In the early summer of 1980 former Punk personality Luminary of Gillingham in Kent and fanatical follower of Adam and the Ants MK1 (not the Bid of Monochrome Set's really earlier version that is) Fergus Crockford found himself living in Canterbury amongst some art students at the Canterbury College of Art - Melanie, Jet, and Mark. Having previously been in a punk band from Hildenborough in Kent called The Klingons in 1978/9 with Mark - which besides having its name taken by a number of other bands when it played a few gigs in London and so got listed in the Time Out gig guides (leading to ourselves being able to boast of being part of the First Wave of British Punk, which we thought we'd missed), and which also came to a similar drummer-centric demise as the Sons of Blob (see below) - Fergus began to have the beginnings of a "band plan" again. Bizarrely, Alasdair Blaazer (who came from the same town in Kent as Mark did and had at that point only been in an imaginary band all by himself in his bedroom called The Ambassadors, which he had tried to morph into a proper band with Scala Cinema Modettes Debbie and Lee with Mark on guitar earlier in the year) also landed up in Canterbury, flipping burgers, and was dragooned in as sax player. Fergus' idea was to form a band that would fit in with the nascent psychobilly genre recently invented by The Cramps, a band whose one-time drummer Miriam had picked up Alasdair (when he was in a somewhat Teddy Boy Damaged state) off of a London Street and taken him to the casualty department at the nearest hospital for urgent treatment. Ah... an angel in Cramps clothing!
The band was a stripped down, back-to-basics affair with Fergus abandoning bass (which Melanie took over) to play primitive guitar, whilst Mark was recruited as vocalist/frontman specifically because he could play guitar and was therefore forbidden to go near the instrument, and he also had the stature and vocal-style of Lux Interior. Chris Lucas, ex-Kilburn & The High Roads was asked to be drummer. There was a gig looming in support to The Crewsy Fixers and also Shakin' Stevens ex-band The Sunsets. Jet was borrowed from The Crewsy Fixers for the gig. This was the end of summer term bash at the Art College. With one week to go the band set up residence in Caravan's rehearsal studio in a local school and everyone set about learning Fergus' trashy B Movie songs.
The name was invented by Alasdair and Mark's (at the time) obsession of going to see trashy horror movies on Saturday nights at The Scala Cinema in Tottenham Street, London, W1. They had recently seen the classic 1958 film The Blob and the 1972 sequel directed by Dallas star Larry Hagman, The Son of Blob there, and so, the name Sons of Blob naturally coelesced out of their ramblings about those films.
They proceeded to do the gig and stormed through their set (see
www.sarzi.co.uk/gig2 and www.sarzi.co.uk/gig2b - click on the black and white logo to proceed to further pages - it's a lot easier than typing in the page's URL every time and you will also find photos of The Crewsy Fixers at that gig: BTW, these links are automatically disabled by MySpace thinking that they are Virused Phishing Devices - they are not, it is a genuine Sons of Blob related website belonging to The Grand Nifty himself, so, you'll just have to type in the URL, sorry about that...).
After that phenomenal start, Mark left to go to Leeds Polytechnic Fine Art Department and Chris and Jet also departed. They were replaced by John Richardson on vocals and Jean on drums (later joined by another girl drummer who was meant to be replaced by Stan when she left). With this line-up the Sons of Blob recorded the songs on this profile's player when Mark came back from Leeds in the holidays with his newly acquired Teac reel-to-reel tape recorder. The band became a regular fixture on the Canterbury Live Scene until Stan joined, but he was tragically killed in a car crash on the same night he became a member. This was a cruel blow and after that the band split up sometime around the autumn of 1981 (I think?).
After that Fergus went on to form the Skinbat Scramble in Leeds with Mark and Mark Ryder (also from Canterbury College of Art). Alasdair later joined the Skinbat Scramble before abandoning the sax altogether to pursue his blues guitar vox persona. Melanie lives somewhere on the coast of Kent, and John has not been heard of since Mark encountered both him and Chris Lucas playing in a country band in Whitstable about 12 years ago. Jean and Jet have vanished completely.
