FOUR DECADES AGO, the British new wave band the Fixx were having their moment in the sun. Hooky, slick and multi-textured hits such as “Red Skies,” “Saved by Zero,” “Stand or Fall,” “One Thing Leads to Another” and “Deeper and Deeper” turned the group into radio and MTV darlings. By the degree that success in the music industry is mea-sured (platinum sales for 1983’s Reach the Beach and gold for its 1984 follow-up, Phantoms), it appeared as if the Fixx had it all nailed down.
By the end of the Eighties, however, things began to trend downward; the band’s last charting single of any significance was “Driven Out,” in 1989. But that doesn’t mean the Fixx’s music went away; in fact, over the past two decades it’s reached new — and perhaps larger — audiences than ever before, via TV ads. Toyota and Fidelity Investments have run spots utilizing “Saved by Zero,” and the human-resources company ADP seized on the funky dance rhythms of “One Thing Leads to Another” to tout the synergistic effects of their data-driven insights.
“It’s a very funny thing, the way those ads hit people,” says Jamie West-Oram, the band’s longtime guitarist. “One of the bigger ones was when ‘Saved by Zero’ was used by the car company to promote its zero-financing deal, which certainly
