Buzz Drainpipe’s Unmoored Unraveling of Stackridge’s The Man in the Bowler Hat

Originally published in the final mimeographed issue of Acid Fudge Gazette, folded into an origami toad and left under a milk bottle on Eno’s doorstep, 1974.

There’s a man with a bowler hat in the garden of my cerebellum, dear reader, and he’s juggling strawberries dipped in Bach. That man’s name is Stackridge, and this record? This is not just an album—it’s a satirical pantomime in sonic Technicolor, a chamber-pop Monty Python musical starring a platoon of talking badgers and one very persuasive brass section.

The Man in the Bowler Hat is the sound of a band possessed by the ghosts of The Beatles and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Produced by George Martin himself—yes, that George Martin, still radiating Abbey Road stardust like a benign space pope—the album is a madcap pageant of harpsichords, harmoniums, honking saxes, and vaudeville vocals that waltz through English meadows on stilts.

Let us examine the evidence:

• “Fundamentally Yours” is the kind of sweet, disarming pop gem you hum while sipping absinthe in a glass-bottom boat. It’s got the pastoral sparkle of a Paul McCartney tune, if Paul had been exiled to a commune of eccentric beetle taxonomists.

• “Humiliation” is as if a forgotten Noël Coward ditty had an anxiety dream and woke up inside Sgt. Pepper’s. Wry, theatrical, and ever-so-slightly psychotic.

• “The Galloping Gaucho” is the soundtrack to a silent film that doesn’t exist but probably should—a slapstick bullfight through the subconscious, starring your uncle's mustache and a runaway grand piano.

• And “God Speed the Plough”? That’s an epic, man. A rural hymn delivered by a mythical Morris dancing choir halfway between Avalon and a cider-drenched hayride. It’s England dreaming itself back to an imaginary past before electricity, but with stereo mixing.

Stackridge were never cool. They were never glam, never punk, never prog in the solemn sense. But that’s the trick—they were beyond it all. They wore bowler hats in a world of bell bottoms. They were jesters, not junkies. They painted their little corner of 1974 not with nihilism, but with a full box of colored pencils and the delighted glee of children allowed to stay up past bedtime.

This album isn’t just music—it’s a cosmo-carnival of whimsy, a sketchbook of sonic doodles drawn by brilliant weirdos who knew that silliness is a revolutionary act when the world gets too drab. Play it while wearing a monocle in the bath. Play it backwards during a séance. But whatever you do, play it loud and with the windows open. The bowler-hatted man deserves an audience.

Final Score: 9 powdered wigs out of 10 badgers in waistcoats.
Long live the ludicrous. Long live Stackridge.