Bogshed were an independent band formed in Hebden Bridge

Hebden Bridge

Hebden Bridge is a market town within the Metropolitan Borough of Calderdale, in West Yorkshire, England. It forms part of the Upper Calder Valley and lies 8 miles west of Halifax and 14 miles north east of Rochdale, at the confluence of the River Calder and the River Hebden .A 2004 profile of...

, Yorkshire, England in 1984, originally as The Amazing Roy North Penis Band.

History

The band formed in early 1984 and comprised Phil Hartley (vocals), Mark McQauid (guitar), Mike Bryson (bass guitar), and Tris King (drums). Bryson also produced the cover art for the band's releases. The name came from a misheard line in a song, with Hartley explaining "I like the way that the mouth moves when you say Bog Shed". They were helped initially by The Membranes

The Membranes

The Membranes were a post-punk band formed in Blackpool, Lancashire in 1977, the initial line-up being John Robb , Mark Tilton , Martin Critchley and Martin Kelly . Critchley soon left, with Robb and Tilton taking on vocals, and Kelly moving to keyboards, with "Coofy Sid" taking over on drums...

, leading to several performances in London, and the band's first release was the Let Them Eat Bogshed EP

Extended play

An EP is a musical recording which contains more music than a single, but is too short to qualify as a full album or LP. The term EP originally referred only to specific types of vinyl records other than 78 rpm standard play records and LP records, but it is now applied to mid-length Compact...

 on John Robb's Vinyl Drip label in 1985. By the time of this release, the band had already played around 35 concerts and, according to Hartley, written between 80 and 100 songs.

Not really sounding like anyone before or since, they had much in common with some of the bands on the Ron Johnson

Ron Johnson Records

Ron Johnson Records was an UK independent record label based in Long Eaton operating between 1983 and 1988. The label contributed five tracks to the NME's C86 compilation. Run by Dave Parsons, the label released records by artists such as Big Flame, The Shrubs, A Witness, The Great Leap Forward,...

label. Bryson explained their approach to songwriting: "We start out being totally out of order and out of key and we turn things like that into a pop song. Most people try to do it the other way round." They released two albums and several singles as well as recording five Peel Sessions, before splitting in 1987. Two of these sessions, from 1986, were issued on the Tried and Tested Public Speaker EP in January 1987, described by Liz Evans in Underground as "a mixture of throbbing, jogging rhythm and a bleating voice which rolls those words around and spits them out with plenty of spleen and bile".

Bogshed appeared on the NME

NME

The New Musical Express is a popular music publication in the United Kingdom, published weekly since March 1952. It started as a music newspaper, and gradually moved toward a magazine format during the 1980s, changing from newsprint in 1998. It was the first British paper to include a singles...

s C86

C86 (music)

C86 is a cassette compilation released by the British music magazine NME in 1986, featuring new bands licensed from independent labels of the time. As a phrase, C86 quickly evolved into shorthand for a guitar-based musical genre characterised by "jangly" guitars and fey melodies, although other...

compilation, and the term shambling was coined by John Peel

John Peel

John Robert Parker Ravenscroft, OBE , known professionally as John Peel, was an English disc jockey, radio presenter, record producer and journalist. He was the longest-serving of the original BBC Radio 1 DJs, broadcasting regularly from 1967 until his death in 2004...

 to describe their sound, although the term later became more commonly used to describe bands such as The Pastels

The Pastels

The Pastels are a group from Glasgow, Scotland, UK.Their early records for labels like Whaam!, Creation, Rough Trade, and Glass Records, had a raw and immediate sound, melodic and amateur, which seemed at odds with the time...

.

Singles

• Let Them Eat Bogshed EP (1985, Vinyl Drip) #8

1. "Panties Please"
2. "Spencer Travis"
3. "Fat Lad Exam Failure"
4. "Slave Girls"
5. "City Girls"
6. "Hand Me Down Father"

• "Morning Sir" (1986, Shelfish) #2

1. "Morning Sir"
2. "The Story of Bogshed"

• Tried and Tested Public Speaker (The Peel Session) EP (1987, Shelfish) #13

1. "Tried And Tested Public Speaker"
2. "Champion Love Shoes"
3. "Little Grafter"
4. "Morning Sir"
5. "Fastest Legs"
6. "Adventure Of Dog"

• "Excellent Girl" (1987, Shelfish) #30

1. "Excellent Girl"
2. "True Rope"

• "Stop Revolving" (1988, Shelfish) (only a few copies were released)

Albums

• Step On It (1986, Shelfish) #4

1. "Mechanical Nun"
2. "Run To The Temple"
3. "Adventure Of Dog"
4. "Tommy Steele Record"
5. "Jobless Youngsters"
6. "Tried To Hide But Forced To Howl"
7. "Packed Lunch To School"
8. "Summer In My Lunchtime"
9. "The Fastest Legs"
10. "Oily Stack"
11. "Hell Bent On Death"
12. "Thunderballs"
13. "Can't Be Beat"
14. "Little Car"

• Brutal (1987, Shelfish) #20

1. "Raise The Girl"
2. "Geoff's Big Problem"
3. "Old Dog New Dance"
4. "No To Lemon Mash"
5. "I'm The Instrument"
6. "Opportunatist Knocks"
7. "People Equal Greedy"
8. "Sing A Little Tune"
9. "C'Mon Everybody"
10. "Uncle Death Grip"
11. "Spring"
12. "Loaf"

External links

• Unofficial Bogshed website