Dog Faced Hermans

Dog Faced Hermans were a post-punk band that formed in Scotland in the mid 1980s and remained active through the mid 1990s. They emerged from the UK anarcho-punk scene with a guitar/bass/drums line-up, but also incorporated trumpet and other instruments not commonly found in punk music at that time. Their composition style incorporated many genres of music outside of rock, including folk, jazz, ambient and noise music with often unorthodox instrumentation.

History

1980s

Dog Faced Hermans formed in Edinburgh, Scotland out of the female-fronted funk-punk sextet Volunteer Slavery, named after an album by Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Londoner Andy Moor, who was studying anthropology in Edinburgh, first met Colin McLean at a benefit for the Scottish Campaign to Remove the Atomic Menace, and the two shared a love of James Brown, free jazz, reggae, and African music. McLean owned both a guitar and a bass, which he traded off with Moor, eventually setting on who was to play which in the band after realizing that the songs they liked best were the ones with McLean on bass and Moor on guitar. Wilf plum had been moonlighting with local noise bands Finitribe and Stretchheads, and Marion Coutts took time off from her studies at Edinburgh College of Art to play trumpet, and the whole group also took to banging on oil drums and other percussion.

Their band got their new name from a scene in a Frankenstein movie, "where a woman dreams that her husband, whose name is Herman, gets turned into a dog," although the phrase occurs in the 1933 horror The Vampire Bat. When the group started, they played primarily improvised music, "like bashing oil drums and hitting the guitars without actually playing very many tunes," according to drummer Wilf Plum. The group's longer improvisations were condensed into shorter arranged songs that maintained their experimental qualities. The Hermans' line-up stayed constant throughout their tenure, with Marion Coutts fronting the band on vocals, trumpet and percussion, Andy Moor on guitar, Colin Mclean on bass, and Wilf Plum on drums. Within their first three years as a band, the Hermans recorded and released a few singles and two albums on their own Demon Radge Records and on journalist Everett True’s label, Calculus.Strong, Martin C.: "The Great Alternative & Indie Discography", 1999, Canongate, These early records demonstrated the breadth of the band's influences, including English and Scottish post-punk, American no wave, and various styles of folk music, exemplified in their renditions of the Italian partisan song " Bella Ciao" and the blues standard " John Henry".

While in the UK, the Dog Faced Hermans made numerous appearances on the BBC
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