Millie Week 56: Mon 30 Sept - Sat Oct 5 October

Remember Perhaps (Six Plastic Flasks), the bit of Gnomefumbler music that I posted last Saturday, the one with an extended Tupperware percussion break in the middle? It directly inspired the third strip this week.

I'm not making up the stylophone either. Of course, it has a long and noble history in pop music, being heard on David Bowie's Space Oddity and The Beatles' Continuing Ballad of Bungalow Bill to name but two. And Gnomefumbler used it to subvert the lumbering Heavy Metal riff of Bod and the Ice Pop and underline its ludicrousness.

Ironically, busking sites on the London Underground have since been commercialised - you have to be a professional busker nowadays, and have to play on a sponsored pitch. If you want to play the tube now, you need a manager!

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.

Millie Week 54: Mon 16 Sept - Sat 21 Sept

First of all, hello. This is my first post with my new computer. I've been running the same iMac G4 since 2004, and while it's still going strong, it's going very very s l o w l y as well. Not only that, it's reached the point where I can't upgrade it any more, the CPU inside the computer is no longer supported. So it's time to make the change.

I'm still setting things up at the moment, but hope to have everything at the point where I can start posting new strips before the ones already up on the GoComics system run out. Now all my old apps have to be upgraded (thank you Adobe for your licencing system that allows you to install your aps at work and at home simultaneously). Now all I have to do is find some drivers for my scanner...

This continues the guitar storyline that started last week. I don't know how to play the guitar at all. I was once shown how to play two chords on a mandolin, but I don't know what they were.

Millie Week 53, Mon 9 - Sat 14 Sept 1991

Handwriting analysts will have noticed that a last minute revision was made to the punchline in the first strip. The original one was 'He let me have the video free just for pure persistence'. As you can see it was changed to something which at the time seemed far more innocuous. Now we know a bit more about Mel, and how his slightly askew worldview colours his movies, we may have been better off sticking with the original.

The last two strips begin a new storyline, very much based on the band I was in when I was at school. I say 'band'. I say 'in'. Actually it was a collection of grammar school kids with more ideas than musical ability, and access to some high-end (for the day) recording equipment. The band was called 'Gnomefumbler'. This is all you need to know for now. The story continues next week...