INVADERS FROM PILMO
Arthur A Aardvark casts his eye back, runs across the room to retrieve
it before it gets squished, pops it back in and refocuses on the origin of The
Masked Martians, the dark horses of Pilmo's Bronze Age of Local Music.
The Masked Martians were born in the white heat of the Autumn of Apathy, when the local music scene in Pilmo, their operational base, had become clogged with progressive rock bands, or as the Martians put it, the Beard People. The scene was dominated by such luminaries as Fred Bloggs and the Steam Engines - best known for their habit of writing songs with titles that had already been used several thousand times before (eg The Power of Love, Space Invaders) - and Bodger, cover version hard rockers. Taste among the locals seemed to comprise either riff-based rock or old blues standards.
The individual members of the Martians came from four different bands, each of whom tried to subvert the ways of the villagers in various forms.
INFERNAL YOUTH |
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Wally |
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guitar/vocals |
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Flodge |
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guitar |
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John |
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bass |
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Squid |
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drums |
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Ernie |
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organ |
Infernal Youth consisted of five young boys fresh out of grammar school, all of whom had reportedly failed their A-levels through putting rehearsals before revision, and took their inspiration from 60s pop, which was much despised in the current climate. After a string of unpaid gigs at various youth clubs, Ernie left the band to become a road-sweeper in Paris, while John and Squid decided to get married and move to a little cottage on Darkmoor to raise cats. Wally and Flodge then spent some time playing in Wally's front room as a raucous guitar duo until the neighbours clubbed together, and attacked them with the club.
NIM |
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Ogg |
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drums |
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Ko-arrr |
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guitar/vocals |
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Nibble |
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fiddle |
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Forzat the Severer |
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guitar |
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Lord Scrunge |
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accordion |
Nim were a cult folk-rock band, mainly notable for Lord Scrunge's ability to make his accordion sound like a malfunctioning pocket calculator played with a cheese-grater. Their gigs took place mainly in fields and quarries, preferably while blasting was taking place. The band collapsed when lynchpin Ko-arrr took up a career as the big ball on the end of the crane wot knocks down houses. Without his guiding hand, Nim fell into a cycle of drawn-out jams and long breaks for tea and biscuits, until Forzat the Severer validated his title by sawing his guitar in half and decided to cross the Himalayas by wheelbarrow. The other three split due to whimsical differences.
BABOOMBA BABOOMBA |
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Twitch |
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vocals |
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Simon |
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guitar |
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Neil |
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bass |
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Gormless Fill |
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drums |
Named after one of Gormless Fill's favourite rhythms, Baboomba Baboomba were brought together by Twitch in a bid to bring the songs he had hitherto played to himself in a mirror to a wider audience. He drew together some of his friends (ie people he knew) who were at different stages of learning to play their instruments and gradually beat into them the chord progressions he had written on his one battered acoustic guitar; in a letter he wrote to his penfriend, Ecstasia Deluxe, who lived two doors down from him, he stated "The songs sound quite different on a tunable guitar. I'm not sure I like it." Not many other people liked it either, due to the varying degrees of incompetence attained by the players.
No matter how much Twitch tried, he could not stop Simon using his battery of effects pedals, which Twitch claimed had the same effect on the sound as a food processor does on an egg. He once took them and buried them on the moors, but at the next rehearsal Simon produced an identical bank of reserves. It seemed Simon treated himself to a new effect every week, as is often the wont of guitarists, and eventually began using every single pedal he owned, which took up so much room on the average stage that Neil and Fill found themselves crammed at the back while Twitch's habitual frenzied dancing meant he often found his feet crashing down on one of other of the boxes, be it fuzz echo scrambler or mangler, which annoyed the stringer so much that he finally gathered up his pedals (it took him three quarters of an hour) and left to join Bodger where he belonged.
Meanwhile, Gormless Fill had bought Bodger drummer Big Mel's drum kit, forsaking his home-built structure of oil cans, biscuit tins and sheets of corrugated iron, which led the band even further away from Twitch's original vision. The band continued as a bass/drums/vocals trio, playing their round of friends' parties and on one occasion a PTA cheese and wine party, which was a mistake by Twitch's old English teacher who was later found gibbering in the staff room with most of the wine.
THE BEVS |
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Phoebe |
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bass |
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Grill |
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guitar/vocals |
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Wendle |
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keyboards/vocals |
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Batgirl |
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drums |
The Bevs were Pilmo's Token All-Girl Band, formed by Phoebe and Grill in reaction to the dominating though unwritten Beard Ethic, which stated "No beard, not revered" (Beard People weren't very good at slogans), meaning that women couldn't play rock'n'roll, though even among the Beards it didn't make sense as one or two of the men involved shaved every day, as they had jobs as bank managers; it also ignored the presence of Jane Doe, keyboard player in the Steam Engines, though she was accepted as a musician by the Beards (well, she was quite good for a girl) as she was the girlfriend of guitarist Joe Soap. Jane had originally been invited to join the Bevs, such was the shortage of "out" women musicians in Pilmo, but turned it down in case everybody thought she was a lesbian because there were no men in the band. No hard feelings, said Phoebe, and gave her a black triangle sticker to put her keyboard, telling her it was a peace symbol.
Eventually they met Wendle through an ad they put up in Plonkers Musik Beatique, where they discovered Batgirl seated behind a massive kit beating thunderstorms out of the skins. Legend has it that Big Mel was in the store at the time; it is said that his jaw had dropped so far it was bouncing on his beer belly. Whether this is true or not, it was not long afterwards that he left Bodger and sold his kit to Gormless Fill. Fill has stated that while in the process of purchasing, he noticed on Mel's coffee table a leaflet entitled "Coping with Impotence".
The Bevs' music was a mixture of vintage rock'n'roll twisted to suit their perspective ("Stay away from Runaround Stu") and unfortunately Wendle's ballads. The band met with critical approval and grudging audience appreciation, but Phoebe and Batgirl, frustrated by Grill and Wendle's tendency towards cabaret, began taking too much speed to liven up the rhythms and eventually found themselves burning out. The day after a gig they took on the aspect of animated cinders.
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THE MASKED MARTIANS |
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Twitch |
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vocals |
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Wally |
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guitar |
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Flodge |
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guitar |
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Phoebe |
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bass |
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Ogg out of Nim |
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drums |
Fresh from their clubbing, Wally and Flodge sought themselves a rhythm section. At a Bevs gig they were so impressed by the swirling mass that was Phoebe and Batgirl, blurring behind the two frontwomen who were straining to keep up, that they forgot to go to the bar and spend the entire evening with a half of lager and two straws. The ex-Infernals determined to poach the speed queens for their new band, but were saved the trouble when the end of the night saw a raging argument between the balladeering and screaming looney factions, the one side claiming that it was severely unprofessional for half a band to finish the second set before the other half had got halfway through the first, the other side replying in a revved-up scribble. Striking while the iron was hot, or to be more accurate the drum riser which had burst into flames earlier and was still smouldering, Wally and Flodge immediately offered the vacancies, which the girls accepted half an hour earlier.
Unfortunately, the next day Batgirl discovered she had become permanently dislocated into a different time zone, and went on to make her fortune betting on horses, greyhounds and the festive No 1. Phoebe, however, after a week in bed, returned to the present and officially joined.
"Aren't you Ogg out of Nim?"
Such were the words that greeted Ogg out of Nim as he poked his head out of the tent which he had pitched for the night in Wally's mum and dad's back garden. By accepting the post as drummer he was allowed to keep his campsite, although later he was moved to the garage so he had somewhere to keep his drums ie in the back of daddy's estate car.
It was only after several rehearsals that the band realised they couldn't write a song to toast their cheese, although they had quite a few basic grooves going, so they set out to find themselves a singer/songwriter/frontperson, which they accomplished at one of Troke's famous parties where the unlegendary Baboomba Baboomba were playing. Twitch was observed to have a severe case of personality, of which the band as stood (all furniture being cleared for the dancing) had, on a scale of 10, about 0.4. It was too obvious really, and Twitch did seem to be severely disjointed with his musicians, as was clear from the way he beat them about the head with a plastic fish before and after, and often during, each number. So he was sounded out and eventually agreed to lend his larger than lifeness to the project as long as they could be named after a story he wrote when he was seven, wherein a visitor from another planet went around shooting Ordinary People with a raygun for no particular reason, and found it necessary to disguise himself to do so. He was eventually foiled by those meddling kids, who were written to be Twitch and his best friend at the time Switch, and beat it back to his home with his tails between his tentacles. In return, Twitch consented to leave his plastic fish at home it its plastic fish holder. So it came to be that THE MASKED MARTIANS were born, producing chaos out of order.
Where were they next?
Infernal Youth
Ernie is still in Paris, still sweeping les rues. Phil and Squid split up, moving separately to Amsterdam and Berlin, but the cats still live in the cottage on Darkmoor, looked after by the new tenant, Mistress "Not a Witch, Honest" Strangewoman.
Nim
Ko-arrr can be found somewhere in the foundations of a recently-built multi-storey car park, while Forzat the Severer can probably be found in the Himalayas, if recent reports of a large hairy grunting creature are to be believed. Nibble and Lord Scrunge returned to their roots and now run a firm of chartered accountants in the City (Nibble, Scrunge, Roll and Chewitt).
Baboomba Baboomba
Simon is Effects Editor of Screaming Guitar Solo magazine, and in the evenings plays screaming guitar solos in the office band, the Screaming Guitar Solo Boys. Neil is a used car salesman with his father's firm. Gormless Fill is an actor of sorts; he can often be seen in the credits at the end of television plays, under "Gormless Nerk - Fillip Jughead".
The Bevs
Grill and Wendle eventually gave up playing, married Beards and propagated little Beardlings. They are probably still there, but nobody sees them nowadays. Batgirl cannot be found, but a passing comment from a woman of indeterminate age in a white lab coat has led many to believe that she will be the leader of the Post-Apocalypse Revolution.
WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
The Masked Martians managed one Hit Single before vanishing in mysterious circumstances along with their manager Phwill Bilson. Some say that they are ensconced in a recording studio somewhere still struggling to finish that difficult First Album. Neither original singer Twitch, still active on the local scene, nor his replacement Ferdie, still inactive in a ditch somewhere, probably, have been able to cast light on the band's disappearance, yet even today their influence on modern beat combos is clear, as many of them have employed the Martians' technique of playing musical instruments to produce sounds.
This article first
appeared in "Seen", Pilmo's local listings frizbee.