Former new waver Digney Fignus is back with a new album.
By James Sullivan Globe Correspondent /

(photo: David Kamerman/Globe Staff)

September 5, 2008 LEXINGTON - The folks at FEMA might want to check with Digney Fignus the next time they're tracking another hurricane approaching New Orleans. Fignus, a onetime major-label new waver from Boston who has utterly reinvented himself as a roots-music storyteller, was rehearsing material for his first album of a projected three-record Big Easy song cycle when Katrina hit in 2005.

This week, just as Hurricane Gustav was making landfall, Fignus was gearing up for a record-release party to celebrate "Talk of the Town," his second album of songs about the fictitious bayou scoundrel Johnnie Boudreaux. Fignus plays Wednesday at Scullers.

For all the authenticity of the performer's steady-rolling, two-stepping songs about voodoo queens, riverboat grifters, and Basin Street prowlers, it's strange but true that Fignus has never been to New Orleans.

"Why screw things up by going?" he says with a smile, sitting in the front room of his girlfriend's sunny home here. It's the same town where the singer grew up in his parents' "little G.I. house" as Bobby Brown, progeny of a long line of working-class journeymen.

"My dad was a bus driver for the MTA," says Fignus. "His dad drove for the Boston Elevated, and his dad was a train worker in England."

That lineage might help explain the singer's far-flung imagination. After falling in with Boston's post-punk scene in the late 1970s, he chose himself an alter ego.

"I was hanging out with all these whacked-out artists, doing crazy stuff," he recalls. "Everyone was changing their names."

Looking up his name in Billboard's musicians' directory, he was dismayed to discover a whole page of Bobby Browns. So he put a twist on one of his own song lyrics - "dig the fig" - and created a fanciful moniker suitable for a Roman emperor.

As Digney Fignus, he flared up in 1984 with the song "The Girl With the Curious Hand," scoring a surprise hit on MTV's "Basement Tapes" with an alluring video. That led to a short-lived contract with Columbia Records.

Coming at the height of a record-industry push for Boston bands after the breakthrough of 'Til Tuesday, Fignus's self-titled debut featured production help from Leroy Radcliffe (Modern Lovers, Robin Lane & the Chartbusters) and knockout back-up singing by the late Vicki Sue Robinson ("Turn the Beat Around"). But the record came out alongside another, slightly more pressing Columbia release - the superstar famine-relief collaboration "We Are the World." Tossed out without a lifeline from the label, the "Digney Fignus" album sank quietly.

"It's the typical rock 'n' roll story," says Fignus. "I was screwed by everyone, broke, trying to make ends meet, the band dissolves. It was a real 'Spinal Tap' story."

Sitting on the edge of a cushioned armchair, T-shirt sleeves rolled up, a bottle of ginger beer on the floor between his snakeskin boots, Fignus looks much the same as he did more than two decades ago on MTV. A small hoop earring dangles from his left ear. He declines to give his age. "Let's just say I'm not gonna make the Mouseketeers this year," he jokes.

After souring on the music business, Fignus began writing more songs on acoustic guitar, starting his own "Tuesday Night Music Club" with mandolinist Chris Leadbetter. In 1996 he poked his head out of hiding when he accepted disc jockey Charles Laquidara's challenge to write a new local anthem. Fignus's countrified "Boston Town" emerged as the winner, prompting a congratulatory phone call from Mayor Tom Menino.

He and Leadbetter spent the next several years kicking around various folk festivals. The Boudreaux albums, self-released on the Figtone Music label, began to take shape in 2004, when Fignus met Marblehead-based drummer Dave Mattacks at a festival in Bangor, Maine. Impressed by Mattacks's appearance with another group, Fignus asked whether he had done any recording."Right, mate, once in a while," said the unassuming drummer, who in fact was an early member of the British electric-folk pioneers Fairport Convention and has recorded with Paul McCartney and George Harrison, among many others.

With contributions from more than a dozen musicians, 2006's "Trouble on the Levee" told the story of two-timing Johnnie (a man "too good-lookin' for his own good") and his narrow escape from the wrath of his moonshine-running father-in-law. As a tuneful raconteur, Fignus channeled such Crescent City originals as Randy Newman and Dr. John (with whom he shared a stage at Lowell's Summer Music Series two years ago), stepping nimbly from Cajun and country-jazz to French Quarter bon-temps-roulez.

"I love that beat," says Fignus, who sang in the choir of a Congregational church and found rock 'n' roll after puberty, when a buddy got a drum kit and encouraged him to pick up the bass. He's drawn, he says, to the community created by traditional music: "To see those people on the dance floor, doing the two-step, little kids and couples in their 80s - what more could you ask?"Though he hasn't been there yet, he's hoping to take his Boudreaux songs to the city that inspired them: "I would love to be adopted by New Orleans," Fignus says.

In the meantime, he's laying in cases of food. No, he's not expecting a hurricane. They're promotional items named for songs from his new album - "No Worry for the Berry" jam, "Party Down in Hell" hot sauce.

"The big joke," he says, "is that we'll make our money in food products."

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