Last month, Croydon trio My Best Unbeaten Brother released Pessimistic Pizza, their brand new album on Audio Antihero. The record, which we described in a preview as “made in a country coming apart at the seams yet unable to fully embrace its impending doom,” swaps out detached irony for something more positive. A desire, if not to mend our broken world, then at least to not contribute to the self-absorption and futile anger that seems otherwise all too common.
The album is the latest in a long line of releases from Ben and Adam Parker. Starting as Tempertwig back in the halcyon days of noughties indie, the pair shifted through various projects including Nosferatu D2 and The Superman Revenge Squad Band before eventually settling on their current iteration. The pair won acclaim from various corners with each release, building a loyal fanbase in the way Audio Antihero artists seem to do best, but always sitting uncomfortably within a music industry which often asks too much of its would-be stars. But where some sell out and others self-destruct, the Parkers decided to operate on their own terms, appearing and disappearing as it suited them, always changing, always staying the same.
Following on from similar retrospective features on Benjamin Shaw, Fighting Kites, Broken Shoulder, Frog (parts 1 and 2) and Magana, we have again enlisted Jamie Halliday from Audio Antihero to share their memories on the Parker brothers’ career, from the early days right up to the present day. Read on below!
I’ve worked with Ben and Adam Parker on and off since the Audio Antihero record label’s inception in 2009 when I released Nosferatu D2’s We’re Gonna Walk Around This City With Our Headphones on to Block Out the Noise. In the many years that have followed, I got the opportunity to work with them again with different names and lineups on records by The Superman Revenge Squad Band and Tempertwig.
I suppose it was a bit of a coincidence that Audio Antihero came out of hiding in late 2023 for Frog’s Grog album shortly after the Parker brothers had formed My Best Unbeaten Brother with Ben Fry. This lucky timing means I am fortunate enough to once again be their label. We did kind of a soft launch with the ‘Slayer on a Sunny Day‘ single in December, and the debut record, Pessimistic Pizza, was released late last month. I hope you’ll check it out if you get a chance.
The Parkers have had a strange journey, a kind of feast or famine in terms of output and people’s interest in their work. This is actually the first release I’ve done with them where the band is still active since previous titles have been posthumous, one-offs, or retrospectives. It’s almost a novelty to work with them on something where a follow-up release is a possibility, where the band is excited to get together to record radio sessions and play live, and maybe most importantly, where the songs we’re promoting reflect the artists in the present day.
I think my label’s history with Ben and Adam Parker illustrates that I’m quite big on documenting and archiving. That’s why I wanted Nosferatu D2’s album to be on CD, and that’s why Tempertwig demos were remastered and released. Too much stuff just disappears and so much context gets lost, oftentimes this happens with things far more important than Indie Rock, but that’s what I periodically choose to make myself responsible for, so essentially I’m doing this again here.
I wanted to record some kind of a history and evolution of the work of Ben and Adam Parker from Tempertwig to My Best Unbeaten Brother. It’s all through my eyes, and I’m not really sure who it’s for, but it’s something I wanted to exist for someone. Bands break up, labels give up, blogs go dark, and music platforms shut down, but there’s always someone who remembers, and too often I’ve sought out a band or a song and found nothing. So, I like the idea that the following links, quotes, and memories are consolidated in one place should that person ever come looking for them.
TEMPERTWIG
Tempertwig was a 3 piece band from Croydon that I tried to make into a mixture of Pulp, Arab Strap, Dinosaur Jr and the Afghan Whigs. We started in 1999 and finished in 2004 I think. Along the way we recorded a bunch of songs at different places, got played by Steve Lamacq when he was on Radio 1, built up a small group of other bands that we liked playing with, then called it a day
—Ben Parker (For the Rabbits, 2019)
The chronology of Ben and Adam Parker’s musical exploits can feel a little jumbled on account of the irregular way that much of their music was released. So while the vast majority of their output didn’t receive a formal release until 2019 (their one previous commercial release was a seven-inch split single with Air Formation), Tempertwig came first.
The trio (completed by bassist Daniel Debono) went from scrappy post-punk to something that the late great Cereal & Sounds blog called “Angled hooks, mathematical elasticity, and unbridled ferocity,” before dubbing Ben and Adam Parker “the lost pioneers of the indie-emo scene.” You can believe I ran hard with that line in our press materials.
When discussing the meaning of the song ‘Bratpack Film Philosophy’,” Ben told The Alternative: “The lyrics are inspired by the Breakfast Club, awful small talk at parties and a Motown collection on record that I got from a charity shop at university that had “I’m still waiting” by Diana Ross on it.” Ben’s lyrics often mix these references to good and bad media with the very real frustrations and disappointments that come with trying to find a way to live, connect, and relate. It’s through this combination that he creates a rat king of dissatisfaction, where the dull and drab become something frantic and frightening.
I’ve seen Tempertwig described (probably on the Drowned in Sound forum?) as something like “Nosferatu D2 with a bassist / distortion pedal,” which is factually true, but doesn’t necessarily give them their due. When compared to other more streamlined outlets for Ben’s songs, the depth of the sound, and the variety of the arrangements can be quite exhilarating to listen to. The spark that made Nosferatu D2 a small cult success is always there too, that bizarre sibling chemistry between a Metal drummer and a Bonnie Prince Billy nerd.
Nosferatu D2 and Superman Revenge Squad’s songs often push us to question how, if none of this matters, we can feel how we do. If there’s no meaning to any of this, why do we fill our homes with books and records? Why do we write, think, and take ourselves out into crowded shopping centres in search of touch and meaning? For me, Tempertwig possessed that same swollen contradiction. “Why is the bedroom so cold, etc etc.”
When reflecting on their live shows in 2019, Adam mentioned: “Every song was like a race to the end – the adrenaline definitely took hold when we played gigs, which gave us an edge of barely controlled chaos.” Ben told God Is In the TV that their anthology release contained a: “younger version of me that I can barely recognise in places.”
NOSFERATU D2
This record perfectly depicts disillusionment with the place you live or the relationship you’re in, but are completely unable to bring yourself to get away from. Brothers Adam and Ben Parker– Adam whose drumming is up there with any drummer I’ve ever heard, and Ben whose lyrics are perfect in their hopelessness
—Gareth Campesinos! (Pitchfork)
Nosferatu D2 broke up in 2007 and the Audio Antihero record label was started around their unreleased debut album in 2009. It was a silly idea that panned out quite well on account of a small but enthusiastic fanbase, which included Gareth Campesinos! (who wrote a very kind piece about the album on the Los Campesinos! website), and a small fleet of music bloggers. The unexpected interest helped us get support from Pitchfork, Drowned in Sound, The Line of Best Fit, DIY Mag, The Skinny, BBC 6 Music, Public Radio International’s ‘The World’ and a heap of others. If you’ve heard of the Parker brothers (or Audio Antihero, for that matter), it’s quite likely that Nosferatu D2 is the reason why.
They’ve been one of my favourite bands since I was a teenager, but I’ve always had a hard time articulating what it is exactly that I love so much. The lyrics, of course, and the urgency that’s perhaps exemplified by the immediacy of ‘Broken Tamagotchi’ or the frantic ‘Springsteen’. This quality of urgency doesn’t always mean fast and loud though, it can be found in other ways and at other tempos.
I was once practically yelled at by a music degree student about ‘Colonel Parker’, who found its jolting stop-start so miserably unmusical. There’s also ‘I Killed Burt Bacharach’, which I saw reviewed once as something like “Radiohead stuck in the mud.” Evidently, these songs are not to everyone’s taste, but there’s an urgency in their delay. Some might hear aimlessness, but to me, it sounds like a desperate attempt for the Parkers to ground themselves, to hold onto some control, which inevitably slips away before the cathartic finale.
It was always far easier to describe the feeling than the sound, and so Nosferatu D2 was always something that you just needed to try in order to know if its rough edges were a positive or a negative for you I always loved this review quote: “Some kind of alchemy, not to be repeated—a mix of tension, bitterness, and a way with lyrics that no one has, or will, match”—Drowned in Sound
A lot of the interest in Nosferatu D2, and their moderate (but what was for us huge) success occurred before their music was sold via Bandcamp and iTunes, or streamed on Spotify and Apple Music. So, I suspect a lot of those connections were lost over the years as MP3s were deleted and boxes of CDs were shoved under the bed (and then out the door). At press and radio, a lot of their supporters were hobbyists who eventually got too busy with real life to keep up with fielding premiere pitches for so little in return.
Consequently, it’s kind of hard to really illustrate to the uninitiated that this little Nosferatu D2 revival was a pretty special moment in time, I don’t think Audio Antihero could have gotten through the first few years without the goodwill Nosferatu D2 had given us.
I spoke on this about as well as I’m going to when I made a pretty sombre Christmas mixtape for Various Small Flames last year:
It’s funny because Nosferatu D2 really did so well. As a dead band on a first-timer one-person DIY label, the album kinda overachieved and found an audience, but that CD-buying fanbase never quite translated to Spotify, which in part is my fault for being a late adapter but is probably also common for inactive independent releases. In recent years however, Nosferatu D2 have been getting a bit of a boost on Spotify at this time of year. This particular song has amassed a modestly respectable 37,000+ streams thanks to playlists like ‘christmas cries‘, ‘Christmas Music for Pretentious People‘, ‘loser christmas playlist‘, and bless them: ‘It’s Christmas time for God’s sake‘.
I don’t think that myself or either Parker had particularly aimed for their lasting legacy to be having a very nominal Christmas hit but as their song ‘A Footnote‘ illustrates: you’re lucky to be a part of all this any way that you can be. If you put enough time into it all then you’ll learn that there’s far worse things to be known for in music than having a song people like listening to.
For what it’s worth, “It’s Christmas Time (For God’s Sake)” is now up to just shy of 45,000 streams on Spotify.
When the album came out, I remember one review made a point of mocking the unsustainability of my “business model” on account of launching with an inactive band. I think it might have been the same review that said it was “absolute shit posing as absolute genius,” which I bitchily quoted on a later press release as “…absolute genius” because I thought that was a pretty funny thing to do at the time.
The writer was probably right about it all being a daft idea in theory, but in some ways, Nosferatu D2 were maybe an ideal band for a micro-revival. They’d done enough in their short lifespan to have a couple of higher-profile fans, they’d been featured by NME, BBC, and XFM, but they were also quite restrained in their live schedule and promotional efforts. There was still much that could be done, and perhaps even a small air of mystery about them, I didn’t even really know what the band looked like until I saw them live for the first time.
A 2006 interview with Ben Parker for Robots & Electronic Brains makes it pretty apparent that they weren’t terribly keen on compromise or becoming entangled in the more cynical or desperate aspects of making music. Re-reading the interview today, this quote stood out:
Adam’s got a sixteen-track that we take to the practice room, then he mixes it at home. I don’t ever want to go into a proper studio – I don’t like the kind of people you get working there. I really quite dislike the music industry and I think we aren’t part of it. I don’t really want to go back to spending loads of money and getting someone outside involved. Their influence just works its way in. I’m happy with what we’ve got, it’s immediate, and I like the fact when we’re played on the radio and stuff it’s just us two.
So, maybe in 2009, with a couple of years of distance, it was a solid option to allow in a DIY label that was helmed by an inexperienced superfan, one far too hapless to know how to try to manipulate them into something ugly or expensive. There was someone there to do the shamelessly enthusiastic (or enthusiastically shameless) promotion through channels that may have always just been waiting for something this different, someone who at that time was still too excited to really mind the indignities of a collapsing industry.
Speaking of shameless, one time I wanted to use a burner account to bump their legendary thread on the Drowned in Sound forum, but I forgot to log out of my label account first and posted something like “wow I just bought this album, so great!” on main. Mad embarrassing. When I remember who I was in the early years of this label, it makes more sense to me that Benjamin Shaw (Nosferatu D2’s only labelmate until 2011) was always making fun of me.
THE SUPERMAN REVENGE SQUAD BAND
This chronophobic dissatisfaction with how life turned out, paired with a lack of control over any of it, leads me to rehearse and remember negligible things, especially from the realm of popular culture, just so I can cling to something that allows me a pathetic sort of mastery and belonging. So much of my anxiety comes from cultural surplus, the acute unease of being always a curator, never a creator. I’m ashamed of how tragic I felt in discovering that I still know all of the words to Savage Garden’s “I Want You,” but that any other memory of my fifteen-year-old experience is virtually non-existent.
Ben Parker, formerly of Nosferatu D2, now recording solo as Superman Revenge Squad Band, has created an album that eloquently articulates these anxieties and musings with an alarming degree of accuracy. There is Nothing More Frightening Than the Passing of Time terrifies me as much as it comforts me to know that someone else is having these thoughts.
While those who discovered Tempertwig likely did so after Nosferatu D2, it was The Superman Revenge Squad’s 2013 album, There Is Nothing More Frightening Than the Passing of Time, which was the closest we’d gotten to what you could call a “follow up” to the duo’s well-received debut (until My Best Unbeaten Brother’s Pessimistic Pizza in June of 2024, of course).
Superman Revenge Squad briefly overlapped with Nosferatu D2 when Ben began uploading his solo recordings to Myspace before they called it quits shortly after supporting Los Campesinos! and Sky Larkin in March 2007 (as captured on ‘Live at The Spitz’).
Superman Revenge Squad evolved from Ben recording solo with an electric guitar to Ben recording solo on an acoustic guitar, and later he expanded the lineup to a duo (initially with Martin Webb on cello, and later with Tim Eveleigh on the accordion). If you were lucky though, you might have actually caught Adam joining him on stage to play drums for The Angriest Dog in the World, which was something I found spellbinding when I got to see it in 2009 or so (I believe at The Brixton Windmill).
Though the brothers had resumed (briefly) sharing stages, it would take a few more years before you’d hear them collaborating on new recordings. It wouldn’t be fair to refer to it as an album by Ben and Adam Parker however since the lineup for this record was expanded to The Superman Revenge Squad Band, featuring a lineup of Jon Roffey, Martin Webb, and Gavin Kinch who added saxophone, accordion, cello, and piano on top of Ben’s guitar and Adam’s drums.
As Ben had done previously with Superman Revenge Squad, he mixed new songs (‘Lately I’ve Found Myself Regressing’) with re-recordings of old songs (‘Kendo Nagasaki’), offering a more layered and immediate experience than he’d been able to offer under this moniker previously.
We wouldn’t recapture the same blitz of press support for this release, in part because so many past supporters of Nosferatu D2 and Superman Revenge Squad had moved on from music, and perhaps because just two months prior I’d burned through more favours than I realised during my unhinged press efforts for Cloud’s Comfort Songs. However the new album did well, the CDs sold out (I’ve lost my copy, and can’t even find one to buy back), we got some wonderfully thoughtful reviews, and Steve Lamacq and Gideon Coe were pretty generous with BBC airplay too.
It was a lovely experience with a lovely album. I’d wanted to work on something from Superman Revenge Squad for a long time, so to get to do so, and to find out yet again that his words and music could really move people felt good.
Here are some kind words about it:
…Practically bursts with melodic ideas thrumming off of tense accordions and wandering saxophones. In one way it sounds like Parker has gone off the deep end finally, but in another it is pure genius. You may recall we’ve done things like proclaim Parker England’s greatest contemporary lyricist, or characterize him here as “startlingly talented,” all of which still holds true
This album speaks to me on an almost embarrassingly intimate level… It’s been a long time since I was so interested in an album’s lyrical content
There’s something so special about There Is Nothing More Frightening Than the Passing of Time. It’s a record which deserves wider recognition, but will likely hold a special place only to those few fortunate enough to have come into contact with it. I for one am truly glad that I am one of those
I suspect that the big band iteration of Superman Revenge Squad had always been intended to be short-lived, or sporadic at most, but the entire thing went quiet after this album. Ben continued to perform with The Jonbarr Hinge, a group he’d joined around 2010, and they released an album in 2015, but there were no more Superman Revenge Squad releases, and live shows eventually stopped too. As he’d told Clicky Clicky Music in 2008: “I’ll continue doing this until I don’t want to do it anymore.” I guess he didn’t want to do it anymore.
MY BEST UNBEATEN BROTHER
On the whole, despite often dealing with frustration and disappointment with the world, I hope the songs on the album convey a feeling of hope and some positivity. In the past, I have tended to write very much from a personal perspective, but I wanted to write stuff that is a little more universal.
—Ben Parker (MusicNGear, 2024)
Formed in 2023, My Best Unbeaten Brother began when Ben Parker happened to bump into Ben Fry, his former Jonbarr Hinge bandmate. Parker had already been experimenting with music again during lockdown and Fry’s interest in helping him flesh these songs out as bassist became the foundation of the band. Adam then joined on drums to make them a trio, a lineup that the Parkers hadn’t been a part of since Tempertwig’s split in 2004.
Their music is both familiar and strange. On one hand, they’re both very much who they always were, Ben Parker’s lyricism is still full of wit and passion, and the generally quiet and unassuming Adam is still an absolute madman behind his kit. On the other, after what we’ve heard from them before, it can be bewildering to hear Ben Parker yell “Come on! Come on!” or allow himself a bit of guitar solo.
The hopelessness found in the early work of Ben and Adam Parker verged on nihilism, stylistically, they’d usually sought to strip elements from their sound (for example, never utilising distortion pedals in Nosferatu D2). They were never self-important but there was a seriousness to them in that they knew enough about what they wanted to know what they didn’t, and so they walked away at the band’s peak, and when the posthumous release created even greater interest, they refused to reform, focusing on the projects they found more interesting.
People would tell me to “make” a Nosferatu D2 reunion happen, and my response was a politer “How the fuck do you expect me to do that?” I’d maybe talked them into some things they were unsure about, but I was never going to convince them to do something they didn’t want to, and I wouldn’t particularly wish to either.
When Ben lowered the volume as Superman Revenge Squad, it helped to highlight some of the humour that was always present in Tempertwig and Nosferatu D2, but a bit obscured by the rapid pace and yelping. But much of the lightness of his solo material was through self-deprecation (“I’m only mocking myself” he told God Is In the TV in 2013) or a cheeky warning about our own meaninglessness and impermanence through a pop culture reference to something that doesn’t exist anymore.
If Nosferatu D2 were shrugging into the abyss, then Superman Revenge Squad was shuffling into obscurity, and not even adding sax and accordion could really change that. It feels appropriate to me that the single artwork for ‘A Funny Thing You Said’ was inspired by the iconic and harrowing climax of Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond.
With My Best Unbeaten Brother though, they seem to be really having fun, and without the feeling that they should be ashamed of that. Self-described as “overly self-conscious men reborn as less self-conscious men, now too old to worry about indie credit,” there’s a looseness and a sense of freedom in their work. As Ben Parker told Marc Schuster of Abominations: “In the past, I set myself pretty strict rules when approaching music-making: no guitar pedals for one. With this new stuff, I’m just going with whatever comes and ultimately it all sounds like us somehow! I’ve even allowed myself a guitar solo on one song, which I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near previously.”
Lyrically the songs could almost be seen as a condemnation of their past selves, ‘It’s Not Embarrassing to Care About Stuff’ pushes back on fan-favourites like ‘The Kids from Fame’ and ‘Bratpack Film Philosophy’ by turning the “1980s film that no-one liked, that you quite liked” into a source of inspiration, rather than one of defeat or tedious ‘fake nostalgia’. The line “I never liked Bruce Springsteen, but I always envied that he cared” even questions the message of Nosferatu D2’s “Springsteen” (an apathetic Croydon counter to ‘My Hometown’) by willing us to find a way to find meaning and purpose–unless “we’re too old to care?”
In a Q&A some years ago, Ben Parker was asked who would play him in a film about his life, and he responded: “I’ll let the director choose and then complain at the premiere.” Just a lighthearted bit of cheek, but you could choose to see his answer as representative of where he was back then. Waiting for things to go wrong so that he can complain about them isn’t him in 2024, but for years Parker had written songs about watching the erosion of a world he didn’t much seem to care for, if he ever thought to offer a solution it rarely went much further than a trip to Wetherspoons or a doomed plan to get on Top of the Pops. His message now is much more about doing what you can and finding meaning in what you do.
Tempertwig’s This Means Everything, This Don’t Mean a Thing featured the ‘I’m not Bono’ refrain, which he later explained to mean: “I’d like to create music that would help… songs that bring people together but it probably wasn’t in me.” In 2024 though, he sings: “There’s a song / Building up inside of you that’s gonna change the world / And all your Bono fantasies are gonna take hold.”
These songs don’t necessarily have answers to all of his past work, but sometimes they change the question. Superman Revenge Squad seemed to show him willing himself to find meaning in his “box of old records” or those reviews that called him “an adequate lyricist,” but now a father, it seems his purpose is having these things so that they can be left behind for his son to explore. The question of what “these stupid songs I sing for something to do” are all worth will ultimately be left for the younger Parker to answer.
In a Resonance FM interview with the two Bens, Parker told deXter Bentley some of his prior writing had been indecipherably personal, and he was now trying to write more broadly, about things that are more relatable, or of importance on a larger scale. So while he still takes shots at figures of pop culture, it’s not because he doesn’t like the later Smashing Pumpkins albums, it’s because he’s “sick and tired of punching down,” and this feeling is no longer compatible with being a fan of Morrissey, even if, as he recently told The Daily Music Report, Reel Around the Fountain was a pivotal inspiration for his beginnings as a songwriter.
On the matter of other artists though, sometimes he was right the first time. Radiohead’s bullshit around Israel, and opposition to the BDS movement in support of Palestine has finally made me connect with Ben’s old Public Enemy homage: “Thom Yorke was a hero to most, but he never meant that much to me.”
Despite all the differences, much is still the same. Ben and Adam Parker are still unmistakably themselves, and Ben Fry, who brings a wealth of creativity to both their music and their artwork, is an addition that reaffirms the Parker brothers’ individuality, rather than diluting it. When speaking to the Hello GoodBye Show, Fry mentioned how playing in My Best Unbeaten Brother was allowing him to channel his own anger at the state of this miserable world through Ben’s words, and their collective art. There’s that important feeling of doing something rather than nothing, which is now so crucial.
When reflecting on Nosferatu D2’s “A Footnote” in 2011, Ben had said: “The main concept of the song comes from the fact that we’d probably never be famous enough to have a rock biography written about us, but maybe one of the bands we’ve played with a few times will one day get massive and there might just be a quote in the book that has a footnote that, when you look it up, references me; and maybe that will be enough.”
I always found that ambition to be quite humble, and even inspiring. In 2024 though, as he told Amplify the Noise, that concept of legacy may not be really even worth engaging with: “More than ever, you have to be making music and writing songs just for the joy of making music and writing songs. You ask yourself. why are you bothering, and you just have to avoid the question and carry on.”
And he’s right. Indie credit doesn’t last forever. You could take it to the grave, but it wouldn’t do you any good.
Pessimistic Pizza is out now via Audio Antihero and available from the My Best Unbeaten Brother Bandcamp page.
Cover Photo by Tony Robertson