Ireland in 50 Albums, No 15: Tatitum, by Auto Da Fé (1985)
Auto da Fé: a defining synth-pop duo of 1980s Ireland
Auto Da Fé’s only studio album - Tatitum, released in 1985 - was both blessed and cursed by featuring the slew of classic singles that had brought them to public notice over the previous three years. ‘November November’. ‘Bad Experience’. ‘Man of Mine’. ‘All Is Yellow Hot Hot Hot’. All had been mainstream radio hits, helping to establish the band as one of the hardest-working live outfits in the country.
Auto Da Fé were formed in 1980 around the personal and professional partnership of Gay Woods and Trevor Knight. Both had considerable form as musicians: Woods was a founder member of the folk-rock outfit Steeleye Span, and had toured with Dr Strangely Strange and the Woods Band, while Knight had performed with jazz-rock outfits such as Naima and Metropolis. The classic Auto Da Fé line-up of the early 1980s was completed by Mark Megaray on bass and Robbie Brennan on drums.
Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy was an early champion. “Phil discovered us when we were recording at Windmill Lane in Dublin,” says Knight. “He happened to be in there as well, working on his solo stuff. He poked his nose in and said, that doesn’t sound terribly different from what I’m doing myself. He offered to produce ‘November November’, and then his plugger picked up on it and got it released in the UK. We had a big success with that, in terms of airplay. Only Culture Club were getting played more than we were with that single in 1982.”
Lynott went on to produce Auto Da Fé’s next three singles, duetting with Woods on ‘Man of Mine’ and appearing in the video for the single, as well as playing live with them on several occasions. Midge Ure was another collaborator.
“Those were great times,” says Martin Kelly, who often toured with the band. “Gay used to introduce me as ‘the Cosmic Dancer,’ and I’d perform in all these outfits at their shows. The Dublin scene was tiny, and I knew Gay from her folk days. It was fantastic to see her transform into this punk princess. Auto Da Fé were like the Irish Eurythmics. Their shows were very theatrical, and the singles were just brilliant. They represented Ireland on a show called Europe A-Go Go, which was huge at the time.”
By 1985, Auto Da Fé were signed to a record deal with Stoic, a UK company. Stoic assigned a budget of about £40,000 to their debut album, big money for an indie label in that era, and asked who they’d like to produce.
“We wanted Kate Bush,” says Knight. “She hadn’t had a hit in a long time, and we thought she might be interested.” That would surely have been a remarkable pairing, but Bush’s career suddenly experienced an uplift with the release of her single ‘Running Up That Hill’ and the album The Hounds of Love.
“So we settled for Gil Norton, who’d just produced Echo and the Bunnymen’s Ocean Rain, one of my favourite albums at the time.” The band were booked to record for two weeks at Amazon Studios in Liverpool, a major facility that Knight reckons probably cost £1,000 a day. “It was a bit like Windmill Lane. There were two or three studios, and we’d pass acts like Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Dead Or Alive and China Crisis on their way in and out.”
The band were unhappy at Stoic’s insistence that they re-record all their singles for the album, rather than concentrate on their new material, particularly as they had already released a compilation called Five Singles and One Smoked Cod the previous year. They also discovered that Gil Norton had brought his production partner, Ronnie Stone, on board. “So in a way we ended up with a twin-headed monster producing the sessions, which was not what we’d planned either.”
One of the tracks Auto Da Fé re-recorded for the album was their cover of ‘Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart’, the Roger Greenaway/Roger Cook number made famous by Gene Pitney in 1967. “Phil had produced a version for us, but he was not in a good way at the time. So when we had the chance to do a more uptempo version on the album, I was happy with that.”
Released as a single, ‘Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart’ got plenty of airplay but did not burn up the charts like Marc Almond’s version, a duet with Pitney, would do in 1988.
The name Auto Da Fé settled on for their album, Tatitum, was a play on that of the French filmmaker Jacques Tati, their favourite director of the time, reimagined as a drum roll. The launch party was at a venue called the Café de Paris on Stephen’s Green in Dublin.
“That was a brilliant evening,” says Kelly. “Everyone was there, even Gay’s mother. After the launch, we went on to the Bailey. And then myself and Bill Graham, the Hot Press journalist, stayed over at Gay and Trevor’s house. We stayed up talking half the night.”
Tatitum got positive reviews, particularly in the Irish media. “I think Hot Press gave us the cover the month it was released,” says Knight. “But we were never happy with the album. The production let us down; it sounded like generic 1980s electronica, which was not what we were about at all. And a lot of our fans wondered why we had mucked around with these songs that had already been classic singles.”
Kelly agrees. “The album was badly produced,” he says. “None of it compared with how good the band were live. That happened a lot of bands at the time; the studio production just didn’t capture the energy of their live gigs.” When Tatitum failed to take off in the UK, Auto Da Fé took a break. “Gay and myself had a daughter in 1986,” says Knight, “and we put the band to sleep for a while.”
They revived the outfit on a number of occasions, but they never did regain the traction of the early 1980s. The last time Knight and Woods performed together as Auto Da Fé was at a tribute to the late Robbie Brennan at the Olympia in Dublin in September 2016. Today, Woods has health issues, and it is unlikely that they will ever perform live again.
In 2020, the band released a compilation of 32 studio recordings, called When the Curtain Goes Bang, and Knight is currently mixing a double album of live material, which they hope to release this year.
“Gay and I must have written somewhere between 120 and 150 songs,” he says, “but we never got to record that many of them in the studio. The live recordings are of varying quality, but the vibe is good.”
Knight may not hold too high an opinion of Tatitum, but he remains in awe of his songwriting partner: “Gay has a fantastic voice,” he says, “and when you read her lyrics now you realise just how remarkable it was that she could put them in pop songs. As for Auto Da Fé, you know, we had our moment, our four or five years of glory.”
- Further information: trevorknight.bandcamp.com
