So what exactly happened to Blind Lettuce MacGarrity after the “success” of his work in the folk field?

One day, while he was sat in a slurry pit, a car drove past. In that car was a radio, and playing on that radio was a song. The song in question was “Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding, and the small fragment that he heard as the car went by was enough to convince MacGarrity that he had found his new direction. He leapt out of the slurry pit and flagged the car down, desperate to know where this wonderful new sound came from. Understandably, the sight of a deranged idiot covered in slurry was enough to panic the car’s driver, and he crashed into a tree, setting the car on fire and incinerating the occupants, but with his dying breath, the driver managed to groan the words “Otis Redding”.

Leaving the poor passengers to their fate, MacGarrity ran to the nearest airport (Stansted, some 200 miles away) and demanded a ticket for Memphis so he could get to the home of the Stax/Volt sound. However, owing to a mistake with the tickets, he ended up in Detroit, home of Tamla Motown. After six weeks failing to convince any record executives to give him a recording contract so he could take advantage of their “laid back Southern sound” he decided to form his own label just to piss them off. Tampax Moped, as he christened the company, went on to be the least successful record label in history, releasing precisely no records. In fact this recording, made on a $10 cassette recorder, is the only concrete evidence that they ever existed. It features MacGarrity on vocals, “Small Brian” Finkelstein on bass, Cort “The Fishsticks” Delaney on drums, Maurice “Maurice” Morrison on keys and the 86 th Street Big Hairy Horn Section.

Sadly, ten minutes after this recording was made, Tampax Moped went into official liquidation when their head office was handed back to its rightful owner, who had only popped out to buy a sandwich and had no idea that MacGarrity was in there. This is the only trace that they ever existed.

Click on the record to download the song.

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