Loud, odd and unrepeatable: a Cardiff art punk band
Adam Taylor on guitar, Louise Mason on bass, Emma Daman on drums, and all three of them singing. That was the whole of it. They formed in Cardiff in 2005 and stopped in 2012, and in between they made a noise nobody has managed to file away neatly since.
The name has no apostrophe. The band knew there should be one and left it out anyway, which tells you most of what you need to know about how they handled a rule.
They described their own music as pop that sometimes forgot to have a chorus. Everyone else reached for post-punk, art rock or no wave, and mostly settled on art punk band from Cardiff because it was the only description that did not start an argument.
AIA photoreal render of a band walking to a stage: AI-generated image.
Eleven records, and the whole discography in one place
Eleven releases between 2005 and 2011: three albums, six singles and two shared seven-inches, across Fantastic Plastic, LSM Records and This Is Fake DIY. The Victorian English Gentlemens Club discography is set out here with label, catalogue number, format and tracklisting, because the catalogue numbers are the part that goes missing first. FPCD016 is the self-titled debut; TIFD0030 is the yellow seven-inch of Parrot.
What the press made of The Victorian English Gentlemens Club
Between 2006 and 2011 the band were reviewed by Q, NME, Uncut, Time Out London, Plan B, Rock Sound and The Sun, and written about at length by The Independent, The Sunday Times and Artrocker. The lines below are quoted as they were published, with the publication named and nothing tidied up in either direction.
“A joy unheard since the B-52s”
Q
“Sexy stripped down rock’n’roll”
NME
“There’s not a dull second in its sharp splenetic 30 minutes”
From the live record · Winter Lake Swimmers, autumn 2011
Small venues. Big feelings.
The live record runs from festival stages in 2007 to a seventeen-date European tour in the autumn of 2011, booked around the third album. Winter Lake Swimmers took them through Switzerland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany in three weeks, opening at Swn in Cardiff and finishing at Audioscope in Oxford.
An art punk band from Cardiff that never quite behaved
Cardiff in the middle of the 2000s was not short of bands. The city had Manic Street Preachers and Super Furry Animals behind it, Future of the Left and Los Campesinos! coming up beside it, and a circuit (Clwb Ifor Bach, the Barfly, Buffalo) that would give a three-piece a weeknight and see what happened. What this Cardiff art punk band did with those weeknights was decline to behave like a support act.
The first single, The Tales Of Hermit Mark, arrived on Fantastic Plastic in August 2005 with My Son Spells Backwards on the other side. Two more singles followed inside a year, and the self-titled debut album came in August 2006: eleven tracks, and a running time short enough that Time Out London made a point of it. It sounds like three people playing at once and daring each other to stop first.
The trick, if it was one, was the voices. Most bands have a singer. This one had a guitarist, a bassist and a drummer who all sang: sometimes in turn, often across each other, occasionally in a unison shout that landed between a chant and an argument. It is the thing every reviewer reached for, and the reason the B-52s line in Q stuck harder than the rest.
Love On An Oil Rig, the second album, took three years and a change of label. Parrot led it out in July 2009 on a limited heavyweight yellow seven-inch, with a video by Casey Raymond and Ewan Jones Morris, and the band spent the rest of that year on the road in Britain and then in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. Bored In Belgium followed in February 2010, a week late, because the pressing was stuck in snow outside Sheffield.
Bag of Meat, the third and last album, came out in 2011 and took the best notices of the three: four out of five in Uncut, five out of five in Artrocker, seven out of ten in NME. The Winter Lake Swimmers tour that autumn was the last long run, and the band stopped the following year without much ceremony. What is left is the records, the dates, the reviews and a few videos, which is more than most bands who started on a weeknight in Cardiff leave behind.
A Cardiff art punk band: Adam Taylor on guitar, Louise Mason on bass and Emma Daman on drums, all three of them singing. They released records between 2005 and 2011 and stopped in 2012. The Victorian English Gentlemens Club discography runs to eleven releases, three of which are albums.
Why is there no apostrophe in the name?
Because the band left it out on purpose and said so in print on their own site: there is no official apostrophe, although they were aware there should be one. Shops and databases use both spellings; the form without is the band’s own.
What did they actually sound like?
An art punk band from Cardiff with three singers and no obligation to a chorus. Q heard the B-52s in it, NME heard stripped-down rock’n’roll, and Plan B called the first album a record that strolls the periphery of pop as if stalking it. Guitars are trebly and sharp, the bass carries most of the tune, and songs tend to end before you expect them to.
Where do the dates, catalogue numbers and quotes here come from?
From the band’s own published release and gig listings, and from the printed poster for the 2011 European tour. Where no source ever gave a value (a catalogue number for the third album, for instance) the field is left out rather than filled in with a guess.
