"Baby, you've got an atom bomb..."note
Fluke was a progressive house band formed in Buckingham, England in 1988, and active until 2003, consisting of Mike Bryant, Jon Fugler and Mike Tournier. The band also included touring members in their live shows, with the most notable one being touring performer Rachel Stewart from 1997 to 1999.
The band has released five albums while active as a group from 1988 to 2003, and are known for the appearance of their music in movies such as The Matrix Reloaded and Sin City, as well video games such as WipEout 2097 and Need for Speed: Underground.
During the Risotto tour, Tournier quit to form the side project Syntax with musician Jan Burton in 2000. This led Fugler and Bryant to work on what would become their final album Puppy in 2003 before retiring the project altogether. Both Fugler and Bryant would later create a Spiritual Successor with the project 2 Bit Pie, releasing their only album 2Pie Island in 2006, which featured included as guest musicians Tournier and his Syntax partner Jan Burton, among with other names such as Yukiko Ishii, Andy Gray and Bush drummer Robin Goodridge.
After years of inactivity from the members, the group has announced their reunion in 2024, with their single "Insanely Beautiful" having their music video being released in 26 April 2024
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Discography
- The Techno Rose of Blighty (1991)
- Out (In Essence) (1991)
- Six Wheels on My Wagon (1993)
- The Peel Sessions (1994)
- Oto (1995)
- Risotto (1997)
- Progressive History X (2001)
- Progressive History XXX (2002)
- Puppy (2003)
Anybody with a heart tropes love
- Broken Record: The female choir in "Blue Sky" repeat the line "Show me the sunshine" / "I wanna see the blue sky" by the remainder of the song.
- Call-Back: "Snapshot" mentions the name Joni in the last line of the song. The name itself was used in one of the group's earliest songs.
- Darker and Edgier: Their third album Oto, where their sound started to become moodier, atmospheric and heavier at the same time, as the band started incorporating elements of big beat, trip-hop, ambient and even rock into their sound.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The Techno Rose of Blighty in spades! It's much brighter and clearly influenced by funk, disco and early house music. Six Wheels on My Wagon still has much of the weirdness to an extent but the elements that would define the band in future installments start take shape there.
- Epic Rocking: Many examples to count, but special examples include the original version of "Zion"/"Another Kind of Blues" named "Slap It" which clocks out above ten minutes when aforementioned later versions are basically four minutes and a half.
- There's also "Switch / Twitch" which are two songs that were merged into one, totaling into nine and a half minutes. Note that "Switch" alone, which in itself is four and a half minutes, was released as a single and it features a version of "Switch / Twitch" as a b-side that's eleven minutes long.
- Fading into the Next Song:
- Six Wheels On My Wagon:
- "Glidub" → "Electric Guitar" → "Top of the World";
- "Astrosapiens" → "Oh Yeah" → "Eko";
- Oto: The first half stretch of "Bullet" → "Tosh" → "Cut" → "Squirt";
- Risotto:
- "Atom Bomb" → "Kitten Moon" → "Mosh";
- "Setback" → "Amp" → "Reeferendum" → "Squirt → "Goodnight Lover";
- Puppy:
- "Hang Tough" → "Switch / Twitch";
- "Baby Pain" → "Nebulus".
- Six Wheels On My Wagon:
- Gratuitous Foreign Language: The name for the third album Oto is Greek for the phrase "of the ear". And then there's Risotto, named after the famous rice dish.
- "I Want" Song: Puppy's final track "Blue Sky" and the album's outtake "Liquid".
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: A few of their singles have alternate mixes with names that fall under this:
- "Atom Bomb": It has six mixes of the song that are named from "Atomix 1" to "Atomix 6". "Atomix 1" in particular is used in WipEout 2097 and as an album track in Risotto.
- "Electric Guitar"'s mixes basically consist of compound word titles (ie: "Humbucker", "Vibrochamp", "Headstock" and "Sunburst").
- "Absurd" does the same portmantitle naming as the "Electric Guitar" single ("Whitewash ", "Landslide", "Referendrum").
- "Bubble", with compound words with "bubble" at the end ("Speechbubble", "Stuntbubble", "Burstbubble" and "Braillebubble").
- "Tosh" basically subtitles its mixes with words that end in "osh" ("Gosh", "Mosh", "Cosh", "Posh", "Nosh", "Dosh" and "Josh").
- List Song: The super list from "Tosh".
- Longest Song Goes First: "Philly" (7:10) from The Techno Rose Of Blighty and "Bullet" (9:00) from Oto.
- One-Steve Limit: Mike Bryant and Mike Tournier...well, at least until the departure of the latter.
- One-Word Title: Oto, Risotto and Puppy, not to mention a good chunk of the songs that can be applied to.
- Out-of-Genre Experience: Puppy closes with "Blue Sky", a soul-inspired song where gospel female vocalists take after the first two verses sang by Fugler, contrasting with the electronic sound from the rest of their discography.
- Perishing Alt-Rock Voice: Fugler's raspy vocals pretty much fit the bill.
- Precision F-Strike: "A motherfucking atom bomb".
- Rearrange the Song:
- The b-sides from their single releases of "Electric Guitar", "Absurd", "Tosh", "Bullet", "Atom Bomb", "Slid" and "Pulse" have different mixes with an idiosyncratic naming style, as mentioned above. "Squirt" and "Setback" from Oto also had this, reappearing on Risotto with completely different arrangements from the former album, with "Squirt" in particular adopting the nickname "(Risotto Vox)" and would be released as a single for the latter album.
- An interesting case of this happened with "Another Kind of Blues", which was originally a completely different song (the version in the 2000
XMas Demos originally was a dance-pop inspired track that recalled elements of Blighty) before being turned into a different version of the track "Zion", a song that previously appeared in The Matrix Reloaded. It also contains lyrics that were later repurposed for the song "Blue Sky".
- Sampling: The most explicit sample the band has done was the song "Joni/Taxi", which samples Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi".
- Siamese Twin Songs:
- Happens twice with Six Wheels On My Wagon; with the transitions between "Glidub" and "Electric Guitar" and the one from "Oh Yeah" and "Eko".
- "Setback" and "Amp" from Risotto.
- The stretch of "My Spine" → "Another Kind of Blues" → "Hang Tough" in Puppy. That also gets repeated later with "Expo" to "Electric Blue". And there's "Switch / Twitch", which is transitioned from the aforementioned "Hang Tough", which is basically two conjoined together in one track.
- Shout-Out:
- The name of the debut The Techno Rose of Blighty, which might come off as a Word Salad Title, is a play on the title of the traditional folk song "The Yellow Rose of Texas", with Blighty being slang for Great Britain.
- Puppy is a nod to Jeff Koons' giant puppy sculpture located in the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao, Spain.
- "Absurd" itself is a breeding ground for these, with namedrops of King Kong, Spider-Man, Dan Dare, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and Big Bird. And that's just the first verse.
- Something Blues: "Another Kind of Blues".
- Textless Album Cover: Subverted with Risotto, since while the cover doesn't contain the band name and album title, the text itself comes from chrome mixer featured in it, which reads "Ultra Power".
- Unreplaced Departed: Mike Tournier after he left in 1999, which led Bryant and Fugler to continue as a duo.
- Word Salad Lyrics: If any of the songs in their discography have lyrics, chances are they might fall into be this in one way or another.
- It's easy to change
And go out and get a new name
Forget yesterday
Tap your troubles away
