Surprise!
Biography
Surprise! Is the calamitous mind meeting of four music geeks in north London. Olly and Beard met after being sacked from their bands at the time for being Vegetarian. They found Jekey after he left the biggest rock band Hungary has ever seen and plucked Tekken from a crazy prog-rock band purely because he had a cool name, both were also vegetarian.
Their music is a cacophony of styles, an irreverent post-modern pastiche of pop gone by. Olly’s lyrics are at once whimsical and profound, ‘I tried writing a song about the Iraq war and it came out like a twisted Christmas carol’ he says of Calypso stomp ‘Jack Frost’. 'Lets Go To LA' is at once wide-eyed and sarcastic and contains a guest vocal from LA scene legend and star of ‘Mayor of Sunset Strip’ (Tartan Films 2004) Kim Fowley, who suggested the band call themselves 'Surprise!'. 'Keith Moon from the Who wanted to change their name to Surprise! after I suggested it to him but they were already too well known.' says Kim. ‘Internet Love Song’ is a swipe at DIY celebrity Myspace culture but Olly acknowledges that ‘we all want fame and fortune without having to work for it, that kind of makes Lilly Allen culturally more important than Gordon Brown, its more vulgar to pursue fame incessantly than it is to stumble on it accidentally online’. Tekken says ‘Ye’.
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Ironic, anti-narcissistic, and pogo-ing ‘Love One Another’ is exactly the sort of mischievous and inventive pop that made London the centre of the universe in the 60’s, only now it’s the naughty’s and that is far more befitting of Surprise!
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.