with leukaemia, a sort of bone marrow cancer that he’s struggled with for years and years, and he’s started these charities to draw attention to it and raise money. I was asked to go up to Mount Everest base camp, and the most important thing that changed my life was that I realised I loved trekking and climbing mountains. It’s about getting away from your problems as much as going to the top of a mountain – you are leaving so many complications behind you.

“The next thing I realise is that with just an acoustic guitar you could still entertain people. At that point, I started doing solo acoustic solos when I came back, just driving around in Germany with just my guitar, having fun with it, and I had never really done that. Then we climbed more mountains and did more trekking and got to know some beautiful people – all the time raising awareness for this important charity that Mike had started. I realised that music is very simple in the end. As long as it can capture your emotion and get it out, you can sing it on the top of a mountain, or you can sing it in a nightclub. As long as you concentrate on what it is, it’ll connect,” Curnin stated.

In an interview with GuitarWorld that was published in July 2024, The Fixx’s lead guitarist Jamie West-Oram admitted that following the band’s rise in the United States, it became “harder and harder for us to get gigs in the UK”. Looking back, Curnin believes that the band should have “grovelled a bit more” when it came to establishing themselves in the English market.

“I think the level we were used to working at in the States – we couldn’t get that level of show in the UK. It meant we would have had to take a financial hit each time, and so we did a couple here and there, but the idea of having to pay to play was hard to swallow. The tours kept coming in the US as well, so we were getting ready for the big shows, and you just want to go where you are wanted, I suppose, in the end. We have feelings, and we were a little bit hurt that the English market didn't warm to us in the way it could have, but looking back, we didn’t quite do the work we should have either. We should have grovelled a bit more,” Curnin said.

Remember you can catch The Fixx in Manchester, Glasgow, Bristol, Wolverhampton and London on their UK tour next month.