At first, The Wombats were a joke they
didn't want anyone to find funny.

"For our first gig we wore jesters'
hats with sunglasses," says guitarist/singer Matthew ‘Murph' Murphy.

"They had bells on the end," adds
drummer/singer Dan Haggis.

Murph: "In the middle of the songs we'd
break into uncontrollable screaming. The idea was not to be funny."

Dan: "If people laughed we'd be like
‘ah we dogged it'. We wanted it to die on its feet. Literally people would just
stand there and there'd be this awful silence. You know like in The Office when
there's a dreadful silence, and the next day we'd be like ‘Ah that was amazing
that bit, wasn't it?' We still love dying on our feet sometimes."

Murph: "It was a lot of silliness. The
idea of the band was to be stupid. We were just idiots."

But this was back in 2003, when The
Wombats were enrolled in Paul McCartney's Liverpool Institute Of Performing
Arts (LIPA). Local lads Murph and Dan, despite playing cricket against each
other for their respective schools near Strawberry Fields, only actually met
each other at LIPA aged 19 when Murph turned up trolleyed at Dan's flat. Murph
thought Dan was "a complete muppet with pink and grey hair", Dan (quite
rightly) thought Murph was a "fellow piss-head". So naturally they started
playing gigs together (at The Cavern Club, notably) before they nabbed bassist
Tord Øverland Knudsen (fresh at LIPA from his hometown of Elverum in Norway) from the
seven other bands he'd joined within a fortnight of arriving. Armed with such
early wonky pop classics as ‘The Ostrich Song' and a tune now only remembered
by the band as "the standing at the bus stop one", the three - plus an American
guitarist called Ben who was in the band for a few months, whose speciality was
a Mexican "areeeeba!" noise - embarked on four years of tall tales of boys and
girls and marsupials.

"We fiddled ourselves a gig in a place
called Hannah's Bar in Liverpool," Murph recalls, "and we didn't really have a
name and me and Dan went through a period of calling each other Wombo."

Dan: "Basically Wombo the Wombat was a
fictional kind of character in our daily talk."

Murph. "We used to call each other
‘stupid wombats' as well, and then we needed a name for this first gig so Dan
was like ‘just call us The Wombats'."

Dan: "And the guy just laughed and went
‘yeah, that's funny, that'll do for now'."

But it wasn't too long before Liverpool had to start taking The
Wombats very seriously indeed. Ditching the sanatorium moods and comedy outfits
(although they went through a "stripe period" before settling on their
trademark primary colour t-shirt look) they set about playing their infectious
punka pop deviance around Liverpool and beyond. Their gigs were laced with a
cappella intros, between-song stand-up and Facts Of The Day (did you know that
rabbits aren't nocturnal, they're crepuscular? Not until you went to a Wombats gig you didn't). They took every gig they were offered,
whichever corner of the country it was in (using Dan's granny's Postman Pat van
to get there); if plotted on a map, their travels would look like the crazed
scrawlings of a madman.

Over the next two and a half years of casual gigging (about one
gig a fortnight) they played at a pub in London called Lark In The Park under
the impression it was a big open-air festival; they played the legendary Three
Fat Fish in Exeter; they got management offers from tattooed amphetamine
maniacs at 3am in Tottington; and they were selected by LIPA to go to China to
play to 20,000 people at Beijing's Midi festival: "It was
basically kids from the streets, that was the idea of the festival," says Dan.
"For some reason we were the ‘kids from the streets' from the UK. It was
amazing".

Things
got even bigger last March when they were invited to play Canadian Music Week:
a far cry from their first gig outside Liverpool two years previously, in a
remote Norwegian fishing village called Stord.

"My girlfriend's from there," Dan explains, "and I basically
played with her in a band as well, a kind of folk trio thing. They suggested
doing some gigs together over in Norway and I wanted to go there for the summer
anyway so we said ‘yeah that'd be brilliant'. It ended up with us playing in
the centre of Stord - if you can imagine an island in the fjords, and us
playing the one pub in the centre. The night was billed as country rock and all
these people came to it and a couple of these elder members of Norwegian
society came, but they left shouting ‘this is the worst music I've ever
heard!'"

Meanwhile, back in Liverpool they launched their own club night,
‘Little Miss Pipedream', at the Liverpool Carling Academy. They had a regular
place to play and Murph's songwriting could evolve. Not too far off the ‘silly'
bracket, but certainly towards the more ‘heartfelt'.

The KIDS label got to hear of the stir going on up in the ‘Pool
after Radio One's Rob Da Bank played ‘Happily Screwed' in October 2005; by this
time they already had seven self-financed EPs under their belts, all recorded
at LIPA's freely available studios. And a touchingly warped pop collection they
were, largely based on Murph's foiled romantic encounters. So ‘Patricia The
Stripper' is about "erm... let's not talk about that... she was called Trisha and
it was my 18^th birthday and she was pretty old and it was bad and I
shouldn't talk about it". ‘Lost In The Post' with its hilarious ‘Go to
Santa!' breakdown refrain, is "a bit of a teenage love gone wrong" and
‘Moving To New York' is "about a girl me and Tord had relations with from Norway, I can't remember what happened.
I was out with her the day before and then the next day I was in a bar and she
was there kissing another girl. So I threw a bit of
a wobbler". And the less said about the face-slapping nightclub embarrassment
that spawned ‘Backfire At The Disco' the better.

KIDS realised that a lot of these songs
had sparking great pop tunes whacked all over them - The Wombats come 2006 had
more hits than www.letslockparishiltonbackup.com. They started by releasing
‘Lost In The Post' in June 2006 (in snazzy air-mail packaging) and followed it
with ‘Moving To New York' as the ‘Bats following in Liverpool began startling
local promoters. By the release of third single ‘Backfire At The Disco' in
April 2007 the band not only gained major video rotation on MTV2 for their
rip-off of Cliff Richard's ‘Wired For Sound' promo, but also became the first
officially unsigned act to sell out Liverpool's Carling Academy and have thus
been declared fully-fledged local heroes.

Luckily, the entire indie nation was
beginning to see their point. After supporting Kaiser Chiefs in Europe and
Babyshambles on their Christmas 2006 UK tour, The Wombats signed to 14^th Floor Records mid-way through what scientists believe to be the longest and
most excruciating UK tour known to rock: 50 dates with around 4 days off. "We
asked them to book us a ‘ridiculous' tour," says Dan, "it's the
biggest tour anyone's ever booked. We were going to do it without drinking but
me and Murph lasted until about the twentieth date then I fell off the wagon,
got run over by it a few times and vomited all over the hotel room"). And
simultaneously, latest single ‘Kill The Director' became not just another
dancefloor hit but a real-life big boys chart hit too, hitting Number 35 in
June 2007. Not bad for a song inspired by a shonky romantic comedy with Jude sodding
Law in it.

"It's
about my current girlfriend and that film The Holiday," Murph explains. "We
were in the Lake District and we went to this posh cinema in Bowness where you
go for a meal first then you go and watch the film. That was the only film on
and it was absolutely appalling but it seemed quite apt, the cheesiness of it
all, when actually things were just horrendous. It definitely didn't mirror my
life."

Next stop
for these wild, wibbly Wombat boys is a rampage around a recording studio to
record an album Murph hopes will bring them "world domination", and promises
will be "fun, with dark undertones thrown in there. There's a few dark
undertones in the lyrics, especially the new songs, a bit of self-deprecation
going on, it kinda feels dark to me."

Ardent
fans, however, might be concerned at the non-appearance anywhere on the record
or artwork of one Cherub, a cuddly Wombat who has graced Murph's guitar amp
during recent live shows, being introduced fondly to the crowd at each show.
Cherub came into their lives as a free gift that came with the crate of Wombat
Hill wine their label bought them to celebrate signing their contract and left
their lives a few short months later when someone nicked it from the stage at
KOKO.

"He's got
his own Myspace now," says Murph. "That person who took him made a Myspace and
then added most of our friends."

You could
always order another crate of the wine.

Dan:
"We've done that and the guy didn't put one in. They're like £27 a go, we've
ordered six of them but the last instalment of the wine has been and gone with
out a cuddly Cherub to speak of."


Jesters,
ostriches, madmen, rollerskates, rom-coms, strippers, lesbians, chart hits,
boys, girls and cuddly marsupials. You have to wonder - what would Paul
McCartney have made of what he's spawned?


"My only
encounter with him was in LIPA," says Murph. "We had this one-on-one
songwriting tutorial, we just talked about songs and I played him some and he
said some things. It was when he was going through the whole divorce thing and
he had to keep running out to speak to his lawyer on the phone. So he darted
out, came back in, then - no word of a lie - I said ‘this song's about falling
in love with a whore, it's called ‘Patricia The Stripper'' and he said ‘oh, I
could imagine that's a bad thing to do."

The
Wombats: you really HAVE to be there.