UK born singer/guitarist Phil Dean jumped ship from his homeland in 2000, making for the sunny shores of Melbourne, Australia. A series of archaic pagan rituals went horribly wrong, forcing him to abandon earlier plans of world-domination, and he decided to return to his musical 'career'. The first Zeptepi demos emerged in 2001, but it wasn't until 2004 that a band was recruited, due mainly to a horrific injury to Phil's sofa which had rendered it uncomfortable.
Bernie Dodd had been living in stasis with his drum kit since the early 1900's (mainly because nobody knew how to turn the stasis machine off), and it was sheer chance that Phil found him and woke him up just seconds before his electricity was cut off. Thus he had a drummer, although one of Bernie's sticks refused to wake up on the grounds that it was a public holiday.
In 2004 the impossibly good-looking Frank Packer joined up on bass, only to leave almost immediately. Remarkably, another bass player, also called Frank Packer, was recruited the following week, although he was only averagely handsome and smelt a bit funny.
Several keyboard players entered the fray and were promptly dismissed - one for not having a keyboard, another for not having any fingers and another for being unable to conclusively prove that he even existed (his evidence was purely anecdotal and deemed unacceptable by scientific consensus).
In January 2005, the band released their debut album 'Travelling Through Time', a collection of songs recorded at home on a studio constructed from double-sided sticky tape, empty washing-up liquid bottles and 4 pipe-cleaners. Heralded as a classic land-mark album in its genre by nobody at all, it soon disappeared from sight quicker than a French soldier can say "retraite, retraite!".
In 2006 Zeptepi entered a real recording studio, for proper grown-up musicians, and recorded their second album 'Universality'. The album was subsequently mixed in the UK, and released with a full street parade featuring a quartet of marching elves playing the album tracks on tin whistles and harps. Universality confounded the critics and subsequently went platinum in both Liechenstein and Tuvalu, the profits enabling the band to invest in a brand new patch lead.
Bored with a life completely free of rock-star trappings, the band took a break before returning later that year with a fresh new sense of apathy and a swag of poorly conceived compositions, illustrating the band's complete lack of self-respect and original ideas. After deciding that keyboards were rubbish and probably the one thing holding the band back from achieving the legendary status they so clearly deserved, Zeptepi recruited a violin player by the name of Hayley Anderson.
Hayley had been living in a hole in Gippsland that she shared with a well-respected wombat for some years, and showed a remarkable instinct for bad decision-making. As a result, persuading her to join the band was a walk in the park, and Zeptepi struck out in a new direction, taking a left at the lights before heading straight over two roundabouts, going over the flyover, turning right after about fifty yards and then taking the thirteenth left after the second McDonalds before the servo.
Currently the band are not working on their forthcoming third album. Occasionally this changes and a little bit of mixing will get done, but for the most part it's no nearer completion now than it was when they began recording it in May 2008.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Twitter Updates
Wishing I was at home in England in the snow instead of sweltering in the Melbourne summer
about 8 hours ago
New single "Ballad of John Green" now available on iTunes... Zeptepi - http://ax.itunes.apple.com/... #iTunes
03:22 PM January 04
Bunch of new photos uploaded to myspace from the single launch on 12th Dec...
05:04 PM December 20 2009
This thursday - live at the Drunken Poet in West Melbourne, playing two sets from 8.30. Come and grab a copy of the new single!
01:49 PM December 14 2009
Wondering how come Mike Scott always has such great hair? Bastard :)
01:49 PM December 14 2009