Cy Curnin is not your typical frontman. Theatric and expressive, he’s always in motion on the stage with his band The Fixx. In The Fixx’s recent visit to The Barns at Wolf Trap, Cy peered to the stars in a telescope, signed a declaration with a quill pen, and tossed a paper plane and balloon into the audience while he was pouring emotion into the lyrics of songs written by The Fixx from 1982 to 2022.
With his physical emoting, Cy, of course, reminds us that The Fixx is a thinking man’s rock band.
The intellectual goals of The Fixx were there from the very start. Shuttered Room, The Fixx’s 1982 debut album, stands as a thoughtful giant of a new wave record, and The Fixx devoted a fair amount of time to it and its follow-up album, Reach the Beach (1983) in their performance at Wolf Trap on April 16. You want the hits? These albums have the hits, and The Fixx were happy to deliver “Stand or Fall” and “Red Skies” from Shuttered Room at the end of their set.
Nothing in The Fixx catalog gets as big a reaction as singles from Reach for the Beach, however, and The Fixx also stood tall for “One Thing Leads to Another” near the end of the concert and then finally “Saved by Zero” to close their three-song encore.
Cy challenged the audience to consider how relevant “One Thing Leads to Another” remains today with hits critical lines: “The deception with tact, just what are you trying to say?/ You’ve got a blank face, which irritates/ Communicate, pull out your party piece.”
Peppering the song with spoken word lines like “Donated to my campaign? Money down the drain!,” Cy made as if he were acting out a music video for the song in real time. 2025 sounded deliciously, but also derisively, a lot like 1983.
Watch the official music video for “One Thing Leads to Another” by The Fixx on YouTube:
To the delight of the Wolf Trap crowd, The Fixx came equipped with new songs that fit very well into their registry. The Fixx released Every Five Seconds, their 11th studio album, in 2022, through JARC Ltd via BFD/The Orchard. And at Wolf Trap, this date on April 16 actually the second of two nights there, the band performed “Closer,” “Wake Up,” and “A Life Survived” from that most recent record. Over the course of the songs, The Fixx clearly were contemplating our times, and they suggest as Cy has said in interviews, that life is a “mosaic of moments,” and that we can wake up and take ownership of this reality.
In “Wake Up,” Cy thundered, “Baby it’s time, to wake up/ Baby it’s time, to move/ Things round here need a shakeup/ Maybe this time we grew.” And Jamie West-Oram smoothed the path to our ears with tinges of psychedelic blues. The talented Adam Woods gave the song that distinctive hit of Fixx drums, which somehow remained consistent while also imparting a unique character to each of the tunes.
Hats off also to The Fixx for maintaining its classic lineup. You don’t get any cooler than bassist Dan K. Brown, fixed at the rear of the stage with Adam, as he mysteriously kept the beat in style. And the secret weapon of The Fixx always has been keyboardist Rupert Greenall, an old hand who meticulously and instinctively knows his craft, layering that new wave sheen onto The Fixx’s tough and tumble rock operatics. Every song by The Fixx makes for a remarkably consistent listening experience of exceptional quality.
Many of us came to dance to the undeniably hooky anthems of The Fixx, but there was plenty of opportunity to also think about Cy’s incredibly prescient lyrics. And for this evening, The Fixx were good for our receptive ears and our dancing feet — and also for our thinking minds.
Do your brain a favor: Catch The Fixx on tour!
Hey, Cruel World Festival, book The Fixx in 2026! They would absolutely kill it in Pasadena.
Here are photos of The Fixx performing live at The Barns at Wolf Trap on April 16, 2025. All pictures by Mickey McCarter.
