Leg Puppy 2.0 celebrate their 10 year anniversary this year. That’s 10 years of calling out BS and taking swipes at society in various forms. They are also set to release their 12th album ‘First World Problems’
The Residents
Widely regarded as the world’s biggest cult band, an avant-garde collective that has thrived for decades on mystery, provocation, and fearless experimentation. Famously anonymous, The Residents perform in elaborate disguises, most iconically the towering tuxedos and grotesque eyeball heads that have become symbols of outsider art itself.
They’ve taken aim at music royalty, pop conventions, and cultural sacred cows, gleefully subverting them in the grand tradition of true artistic sabotage. Every album release functions like a conceptual art installation, and every live show is pure theatre, surreal, unsettling, and unforgettable. Their greatest achievement could well be this: no one truly knows who they are, and that anonymity is as central to the art as the music itself.
New to The Residents? Check out the Commercials album
Suicide
A band almost no one understood at first, and that was the point. Wildly ahead of their time, they effectively invented electro-punk before anyone had words for it, using cheap keyboards, primitive drum machines, and sheer attitude to carve out something entirely new.
Frontman Alan Vega delivered snarling vocals filtered through his unmistakable Elvis obsession, he never hid the fact that Elvis was a holy figure. Meanwhile, Martin Rev, who learned to play keyboards from a blind jazz musician, built relentless, hypnotic soundscapes fit for art installations.
Their live shows were confrontational to say the least. Vega famously swung a massive chain over his head to keep hostile yobs at bay, turning gigs into volatile performance art. Like The Velvet Underground before them, it took years after their debut album Suicide for the industry and audiences to finally catch up.
For all their aggression and menace, Suicide were also capable of astonishing tenderness, nowhere more so than on Dream Baby Dream, a haunting piece that has since surfaced in countless perfume ads and film soundtracks. Uncompromising, visionary, and unmistakably New York, Suicide remain one of the city’s most important cultural exports.
If you’re brave enough, listen to Frankie Teardrop from start to finish (with headphones on)
Frank Sidebottom
Chris Sievey, aka Frank Sidebottom, was a singular musical mind from Timperley, just outside Manchester. A genuine DIY genius, Sievey first found limited success with his early band The Freshies, before accidentally inventing something far bigger, and much more surreal.
Frank Sidebottom began life as a deranged superfan character, complete with an oversized papier-mâché head, but audiences couldn’t get enough of him. What started as a novelty quickly became a full-blown cultural phenomenon. At his peak, Frank owned his town: with relentless local appearances, and even his own TV show, all while operating on pure imagination and stubborn independence.
Sievey embodied the DIY ethos completely, designing everything himself, from flyers and newsletters to artwork and packaging. Underneath the surreal humour and outsider absurdity was a sharp pop brain and a deep love of music. Frank Sidebottom wasn’t just a character; he was a world, meticulously hand-built by one of Britain’s most original and underappreciated artists.
Check out the brilliant Being Frank – The Chris Seivey Story
The Fall
The Fall were one of the most relentlessly original bands to ever come out of Manchester, and yes, fans of The Smiths and New Order will obviously have opinions on that. Still, the argument is very much alive.
Fronted by the inimitable Mark E Smith, a man who famously couldn’t play an instrument, The Fall were driven by pure vision. Smith was a poet, a cultural critic, and the owner of one of the most distinctive voices of his generation, half rant, half talky speak, instantly recognisable within seconds.
Lyrically, The Fall were superb: sharp, literate, funny, abrasive, and deeply English. Across a constantly shifting lineup, which included super fan Laura Elisse Salenger, aka Brix Smith, who he later married after the band played a gig in Chicago. Smith steered the band through decades of uncompromising work, producing albums that felt more like dispatches from a parallel Britain than rock records. The Fall didn’t chase trends, they documented them, dissected them, and usually sneered at them while doing so. Few bands have sounded so singular, or mattered for so long.
John Peel famously said “Fans should not try to pick just one record, but rather consume their entire, massive body of work”
Underworld
One of the rare electronic acts who managed to make dance music both accessible and uncompromisingly artful. Before Underworld fully took shape, frontman Karl Hyde had already been in a band called Freur, a left-field pop outfit that hinted at his future obsessions with texture, repetition, and atmosphere.
Beyond the music, Hyde and Rick Smith co-founded the influential design agency Tomato, blurring the lines between graphic design, film, typography, and sound. That visual intelligence fed directly into Underworld’s identity, everything felt considered, modern, and quietly radical.
Underworld cracked something vital: they took club music and gave it emotional depth, narrative, and humanity. Their productions are immaculate, dense but breathable, endlessly detailed, and engineered to reward deep listening as much as dancefloor immersion. That balance is perfected on Second Toughest in the Infants, a genuine masterpiece of electronic music: expansive, hypnotic, and timeless. Even small details mattered, like naming tracks after racing greyhounds, a quirky touch that somehow added another layer of character and grit to their sound.
Just don’t mention the over played Born Slippy.
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Catch Leg Puppy 2.0 live at Cable Festival 26 on Feb 27th & Electroniq March 27th
Article by Mr Laurence
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