The Uncle Devil Show are a pop-rock guitar band formed as a side-project for three Scottish musicians, who use pseudonyms as their aliases. The band members are:

• "Langton Herring" – singer-songwriter Kevin McDermott
• "Jason Barr" – Justin Currie, lead singer and main songwriter of the band Del Amitri
• "Terrence" – former Simple Minds drummer Jim McDermott, brother of Kevin.

Though the band members have consistently stayed "in character", their real identities are not supposed to be a secret: their promotional pictures and the distinctive vocals of Currie and Kevin McDermott are confirmation enough. Justin Currie maintained the façade in this statement on the official Del Amitri website in February 2004:

It has recently come to my attention that some bunch of tossers calling themselves The Uncle Devil Show are being claimed by some to be something to do with Del Amitri. Let me state once and for all that nobody in Del Amitri has any involvement whatsoever with these pricks and having heard some of their woeful attempts at indie-pop ... has no desire to be. Anyone claiming that members of Del Amitri are associated with the above group may well find themselves talking to our lawyers. Where this absurd rumour came from I don't know but I'll hazard a guess that these desperate self-promoting talentless limpnecked whimsy-peddaling bedwetters are something to do with it, though I'm sure they'd deny it. I hope this clears up any confusion.

Kevin McDermott's website carried a similar denial:

I know nothing about Uncle Dennis or his Shoes. If you don't believe me, feel free to look at www.theuncledevilshow.com. I thank you.

As far as the tongue-in-cheek press release by their record label P3 Music can be taken seriously, the band is named after a 1985 episode of The New Twilight Zone in which a child is taught bizarre magic tricks through his television set.

In 2004 The Uncle Devil Show performed a handful of live shows in Scotland and released the album A Terrible Beauty, co-written by "Herring" and "Barr". It featured guitar-driven pop songs with surreal lyrics often containing incongruous obscenities. Subject-matter varied from stolen bicycles, a man's love for Gilbert O'Sullivan, transvestism, drug-addled TV presenters in limousines and a woman who teaches her canary to sing Motörhead's "Ace of Spades", to a man filled with murderous hatred for pigeons.

Since 2004 the band have released no other material nor played any concerts: indeed, it has never been suggested that A Terrible Beauty was anything other than a one-off project.

Albums

• A Terrible Beauty – released 19 April 2004

Singles

• "She Cuts Her Own Fringe" – released 2004 (prior to album release)

Notes

1. Official Del Amitri website.
2. Official Kevin McDermott website.
3. Found at www.p3music.com.
4. The details of the episode can be found on IMDb.

External links

• Official band website, now offline but would presumably be revived if The Uncle Devil Show ever recorded together again
• The Uncle Devil Show's MySpace page
• Official Del Amitri homepage
• Official Kevin McDermott homepage
• Official Jim McDermott homepage
• Justin Currie's MySpace page
• Kevin McDermott's MySpace page
• The Uncle Devil Show at the Internet Movie Database