Eric Scarboro

Who is Eric Scarboro?

Comedian and entrepreneur Eric Scarboro is an enigmatic figure in entertainment. He formed a band around 1977 called False Idols, as singer Bruise Banner, with friends who came to be known as Mahatma Coat, John Bull-Shit, and Winsome Churchill. Churchill was his best friend Paul Spoors but the others' real names are probably lost for good. The band played only three gigs, the first ending in a brawl in the Mount Pleasant Club, the other two in being booed out. The audience attempted to boo them off, failed and the band played on until all the audience had left. They steadfastly refused to record any songs so that none could ever be published, leaving them, in their minds, as the only true punk band ever.

He began performing for sporting presentations around the north east of England around 1979. He graduated to submitting various humorous articles for magazines and newspapers almost always under a variety of aliases, one of them being Viz Cliche, and writing music articles and appearing on radio phone-ins under another array of pseudonyms, one of them being the almost incomprehensible Dutchman Sid Andik.