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Artist
The Strolling Ones
4+ albums
eighties80ssynthpopnoisecomedy
about
The Strolling Ones (TSO for short) are a band from Paignton, UK consisting of Martin Bizarro and Stewart Keith. They were mainly active in the mid 1980s but apart from a couple of gigs in 2005 have done nothing else. David Keenan, enthusing about the band, described them as "inspired by surreal British comedy a la Monty Python and riotous atonal noise," and "one of the key lost bands of the UK underground scene." In about 1978 they became interested in home taping.This soon became a new hobby, recording strange conversations and jokes, which later evolved into comedy sketches, influenced mainly by Spike Milligan and Monty Python. In 1981 the duo became a group called Us, and started recording music; either a capella cover versions or original percussion pieces, while still maintaining the comedy aspect of their tapes. At the end of 1982 the band started writing lyrics. The first few lyrics, written in one day, were of course terrible, with titles like "I Think I've Got a Twelve Foot Chocolate Cake", but were funny because of their badness - the boys were fans of William MacGonagall. By 1983 The name Us seemed insufficient, and a new name was sought. Turning to a copy of The Unexplained magazine, they pointed into it randomly, and found the words "27 August". They decided that this was too absurd a name, even for the early eighties, so they tried a different page. The name "27 August" came up again. Fate had decided and the name was adopted. Also in 1983 Martin wrote t