Ben Tucker
Also known as The Colonel. I was born in 1976 in Whyalla, South Australia.The method of my conception is unknown, although in the neonatal phase I was weaned by sea-otters.I have voodoo discolorations in my right eye.A snakehead imported me to Merseyside with my siblings in 1984.
There we were educated by monks, sadists and mendicants and learnt to survive from potatoes we grew in the gutters. Our pastimes generally involved setting fire to the social workers cars.
Some of us worked in the night and secretly constructed a raft from balsar wood, rizlas and boys brigade uniforms.We navigated the treacherous waters of Liverpool Bay, paddled through the Menai Straits and subsequently continued onwards towards whatever rapturous possibilities lay ahead.
Later on, I came to live in London, and learnt to appreciate its beautiful shabbiness.My employment is generally pleasant. I look good in a well-shaped hat and most other normal types of apparel.I like to keep myself clean, although I never clench my buttocks after a fart has come out.
Matt Parker
Matt is a country boy at heart, from the barren lands of the home counties. Wishing he were a working-class northerner he adopted a trombone and joined a brass band, touring the church halls and village fetes of his native Hampshire playing rousing marches and Lloyd-Webber arrangements. Since then he has developed a calling as a jack of all trades. Particular areas of pleasure can be found in making beds; climbing rocks; programming web-sites; epic poetry; learning Ukelele; and the Broca’s area. Matt takes pleasure in his ability to do everything badly and nothing very well, which coupled with a natural arrogance seems to suffice in getting through the week. Matt would be very interested in hearing from fences (jewellery specialists ideal) as he develops a new career area as a fixer.
Mervyn Salole
Merv was born in adult form in Nicaragua in 1902. His age remains static, and his body is capable at will of assuming the terrifying forms of the walnut and the mandarin.
For more than a century now his existence on earth has been characterised by serial participation in bizarre and unsavoury musical collectives, beginning in the early part of the last century with the Trouser Trouts.
The Trouser Trouts were pioneers in early klezmer, who later disbanded when the lead singer, Ira Fuchs, had a fatal embolism in the lavatory minutes before the band were due to play at the Cornucopia stadium in Milwaukee. Distraught and confused, Merv is thought to have wandered northwards to Alaska where he was used as a euphonium in the Dead Kulaks, a controversial Inuit folk-band.
Little is known of this period except that, by the time he joined the Blue Willies in 1927, his niftiness with the whalebone was noted by luminaries of the Appalachian scene such as Fang-Fang Lamb and the notorious Michiko Minty. He then went on to become the leader of bands such as Swan Lightly and The Cygnets and, in the 1950’s, The Jealousy Freaks, whose song ‘brown and warm’ charted in the early weeks of the hit parade.
He escaped death when the entire band were sublimated into liquid gas form towards the end of that decade and, after meeting fellow cordoruy obsessive, Steve Slap, in a bar in Dublin, he engaged on the controversial ‘The Last Picture Show’ project which was later to be banned universally and resulted in several years’ incarceration.
Moving to Balham in the early 1980’s, Merv formed a new romantic cover band called ‘Tether’ which later renamed itself ‘Due South’. Widely thought to be the inspiration for the Gordon Gecko character in Wall Street, Merv retired from public life in 1987. But backgammon was not enough for him and he was seduced into the ways of the red-eye in 2005.
Don Gibson
Don is our percussionist and drummer.
Katy
Katy spent her formative years by the seaside in Hastings (also home-town to one of the other band members’ live-in lovers). Her musical accolades are extensive and varied but include a fantastic vocal rendition of ’sweet child of mine’, thrice winner of hastings music festival’s infamous ‘family music-making’ category (not solo), and as musical arranger of a Christian vocal group called ‘Creation’ in her youth. In albino she mostly plays the keyboards and flute, though she has been known to sing the odd harmony and occasionally scream. Her current challenge is converting the other 4 members of albino into rampant feminists. She plans to take over the band fromthe inside and turn it into a vehicle for brining third wave feminism to the masses. At 26 years old, she is the youngest member of the band by 108 years.
Lorraine
Lorraine tries to play the violin for the Albino Band. In her spare time she goes diving for winkels in the Thames and shopping.
