Fixx warms up for new album with shows in Green Valley

By Jerry Fink

Thursday, Nov. 6, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Cy Curnin has mixed feelings about his hit song “Saved by Zero” showing up in a Toyota commercial.

He loves the fact that repeated plays have refocused attention to the Fixx, his new wave rock band from the 1980s. He likes the fat royalty check.

But he’s not keen on the cheap rerecording.

“I would prefer to have been the one singing it,” Curnin says during a recent phone interview from his farm in France. You can hear the real version when the Fixx performs free concerts Friday and Saturday at Green Valley Ranch.

He’s amused at the irony of using the song to tout 0 percent car financing.

“It’s a bit cheesy,” he says. “It was about looking at your own life, not so much about amassing material things but about experiences that lend you to be blissful. It’s peeling away illusions we pick up along the way. Our identity isn’t the suit we wear or the latest gadget. Our identity is the freedom to pick and choose from all aspects of humanity and to make a stand.

“The song was written from the point of view of the release you get when you have nothing left to lose. It’s sort of a meditation. It clears your head of all fears and panics and illusions and you get back to the basics, which is a Buddhist mantra, which I practiced back then, and which I still do. The idea of the song is how great it is to get back to zero.”

The theme drives Curnin’s life.

Several years ago he moved to France with his new wife and started living off the land and off royalties.

“We are 100 percent self-sufficient,” says Curnin, a native of Wimbledon, England. “We’re getting back to the roots of it. My wife runs a guesthouse. We run all of the stuff we grow and produce through the guesthouse, feeding people. Tonight there are six people who will be eating some of our pigs.”

The Fixx usually tours only in the summer. “But these two dates in Vegas came in. We’ve been trying to put other dates around them, but in today’s economy it’s a bit tough, but we’re making enough to fly everyone in from Europe for a quick laugh in Vegas.”

When Curnin isn’t farming or touring, he’s heavily involved in the Love Hope Strength Foundation, which was co-founded by cancer survivors Mike Peters of the Alarm and James Chippendale of CSI Entertainment Insurance. The foundation often sponsors concerts at high elevations, symbolizing the “Climb Back from Cancer,” which involves mountain climbing.

Curnin was one of 40 musicians who played a fundraising concert above 19,000 feet on Mount Everest last year. He was among 65 musicians at a similar concert in the Peruvian Andes this year.

“Trekking is one of my favorite things to do,” Curnin says. “In June, we’re off to Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. The concert will be higher than the one we had on Everest — it should be at about the 22,000-foot elevation.”

The Fixx is working on a new album.

“Slowly but surely,” he says. “We all have families and other business so we have to take time off to get in the studio when we can. The reason we’re doing the shows in Vegas, actually, is to get our feathers fluffed up to go into the studio straight after. We have done three songs already and have written for more and we’re in the process of writing four more. Hopefully by next spring we will have another record.”