Millie week 55: Monday 23 - Saturday 28 1991

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I was once involved in a school band. It was called Gnomefumbler. No-one can remember why it got that name - we think it was the result of an exercise in finding two incongruous words in a dictionary and sticking them together, though I did later find a character in a book of Round the Horne scripts called Ramsden Gnomefumbler, but this was probably coincidence.

The band played one disastrous gig at St Mark's Hall, Tunbridge Wells, but somehow managed to produce a string of albums on cassette and even sold a few through the fabled music magazine ZigZag.

Its origins were very much as you see here - a bunch of school kids with no real musical ability banding together in a bedroom with as many noise making items as they could find (not all of them musical instruments) and seeing what came out.

We produced several albums of chaotic improvised prog in the space of one year before splitting due to musical differences (one was moving on to proper noodly prog, one became half of a synthpop duo, one just sort of stopped, and I found that doing musical theatre meant I didn't have to pretend to play an instrument). The band reformed for three further cassette albums after we all left school, but they had proper songs and the musicians were a bit too proficient for my liking, so they're not really Gnomefumbler albums - more like albums by a band calling itself Gnomefumbler made by some people with the same names, but older.

I'll post some early tracks on here to give you a flavour of what DEF sound like, as soon as I work out how to digitise cassettes using my new Mac. All the old recording software I had doesn't work any more. Mutter mutter mutter.

DEF is an awful name for a band. It's a bad joke too. I think 'def', meaning 'definitive' or 'good', was in use on 'the streets' for about three minutes in 1983, and was about as hip as the Rock Steady Crew. The three letter acronym observation still holds, though - JLS being the latest example.

As for the last strip, I'd like to remind everyone that the Spice Girls didn't form until 1994, so I'm claiming this as comic prophesy.

UPDATE:

From Gnomefumbler's 1980 album 'Deckchair', here's Perhaps (Six Plastic Flasks).

The percussion you can hear is Tupperware. And the horn section is a length of aluminium tubing.
Guitars: Ian Tapp & Chris Tampsett. Percussion: Andrew Pilcher (assisted by Chris and Ian in the middle section) Monologue: Ian Tapp. Written: Tampsett/Tapp/Pilcher.

In contrast, from 1986's 'The Price of Fish', this is The Celery.

What a difference six years makes, eh? This is a riotous trawl through the musical fads of the time, listen carefully and you'll hear shades of The Smiths, Frankie goes to Hollywood and U2 in there.

Vocals: Andrew Pilcher, Guitar, Bass, Celery sample: Ian Tapp, Simmons Drums (how 80s can you get?): Austen LeGassic. Written: Pilcher/Tapp.