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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