HAMFATTER 

indie

Last login: 2007-08-07 23:40:27

They have split up

Hamfatter?

1. n. A third-rate minstrel, variety artist or actor. - vt and vi to act badly or ineffectively [Perh from an old Negro minstrel song, The Hamfat Man]. Derivation of the term Hammy acting.

Still convinced the New Rock Revolution was a good idea? Thought not. In these darkest of times when even bands like The Darkness are in danger of being taken seriously, you don’t have to be a pompous anti dumbing-down merchant to realise that some readjustment of perspectives is overdue. Ever since the days of Prog when The Soft Machine had their university degrees quoted in their liner notes, this country has never quite recovered from its embarrassment at actually being quite good at producing pop music for people who use brains. But whatever the pathologically anti-intellectual diktat of the British music fashistas, every now and then there will be an eloquent band like Hamfatter who will take inspiration from sources other than Australian lager ads.

Hell, they’re even from Cambridge (though not from a part of town likely to feature on postcards). For his own hard-earned degree, singer/songwriter/bass-, keyboard-player and potato obsessive Eoin O’Mahony wrote a scientific analysis of The Divine Comedy’s underrated masterpiece “Liberation.” Mostly, though, Hamfatter seem to be influenced by bands they’ve never or hardly heard such as the Violent Femmes, XTC, Ben Folds Five, The Modern Lovers, the Go-Betweens or the early Belle & Sebastian. But all of these comparisons are purely erm… academic, as contrary to current convention, Hamfatter don’t make music to recreate their record collections.

Eoin O’Mahony might be a classically trained pianist, but he’s got an inbuilt sense of inverted snobbery, i.e. he finds writing pop songs a lot more interesting than reading dead people’s minds. Guitarist, erstwhile drummer, sometime backing vocalist and songwriter James “Jimbo” Ingham harbours a secret penchant for 80s schlock rock (unlike the Darkness who secretly adore the Pastels). Drummer Mark Ellis drums like he doesn’t care (he doesn’t) and at the age of eighteen is not the youngest member of Hamfatter. Co-vocalist Emilie Martin, on the other hand, is the only one in the band who can dance to anything that isn’t ska.

Hamfatter formed three years ago in a different line-up including Eoin on bass, keyboards and vocals, and some people from Leicester. The original guitarist suffered a hand injury due to being asked to play too many difficult chords, although there have been other rumours, too. Meanwhile, their drummer had to give up “due to work commitments” (hmmm…). Then Jimbo (who had been in a band with Eoin before, just to make it more complicated for Pete Frame) joined on drums. Next a certain Cliff came in on guitar “and he choked on his own vomit or was it a bizarre gardening accident, in any case he had to leave the band”. At which point Mark joined, Jimbo switched to guitar, and Emilie was drafted in to help out in the dancing and singing department. “I mean, I could sing a bit,” adds Eoin in that enervating, self-deprecating way typical of the lucky f*cker who is gifted with the natural ability to sing, play the bass, the piano, the guitar or anything you throw at him without any visible effort.

During their brief existence, Hamfatter have amassed a loyal crowd of followers in the UK and continental Europe. All the time Eoin has been busy turning his tiny flat into Hamfatter’s very own hit factory, producing endless amounts of recordings, the cream of which surface on Hamfatter’s astonishingly colourful second album “Girls in Graz”, out summer 2005 on Pink Hedgehog records.

In many ways, Eoin O’Mahony is an old-school, i.e. observational kind of writer, but he’s never patronising, preferring to use the first person while exchanging the self-pity so endemic in the angst-ridden lyrics of most of today’s “serious” songwriters for a wry and unforgiving take on his own experience. Most of all though, there is a real depth of musical and lyrical possibilities in Hamfatter’s songs.