History
In 1979 vocalist Tim Harrison convinced school friend and active guitarist Martyn Dormer to join him on his musical quest. Tim's brother Ollie played drums with The Photos and was roped in for two DIY independent singles, with the eponymous single in 1979, and then in 1980 for "Squashed Things On The Road", both on their own Fruit & Veg label. Both singles were imported & distributed into the USA via Neil Kempfer-Stocker's Wired Muzik firm. The band's name derived from "didicoi", a term for gypsies.
Supporting The Photos that year at a local gig convinced Tim he wanted do a lot more of it, while Martyn insisted they needed a band, and so recruited his drumming friend Chris Houghton. A capable local muso Mick Davies (aka Dick Crazies) joined on bass, soon replaced by Stuart Dyke, who only appears on a recording for a Chainsaw fanzine flexi-disc of "The Rhythm Section Sticks Together". Dyke was killed in a car crash in 1981 (which led to the formation of the band Finish the Story by his girlfriend Nicola), by which time the Dids were making quite a live reputation for themselves and getting a lot of positive press. NME's Barney Hoskyns wrote: "This excellent four-piece is playing a highly original, wait for it, pastoral Edwardian rockabilly, a delightfully rough, tough little sound whose untapped source is mythical village England, specifically in their case the county of Worcestershire... They are wholly wonderful."
Replacing Stuart was John Wallin, better known as Wally, who soon gave way to Roger Smith that year. They released a single, "The Lost Platoon" with Stiff Records in 1981, and then switched to Kamera Records in 1982 to release two singles, "Badger Boys" and "The Green Man And The March Of The Bungalows", and an album, And Did Those Feet.
The band split up in 1983.
Mick Mercer regards them as his "all-time favourite British group" and followed up with a book about the band.
Read more about this topic: The Dancing Did
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“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
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