Legends of Rock - Part One

Osteopath Chaingun* and the Psychodramatic Megastoats first hit the British singles chart back in the summer of 1975 with their first single (The Square Of The Sum Of The Other Two Sides Makes You) My Squared Hypotenuse, Baby. Championed by Radio 1’s only ever truly hip DJ, Stan Rind**. The Megastoats soon achieved that level of obscurity that is a guarantee of rock music success.

However, The Megas (as they became known to their fan) did not stay obscure for long. By some oversight, they had managed to pick – as their lead guitarist – Nigel ‘Fluffytree’ Hacknslash, who possessed a trait unusual in a rock musician, a natural ability with, and a rudimentary understanding of, music.

In fact, such was his musical prowess that he spent nearly seven weeks as the principal triangle player in his junior school orchestra, until replaced by a girl who knew that a semi-quaver was not as Nigel presumed a half-masticated crisp-like snack.

It was through the musical efforts of Nigel Hacknslash that disaster befell the Megastoats. For it was he who accidentally penned a tune that an over-eager record company released as the perfunctory single from the Psychodramatic Megastoats first album: Put The Cheese Back In The Fridge, Doreen. This was, of course, The Square Of The Sum Of The Other Two Sides Makes You) My Squared Hypotenuse, Baby. Unfortunately, this led to the Megastoats having to appear on the then terminally unhip Top of the Pops, where Osteopath Chaingun, because he was one of the few rock stairs not to have a face like a hedgehog after a meeting with an articulated lorry, soon became a darling of the teenybop audiences of that programme. This meant Chaingun became the darling of those teenyboppers who had left behind Donny Osmond and David Cassidy, along with all their other pre-adult adolescent longings as they looked for someone who seemed to have more than a theoretical knowledge of the differences between the sexes, such that there was back in the 1970s***.

However, the Megas where saved from the fate of being known as 'a teenybopper’s band', when Chaingun fell off the balcony of his Chelsea penthouse apartment hen trying to retrieve a groupie’s bra that had somehow become attached to the next door apartment’s TV aerial during a rather tense episode of The Sweeny.

After that, the Megas replaced Chaingun with Spunk Splatterback, a man so ugly that even his own mother tried to drown him in a sack, and – consequently – only a few months later the Psychodramatic Megastoats returned to the obscurity that their talents so richly deserved.



*Real name - Norman Barnstoneworth
**Real name – Lord Rupert Henry Farigthonstone-Worthy III
***Hence the familiar cry of the 1970s-era father made to witness Top of the Pops by his offspring of: ‘Is that a man or a woman?’ to nearly every act – except, of course, Gilbert O’Sullivan.