London, UK · punk · comedy punk

Splodgenessabounds

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Novelty punk with a legendarily long song title and no pretensions whatsoever — two pints of lager and a packet of laughs.

Splodgenessabounds formed in south London in 1978, coming together over a minicab office, Baron Cars, on Queens Road in Peckham, though the members were from Orpington. Frontman Max Splodge, born Martin Everest, had drummed in the punk bands The Tarts and The Mistakes, and originally fronted the group alongside his girlfriend, known on stage as Baby Greensleeves.

The band played rough, deliberately shambolic punk aimed squarely at laughs, mixing music-hall humour and pub-rock singalongs with the noise of the era. Early shows leaned into pranks: Splodge stranded atop a stack of speakers for an entire set, the band playing the wrong instruments at deafening volume when a support act failed to appear, and a stunt where he came on stage handcuffed to a prison officer.

The band won a recording contract with Deram after finishing runner-up in the 1979 Battle of the Bands, despite the label winding down its non-classical output. Their first single, "Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps Please", appeared in 1980 as a triple A-side with "Simon Templer" and "Michael Booth's Talking Bum". John Peel played it first, daytime radio followed, and it reached number seven in June, though a broadcasters' strike kept the band off Top of the Pops.

The follow-up single paired a live cover of "Two Little Boys" with three more tracks, "Horse", "The Butterfly Song" and "Sox", as a quadruple A-side that came with a cardboard boomerang guaranteed not to come back. This time the band did appear on Top of the Pops, but the single only reached number 26 in September 1980. Their eponymous debut album followed in January 1981, while the band was on hiatus, and failed to chart.

Splodgenessabounds' stage shows sometimes tipped into the carnivalesque, drawing police attention over unsubstantiated reports of public nudity and on-demand flatulence during "Michael Booth's Talking Bum". Press releases were often deliberately absurd, promising triple albums padded with old cassette off-cuts and a free Christmas tree. Later releases never repeated 1980's chart success, but the band has continued to appear intermittently, with Max Splodge as the constant figure.

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