Cheap at Half The Price - Reception and Influence

Reception and Influence

Followers of Fred Frith's music generally had trouble coming to terms with Cheap at Half the Price. To them Frith was "progressive, genre-bending music's last great hope", and on this album he appeared to have abandoned this role. When the album was released on LP in 1983, Recommended Records, founded and run by Chris Cutler (Frith's band-mate from Henry Cow), elected not to stock it because Cutler felt it was not "terribly good". Trouser Press said that the quality of the record suffered from the lo-fi experiment of recording "at home on a 4-track".

In 1985 Michael Bloom of The Boston Phoenix wrote that Cheap at Half the Price "will never get the hearing it deserves". He said that Frith was trying to shake off this "progressive" mould he had been cast in, and believed that the songs on the album should be judged on their own merit and not as "rarefied art rock". The New Gibraltar Encyclopedia of Progressive Rock described Cheap at Half the Price as Frith's response to punk, a low-tech approach to performing songs. It called the album a "twisted pop" record, saying that it is "as uncompromising as everything else Frith recorded". François Couture in a review of Frith's 2002 album, Prints called Cheap at Half the Price "the best tongue-in-cheek take at the New Wave".

Despite the criticism the LP received at the time of its release, the remastered CD issued 21 years later was generally well received. In the 2004 Recommended Records catalogue, Cutler wrote that the album had "raised eyebrows at the time (from, as Fred calls them 'progressive music snobs'—of which I guess I was one) for its apparent simplicity and departure from what was then thought of as Fred Style." René van Peer of Leonardo Digital Reviews admitted in 2005 that he was "one of those snobs" and wrote "I am astonished and embarrassed to find how little I grasped back then of what Frith had put into it." Looking at Frith's projects after Cheap at Half the Price made it clear that what he did on the album was not a departure from his musical experiments, as people saw it at the time, but rather a part of it. Van Peer said (in retrospect) that Cheap at Half the Price "bursts with inventiveness, and eradiates the irrepressible joy of playful creativity".

Frith's exploration of song forms on this album was later developed further with Tom Cora in Skeleton Crew, where Frith and Cora played "deceptively simple catchy songs", often using melodies derived from Scandinavian and Eastern European traditional music. Songs from Cheap at Half the Price appeared in several of Frith's later projects. Step Across the Border (1990), a film on Frith, and its accompanying soundtrack, featured three such songs, "Same Old Me", "Evolution" and "Too Much Too Little". Keep the Dog, a 1989–1991 Fred Frith review band, played a number of arrangements of songs from this album, including "Walking Song", "Some Clouds Do" and "Instant Party".