An Episode From The History Of British Pop Music

Elderberry Mudguard first hit the UK singles chart with her song: Reconcile My Cashbook Baby now regarded as the first song in British pop music’s Accountancy boom. Like the earlier blues boom of the early 1960s, the Accountancy boom began with British teenagers gaining access to something almost secret and unknown: the accounting songs, auditing hollers, taxation spirituals and reconciliation shouts of the accountancy workers.

Britain’s first late night accountancy clubs began in the cellars and backstreets of some of Britain’s trendiest happening cities and towns like Hull, Carlisle, Leominster, and – of course – Walsall where the legendary Expenses Claimed club opened with its infamous house band The Strolling Auditors, featuring their legendary lead guitar auditor, Stroppy ‘calculator’ Penisenvy. Their act became famous for its deep, almost reverential, love and respect for some of the most arcane auditing and accounting songs of the deep south east, those songs first sung by those who slaved in the financial services industry for banks, the large accountancy firms and - even - the government’s own Auditing Commission.

Elderberry Mudguard started out as lead singer, of course, with The Strolling Auditors, for a while she was even Penisenvy’s girlfriend, but they fell out over some mislaid receipts and the band was never the same again, especially when Penisenvy’s increasingly heavy use of tea and biscuits resulted in some tax miscalculations that led to the band being liable for the full cost of their office supplies for the entire financial year.

Penisenvy split from the band, and The Strolling Auditors broke up. Penisenvy slipped slowly into some heavy spreadsheet use until – almost inevitably – he was found one day drowned under a pile of his own tax returns.

Mudguard soon gave up accountancy and made herself respectable by moving into the then nascent hardcore pornography scene, staring in the now infamous Behind the Tax Returns, before dropping out of public life and becoming a recluse, living out her final years far from civilisation in Wolverhampton.

The British Accountancy Boom, like all such pop music fads and fashions soon burnt itself out all too soon though, as the fickle pop music scene changed again. Only months after The Strolling Auditors disbanded it seemed everyone was into the new sound of the new Californian Human Resources wave, jangly, guitar-driven happy songs abut boys and girls getting into how organisations manage their workers and the Fun, Fun, Fun of life in the Personnel Departments of major industrial conglomerates.