Tosser

Genre: Guitar terror

Era: 2007

Country of Origin: unknown

Initially bursting forth from the internet in April of 2007, the corrosive guitar mess of Tosser was seemingly discovered by disaffected youth trawling underground alternatives to mySpace.

Such sites as acne.com and farkmestoopid.com prided themselves on their ability to not only discover, but to shape elements at the very bleeding, hacked edge of so-called youth culture.

With the benefit of my media hindsight, it was inevitable of course, that Tosser’s guitar terrorism would appear from this amateur source. Their agenda ostensibly derived from upsetting established rock mores with singles constructed Tonka-like from heaving chunks of riffery and drum battalions.

This desire to shock and dismay, battering senile audiences with weapons-grade mp3-only releases such as Face in Smithereens and Gunt Missile drew comparisons with certain other populist entertainers. Mostly by dint of the group’s female singer and her refusal to appear in any circumstances without her signature black-bag-masked face.

The most startling ramification of their self-declared first and last live performance in the Summer of that year, was the free-issuing to every audience member attending the gig in a long-disused gas storage chamber in Volgograd, of a bar-coded commemorative T shirt.

The irony being that the bar code had been fiendishly designed to function internationally, and resulted in fans being arrested across Europe when leaving shops – on a charge of shoplifting themselves.

Within two months of their appearance, nu-media speculation as to the identity of the voluptuous but faceless vocalist was vindicated when Tosser was revealed to be a vanity project for Harmonie Carpenter, well-known media-whore it-daughter of shock-headed film auteur Gaspar Carpenter.

Harmonie was widely known prior to the revelation of her involvement with the band – having been photographed on several occasions by paparazzi, brazenly inviting upskirt photographs of her evil areas to increase her friend count on FaceBook. Said photographs appeared on a range of websites, and subsequently on Carpenter’s own personally-issued Christmas cards of 2007.

Shortly afterwards Harmonie married her yoga coach in a beach-held civil service at a secret location in the North of England. Photographs of the whole sorry affair reveal her face to be black-bagged yet again, with her sad undergarments exposed in every single shot.

Soon the band split. The other members’ identities never became public.

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"Twinkling" Mary Kelly

Genre: ghastly folk

Era: 2003

Country of Origin: UK

A gauche and guileless 16 year old when she plopped into the consciousness of a public desperate to be entertained by a musical act virtually identical to Charlotte Church, but without the singing, Mary Kelly was instantly clasped to the breast of The Brighton Demographic.

With her naïve ways and trademark moon-faced Cornishness, she found sudden and undeservedly huge success the moment her hideous pre-release debut single was play-listed for incessant rotation on both BBC Radio and UK MTv channels.

This was a first for both outlets, as Mary Kelly’s chosen oeuvre was the flinchingly narrow folk harp pop – named imaginatively due to its reliance on folk harp instrumentalism and electro-breakbeats.

This single, Magical Steeples, achieved commercial but little critical success, entering the UK top forty at number forty, and remaining concretely in situ for a total of 7 whole days – weathering gales of tabloid scrutiny and the fawning adoration of biscuit-addled pensioners and homosexual clubbers.

In fact it is almost solely due to the power of both pink and blue-rinsed pounds that Magical Steeples achieved the tedious success that it did, and why Kelly’s publishers, Dad’s Farm Music, considered the release of a follow up album to capitalise on the public’s seeming ability to buy just about anything.

Proposed further recordings were sadly scuppered however, when Kelly became hopelessly smitten with Gargill Haversam, a surly boy of fifteen local to her small village. She assumed his circle of interest, and those song manuscripts published of the never-to-be-recorded album indicate a proposed change of direction, to incorporate vocals and a conceptual lyrical theme dedicated to Warhammer 40K.

In the last of her promotional photographs, published before her retirement from music with a stated interest to “drink more cider lol”, Kelly appears in striped tights and a motorcycle-style leatherette jacket, looking off-camera towards where, reportedly, Haversam was making “fanny-licking faces”.

Subsequently, Kelly has failed to trouble the media. Her “twinkling” seemingly dulled for good.

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Barnslaughter

Genre: death folk

Era: 1970s-1980s

Country of Origin: UK

1972 was the year that saw the rise of the genre known as “death folk”, and no band typified its farmyard nihilism quite like Barnslaughter. Indeed, their 1971 debut album Ploughman Of Death is considered by some to have given rise to the entire genre, and punishing songs like Satanic Harvest and Barley Suicide defined the movement, reflecting the emotions of literally dozens of disillusioned Wiltshire teenagers for whom The Archers no longer held any meaning.

Barnslaughter dominated the 1970s, releasing four albums over a hectic eight year period – Tractor Eviscerator, Blood Dairy, Disembowelled By Pitchfork and the politically charged Cannibal Common Agricultural Policy Killer – but in 1979 banjo player and songwriter Syd Piggot died of an overdose of hayfever remedy, becoming yet another depressing statistic of an increasingly self-destructive folk scene that had already claimed the lives of The Gloucester Old Spots, Neil Haystack and two members of Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Tim, and the group decided to embark in a new direction.

That direction was white supremacy. From the alarming retail-oriented race hate of 1982’s Hell By Date to the frighteningly delusional 1986 concept album Satan’s Grocer, in the 1980s Barnslaughter turned their considerable musical talents almost exclusively towards persuading people not to shop at Handeep Patel’s grocery shop in the band’s home village of Monkflint Giddle.

The change of direction proved to be catastrophic; Barnslaughter’s new-found white supremacist leanings drove away their fans, and eventually, after 1988’s Aryan Shopping failed to chart, the band split and went their separate ways. Today only singer Phil Rurral remains active in the music industry, running the staggeringly unpopular pressure group Musicians Against Blacks And Queers from a maisonette in Trowbridge.

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