It seems like a long time since I posted one of Suzanna’s photographs here. Perhaps she has been busy until now, perhaps she has been away on a multicoloured plastic safari, I don’t know. This picture would certainly suggest that something has been going on.
Following on from episodes 1-5 (March 28th) in which our hoovering heroes twiddled thumbs and solved muffin mysteries, here are episodes 6-10. This time we find Zoza and Xoxox embroiled in rather more serious stuff as they make their way in the uncertain world of hoovering detection. Continue reading
Hello. This is the sixth moustachioed gent tale which was left out of the original collection for various reasons (though mostly because I hadn’t finished it then). Now it is finished and can be read below. Continue reading
Intrigued and disappointed by the lack of a good mint biscuit on the market, this week I took biscuit production into my own hands and made my own. Knowing that I definitely did not ‘vont a viscount’, I set out to produce an alternative. It seems that if you want mint in a biscuit then you have to have a chocolate biscuit such as a Mint Club or a Viscount. Well, that had to change. Armed with a recipe book ripe for the rejibbying and a wee bottle of peppermint flavouring I got to work… Continue reading
The Debbie McGees talk to Digestive Press
Brighton’s new uke heroes The Debbie McGees give an exclusive first ever interview to Digestive Press and talk about biscuits, killer plants and big pencils.
Digestive Press: What is The Debbie McGees’ favourite biscuit?
Hilary Hotfeathers (ukulele, vocals): That’s a very hard question. I am partial to a pink wafer myself. I generally like anything with ‘Crunch’ in the name. Fox’s Cream Crunch, Country Crunch, Crunch Bunch, etc.
Barry Allen (ukulele, vocals): Rich Tea has always been my default.
The Thomas Ferguson Band (ukulele, vocals): I think if I could only eat one type of biscuit for the rest of forever I’d choose the humble digestive. It is the biscuit equivalent of air. I’m not entirely sure if that means it’s my favourite, for sake of argument I’ll hand it to the bourbon, it’s the king of biscuits, hence the name.
DP: Please wax lyrical about three (perhaps one each) major influences on the Debbie McGees be they bands, books, films, food, places, people or items of clothing.
TTFB: I’d like to talk about a song, which is ‘Two Of The Beatles Have Died’, written by a three-year-old girl called Olivia. She might be four years old now, I don’t know. Tracy Is Hot & The Clap did a good cover of it last year. It is possibly the perfect pop song; it’s certainly a song that informs a lot of what we do. It’s not really surprising that a child would write the perfect song as innocence in pop music is incredibly important, and the problem is that if we ever attempt to claim that, for instance, all of The Beatles were brothers, most people would know that we didn’t think that, so it would look contrived. Maybe it’s just because I like songs that mention the Beatles. Like the ones by Daniel Johnston and Devandra Banhart. And maybe songs aren’t the sort of thing to wax lyrical about in case it dampens their magic or whatever. Maybe I should have just talked about banana milkshake.
HH: My polka dot dresses. I have a collection of about ten dresses with polka dots on, ranging in colour, weight, durability, circumference…I think Thomas borrows them when I’m not in the house, I keep finding them strewn on my bed smelling of Co-Op Dutch Lager, and nobody else would drink that. They make me feel mighty real. They make me feel like being twee doesn’t have to mean being a jangly Jane.
BA: …
With their painted faces and ukulele-heavy sound The Debbie McGees sound like a made up band, the kind that you could imagine featuring in a comic strip. It’s always the best way. Friends before they formed, they acquired some instruments and hey presto! As Thomas describes it, “it’s like a gang mentality without any knives.” Instead of knives they wield ukuleles at plants (see below) and play gigs to audiences of one. “Our second gig had one person turn up, our friend Kathryn. Barry wasn’t even on the stage, he was sat next to her, we ploughed through ‘Richard Aston’ and then just decided to have a conversation instead.”
In an age where most bands don’t even have one ukulele, The Debbie McGees have three.
DP: Do your ukuleles have names?
TTFB: Terence Trent D’arby.
HH: Mr Claude Atkins. He’s a bluey.
TTFB: My granddad used to have a habit of naming absolutely everything, so it’s put me in good practice. I think we still have his rubber plant, Colin, and his portable heater called Cedric. Or maybe George? I can’t remember which one.
DP: Would you ever consider adding different instruments or would you be more likely to add a fourth uke?
HH: The first thing I’d add would be a xylophone or some woodblocks.
TTFB: I’d be more interested in adding more vocalists really. Maybe sticking a choir on one of our songs, that what I imagine happening to our songs in my head. I like us being a trio though. Sense of the trinity and everything.
BA: We could set up a uke or two as a drum set.
Of course, to those who follow the fortunes of bands-who-play-ukulele-and-have-‘McGee-in-their-name, The Debbie McGees may cause some confusion with twee, Brighton-via-Glasgow duo The Bobby McGees. As Thomas explains, it is all going to be ok: “I thought it was appropriate to call ourselves The Debbie McGees as Debbie McGee is known for being Paul Daniel’s wife, and we’re known for copying somebody else’s name. So I was worried that they would think we were taking the piss out of them, but I got a MySpace message from them saying that they saw one of our gig posters up and it’s now on the wall in their front room so we were completely flattered.”
With that sorted out lets move on to the subject of The Debbie McGees’ first single, ‘Richard Aston, keep it under your hat,’ the video for which can be seen below.
DP: In ‘Richard Aston’ you unsuccessfully battle a killer plant with a ukulele. In retrospect is there a better way you could have tried to deal with the situation or would you do the same again?
BA: Our demise was inevitable.
TTFB: Indeed, so, same again all the way. I have strength in my convictions. I realise my problem this time was that I grabbed the neck and tried to whack it with the body of the uke, and the leaves would just bend every time I made contact with the plant. Whereas if I’d grabbed the body of the uke and jabbed at the leafy bastard with the machine-head end then i’d be more likely to maim its scrawny green torso before it devastated me.
HH: I would use a popular weed killer or some slugs. Or a combination of the two. Maybe slugs armed with pipettes of weed killer. And a back-up army of snails with aphid ray-guns.
When the numbers wore away, trampled down to dust through over-use and the telecommunications market collapsed as a result, Tim was forced to look for a new career. He decided to take his skills as a salesman into a more stable market and moved into vegetables, finding employment with a garrulous grocer named Gary.
There was one tiny problem. Tim had never, not once in his thirty years of human existence, seen vegetables in their natural state before. Deprived of this pleasure until now he was, understandably, a little suspicious of them. Potatoes he could deal with, so too carrots and onions, he had seen pictures of these. But when it came to the likes of parsnips, sprouts and cabbage, Tim was convinced that they were up to something. Continue reading
MILK CHOCOLATE MALTED MILK When looking in the supermarket for something a little different to try I came across the milk chocolate covered malted milk and had to give it a go. I was a little sceptical – the chocolisation of all biscuits has lead to some excellent sub-species such as the chocolate digestive, now eclipsing the humble plain digestive, and the chocolate hob-nob, bringing to life what I always thought to be a remarkably dull biscuit. However, as we saw with the recent dark chocolate hob-nob disaster it is not always a good idea to make things more chocolatey. So, how about malted milks?
They have always struck me as a very innocent biscuit – nice little picture of a cow, interesting-enough-but-not-too-exciting flavour and the word milk in the title. It screams out, “eat me with a glass of milk, don’t eat too many!” Covering them in milk chocolate does seem to make them far more munchable, tempting the taster on to scoff more than they should in a way that the plain version would never have done. Still, they have been chocolised in a respectful way, a slim coating of milk chocolate that enhances rather than overpowers the malted milk itself. So hats off on a job well done, a biscuit to look out for.
Digestive Press 