Fossil Fools: a Spotted History of XTeeHee

After the prefab four, Rutland's foremost pop musical exponents must surely be XTeeHee, the new wave pop combo who saw chart success in the late 70s and early 80s with hits like 'Nigel Caught on the Hop' and 'Senseless Working Overtime.' Not many people are aware that the band even existed, and many confuse them with a similarly-named combo from Swindon. 

Now, for the first time in pubic, sorry, public... no, as you were... the members of XTeeHee speak exclusively to Noddy Gardener about their career, their music and, of course, their trousers...

The band formed, purely by accident, in 1975, when founder member Randy Parchment was holidaying in the West Country: "I went to see this band of farmboys playing in a barn and drank so much industrial strength scrumpy I accidentally said yes when they asked me to join. Well, not to put too fine a point on it, they asked me if I'd play all their instruments for them. They needed some songs as well, so I went to the bog and came back two minutes later with our first single. God knows what it was doing in there, I blame Dave and his time machine personally"*

(*We'll hear more of this story later – ed)

Randy continues the story: "At that time, the band was called Scarecrow and the Farmhands, but we quickly became The Hydrogen Bomzz. Just as quickly, we changed our name to the Splat, the Splink, Inevitable Groin and the Dave Clark Fireball XL5 – that's one name, incidentally, not four. We had to change it again as it wouldn't fit on the posters. In the end we settled on XTeeHee, because we saw ourselves as a band combining glam rock and comedy, much like Mott the Hoople."

The band's first line up consisted of Randy on guitar, bass and shouting, Barry Bismuth on toy organ, and Terry Wam on drums: "We didn’t have a drummer to begin with, so we set up a drum kit in the local village hall. It’s a well known fact that you can lure drummers out of hiding by using a tactically positioned drum kit. They get the scent of it, then you’ve got ‘em."

"We came in one day and found Terry hiding behind the drum kit. When we coaxed him out, he fell over it. We liked the sound it made so he was in the band. And it saved me from having to play guitar, bass and drums all at the same time. We used to put a scarecrow on stage to hold the bass guitar and one day it came to life. We'd had some good mushrooms for tea that day. And that's how we found Corin."

With Corin Mouldering, ex part-time scarecrow now holding the bass guitar, and Terry falling over as many drums as the band could throw at him, the scene was set for something or other. Unfortunately, nobody knew what. Success was literally just around the corner, in the local Co-Op where pickle millionaire Dickie Branston was delivering a crate of one pound jars of his famous produce. He overheard the band having an argument in the rehearsal room next door and immediately went round to tell them to shut up. Quite by accident, he ended up signing them.

Randy: "We were actually playing a copy of the Troggs Tape, but you couldn't tell the difference between them and us, other than that Terry could actually play dub-uh-dub-uh-dub-uh-chuh."

In part two of this exclusive interview, we'll examine the band's climb to the top of the stairs in Randy's terraced house.

Every week, we'll be bringing you some classic music from the band's career, and logically enough, we'll start in the middle, with their highest charting single. 'Senseless Working Overtime' was released in January 1982 from Fern Open Prison, with time off for good behaviour. Randy explains the origins of the song:

"I was working in the local Woolworths' painting murals on the walls of the toy department. I was trying to draw a donkey, but it looked all wrong. That's where the lyrics came from. For the chorus, I thought 'nobody's ever done chanting the letters of the alphabet in a pop song before'..."

Ed: Apart from Len Barry and, uh, The Beatles.

Randy: "Well, nobody from Rutland..."

In case you don't believe any of this, you can hear the song by clicking below: