Trent, Kent, Bent and Palsy

Trent, Kent, Bent and Palsy

“Hunny Buns” c/w “Disco Demon”

SISTEM RECORDS  SIST 34

Released November 6^th 1975

Stan Trent (Vocals, Guitar, Maracas, Afro Comb), Harvey Kent (Keyboards, Accounts), Bob Bent (Marimas, Baristas, Cochineal), Stanmore Palsy (Bass, Chest Hair)

Stan Trent, Harvey Kent, Bob Bent and Stanmore Palsy emerged from the flaming Prog wreckage of Birmingham’s Tit Monocle to form a white funk outfit centred mainly around the extremely extravagant white man afro of Stan Trent.

Turning their back on complex time signatures, concept albums and an appallingly mediocre cash flow, the foursome fired Tit Monocle flautist Greg Happy and jumped aboard the Disco bandwagon.

“The Disco bandwagon was gathering pace”, recalls Harvey Kent. “It had definitely shifted up a gear from second to third and was doing about 35 miles per hour in a 40 zone. It hadn’t yet slipped into fifth and joined the motorway at Junction 12a, but it was doing a respectable speed and we felt that, if we ran fast enough, we might just be able to get on board”.

Whereas Tit Monocle had specialized in lengthy pieces about Faeries, Daemons, Time Travel and Alternative Universes, the new band opted for songs about girls with big arses onto which they could pour honey all night long.

“It was purely an artistic decision”, says Kent. “We felt we had explored the outer reaches of Space to the full: there was simply no more universe to write about, what with it being a finite space trapped in a small bottle on the mantelpiece of a Martian cephalopod called Ben. Instead, our muse took us in the direction of well endowed black women who liked to have foodstuffs dripped onto them”.

Their first single “Hunny Buns” laid the foundations for what was to come:

Ooh, baby, you a woman and me a funky man

Yessa, baby, you knows I gots me’s a funky plan

Gonna grab me a pot of funky jam

An’ spread it all over, yeah, your sexy hams

After years of touring with Tit Monocle to little effect, this white Disco band suddenly hit it big, selling close to 350,000 copies. “It was 349,343 according to my audit”, remembers Kent. “With the profits I was able to pay off the HP loan on my Moog Sideboard. That debt had been worrying me for some time”.

Less happy was Greg Happy, the sacked flute player. “I wasn’t happy”, says Happy. “I played my lips off for Tit Monocle and there I was, on the Prog scrapheap, watching them ride off into the sunset on the Disco bandwagon. Well, it wasn’t so much a sunset as a dual carriageway; the A456 from Bromsgrove I seem to recall”.

However, Happy had his moment of schadenfreude when disaster struck Trent, Kent, Bent and Palsy. “The B-side of Hunny Bunny hinted at the band’s previous life in Prog. It was about summoning an incubus in a graveyard so that they could dance and have sex with a Disco Demon. The chorus involved an incantation from an ancient book of sorcery, over a thumping 4/4 beat. From what I understand, a demon was indeed summoned during a gig at Lancaster Polytechnic and Stanmore Palsy died of fright”.