One Thing Leads To Another Red Skies Saved By Zero The Fixx

One Thing Leads To Another Album: Reach the Beach (1983)
Red Skies Album: Shuttered Room (1982)
Saved By Zero Album: Reach the Beach (1983)
by The Fixx

In a 2012 interview with The Fixx lead singer/lyricist Cy Curnin, he explained the meaning of One Thing Leads To Another, which deals with malleable politicians. "If you're going to be a liar, you'd better be a damn good liar and remember what you said, or the whole thing's going to get pear shaped," said Curnin. "That was 30 years ago, and look where the system is now. A lot of people stand on ballot boxes and say a lot of things and lie in order to get elected and do nothing. So those songs I'm pretty proud of."

One Thing Leads To Another is the most famous song by the London-based group The Fixx, with Cy Curnin on vocals, Jamie West-Oram on lead guitar, Adam Woods on percussion, and Alfie Agius on bass, replacing Charlie Barrett, who left after their debut album Shuttered Room in 1982. In turn, Reach the Beach is their most successful album. Like all their early albums, it was produced by Rupert Hine.

"One Thing Leads to Another" was in heavy rotation on MTV when the network was picking up steam, giving The Fixx a great deal of exposure stateside along with acts like Duran Duran and Eurythmics. The song is well-remembered by early MTV viewers, and the song is included on many 1980s compilation albums and continues to get substantial radio airplay today.
This song has also played in commercials for LendingTree and in promos for the Fox TV show Lie to Me.

Speaking of The Fixx and MTV, Cy Curnin reminisces about MTV's impact in the book MTV Ruled the World - The Early Years of Music Video: "First time i watched MTV, it was early morning. It was refreshing to see a video instead of a cheesy infomercial or a Bible-bashing preacher. Kids for once had their own channel to start the day. It was the first 'national' music station, too, so a hit was a hit nationwide at the same time."

Red Skies finds Cy Curnin singing about the aftermath of a nuclear fall out. In our 2012 interview with Curnin, he said that this tune, along with "Stand or Fall," echoed "back to that sense of impotence that I felt after 9/11." He explained: "I was feeling that sense of impotence back then in the early '80s or late '70s when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were getting in bed together, metaphorically speaking, and designing a whole defense system that involved Europeans' lives without asking us - it was never on any electorate ballot that I can remember. That struck a chord."

The band performed Red Skies on Saturday Night Live on February 18, 1984.

Red Skies was re-recorded for The Fixx's 1987 album, React, at the request of their label MCA Records.

After a failure you start from scratch with nothing. A clean slate. It's the same sentiment Bob Dylan proposed in "Like A Rolling Stone" with the line, "When you've got nothing, you've got nothing to lose." Saved By Zero was released on their second album.

Like most songs by The Fixx, their lead singer Cy Curnin wrote the lyrics to Saved By Zero. "When you're on the floor, you can't fall further, you can only go up," he told us. "Life was starting to get more full with distractions, and I'm a sort of minimalist at heart. I always fight for that space. So it was a sort of a mantra that came from some of the teachings that I was learning back then with my earliest dipping into Buddhism. It was East meeting West for me. It was Eastern ancient philosophies that people live as a daily code over there to necessity. And we in the West absorbing this Buddhism, at the time it wasn't a necessity for functioning life, but it was a necessity for calming the mind and getting to a place of no mind and losing frustration and ego. So that's where it was for then."

The video for Saved By Zero was a favorite in the early days of MTV. In the book MTV Ruled the World - The Early Years of Music Video, Fixx lead singer Cy Curnin talks about the making of this video: "We had Brian Grant chosen for us to shoot 'Saved By Zero' by the record company. By this time, MCA had woken up to the fact that videos were important. They had been penny-pinching our earlier efforts, but now opened the vaults and in came the 'professionals,' with huge expense accounts that afforded us lunches, massages, and 14 stylists to make us look like proper rock stars! The aftershock of the huge price tag to the 'Saved By Zero' video was that the record company agreed that Ostoj and Hine were in fact very talented at a third of the cost."

The first four Fixx albums, including Reach the Beach, were produced by Rupert Hine, who also worked with Tina Turner, Howard Jones and many other popular artists. In our 2011 interview with Rupert, he talked about coming up with the distinctive sound for The Fixx. Said Hine: "We came up with this very aggressive bitey but sort of shiny guitar, which was very different than any other bands at that time. And that certainly was a huge part of the band's success. I mean, the amount of interest that went into the guitarist was huge - quite rightfully, I think. Also the whole production technique we came up with was very new at that time. And still in a way sounds unique."

In America, Saved By Zero was used in 2008 commercials for Toyota, who used the song to promote their 0% financing offer.
Cy Curnin has learned over the years that many people have come up with their own interpretations of this song, which he considers equally important to his own. Among numerologists and mathematicians, it relates to the often under-appreciated number. Zero was the last of the digits to be discovered/invented. First (a couple of centuries B.C.) as a place holder in numbers and afterwards (a few centuries A.D.) as a number itself. Today zero is considered neither positive nor negative. It simply does not exist.

Curnin said: "There has been the invention zero as a number by the ancient Indian mathematicians. Without that, calculations would have been completely wrong. Because we were following the Roman rhythmic calendar which believed that one was the first number. In fact, zero is the first number. Because what stops one being minus one is zero. It's nothing. That's a number. That's a plus unit. It's not negative one. There's no such thing as a negative zero, there's just zero, which is this side of the line. Which is lying in the decimal point. You have 0.1 and in the binary code and in all the other codes. Not that I was thinking that when I wrote 'Saved By Zero.' But, you know what, I'm taking it anyway."