Story of the Booze Bro Band

Booze Brothers: Getting Bigger by the year!

Welcome to the Story of The Booze (Brothers Band Puppets!)

Over the last 14 years I had shot lots of video footage of our gigs at different weddings, pubs and odd venues. I would watch them back at night when I got home, hoping to have something good to keep - or more recent years - to upload to Youtube for a laugh. After sitting through hours and hours of footage (of the same repeating set list…. yawn) I came to the bitter realization that we weren't the most photogenic of bands any more. The audio was alright, but we possibly looked a little bit on the rough side...

Maybe it was the years of beer slugging and free wedding cake. Perhaps it was that one summer where a mobile hog roast truck magically turned up at all our gigs, and fed us too much pig. Whatever it was, the fact we aren't all 19 years old any more, was looking obvious. I thought about hiring much better looking bunch of younger doubles to mime over the tracks for us. Perhaps just have a really good, old photo come up as the song was playing? As it turns out, I couldn't afford the models and it didn't take long to discover there were no good photos of us anyway; old or new. I needed a better plan.

Younger, thinner days. Well, younger at least.

I've always been a huge fan of Jim Henson and the Muppets since I was small. I used to be glued to Fraggle Rock on a Saturday mornings and Sesame Street when I was off sick from School. I'd recently finished building two replica Ghostbusters Proton Packs for Halloween, surely I could have a go at sewing puppets? I thought fluffy, monster hand puppets would allow me to upload silly visuals to our song tracks and nobody would have to actually look at us! This seemed like a simple, and humane solution. I got to work. I found a website in the USA, project puppet that had starting points for building your own puppets. I poured over their site and over a few weekends, managed to sew a few fluffy monsters. I made a purple puppet, a green tortoise puppet and a spiky haired chap. They looked fun, but hey, didn't really have the air of a band that would play weddings. Well, not the kind of weddings we got booked for!

Fluff and nonsense... and some surprisingly pricey scissors.

Then it gradually dawned on me, these puppets were going to have to look like us, or it wouldn't really work. That was going to prove more difficult. Fortunately this is were the hours and hours of watching footage of the band actually paid off. Well, that, and the fact I'd been staring at them as a band for 14 years - I could try and sketch out basic designs based on their main features and characteristics. Putting pen to paper initially ended with some pretty offensive caricatures of my 'friends' that should probably have been burned, not just confined to a bin. Simplifying people down to a few key features is actually quite difficult, and no where near as easy as I had first thought. Noses, hairlines, daft hats. It's not a huge amount to go on. This wasn't Spitting Image, I only had foam and felt.

Mark or Chris? Which is which: Your call.

I thought then, why not just make our two front men? Chris and Mark dress like the Blues Brothers, all I have to do is make two guys in suits, hats and glasses. When sketching their roughs out, I started thinking of The Muppet Show double act idea. The two grumpy old men on the show Statler and Waldorf, who shout abuse from the wings are shape opposites. One has a round face the other, a long face. The same shape difference is also used in Sesame Street with Burt and Ernie. Sticking to my sketches as closely as I could, I got busy with glue gun, scissors and sponge.

Chris, don't look at me like that!

There is a running joke in our band that stems from a time Chris ordered the wrong size hat. It led to everyone insinuating he had a big head, so it seemed a good idea to have him with the long head design, and make him a tiny hat. This made Marks puppet easier to start, his would be an opposite. Rounder head shape with a larger hat. Placing the features was made simpler once I had the basic character pairing, I decided that doing the puppet characters in pairs would make a lot of the creative decisions for me. It was going really well, but there was a lot to do... More that I bargained for in fact, because I started to get carried away.

Rare, Mark with no shades.