Foz Foster

James 'Foz' Foster (born 1960) is a composer and multi-instrumentalist. He is best known as the lead guitarist in the art-rock band, David Devant and his Spirit Wife, and in the 1983-5 incarnation of The Monochrome Set. Foster also plays guitar, musical saw and vibraslap in the house band of Karaoke Circus and occasional saw in Martin White's Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra. He plays ukulele and other instruments as part of the double-act, Foster and Gilvan, and is also musical director of Sawchestra – a band of musical saw players who perform Foster's compositions to accompany silent films.

Foster grew up in Pimlico, West London. In his late teens, he formed his first band, the New Romantic Los Apachés, in which he was songwriter and played lead guitar. Los Apachés became press darlings for well over two months in the winter of 1979, and Foster was 'nicknamed the Kaftan Kid by the NME for some strange reason'. In 1983, he was talent-spotted by Andy Warren, bass player of The Monochrome Set, who was looking for a replacement for the departing guitarist, Lester Square. The band had just released the single, "Jet Set Junta", which 'nodded to the previous year's Falkland Islands conflict, becoming a big indie hit and garnering extensive play.' One of Foster's first tasks was to appear in the video for "Jet Set Junta", miming to Lester Square's guitar part. Foster went on to play on the band's fourth album, the pop-flavoured The Lost Weekend (1985), which included the singles "Wallflower" and "Jacob's Ladder". In the video for the latter, Foz dressed in a bear costume – the first of many animal costumes he would wear on stage. Although these were the most commercial-sounding records released by the Monochrome Set, sales were disappointing, and the band split up.

In 2009, when The Lost Weekend was rereleased on CD by Cherry Red records, the Guardian journalist, John Robb, wrote, "It's clearly time we resurrected the Monochrome Set, arguably the first truly postmodern pop band."

After moving to Brighton, Foster met the artist and songwriter, Mikey Georgeson and, at the beginning of the 1990s, they formed David Devant & His Spirit Wife. All the band adopted stage names, with Georgeson as the Vessel on vocals and guitar, Professor Rimschott (Graham Carlow) on drums and the Colonel (Jem Egerton) on bass. Foster was renamed Foz?, pronounced 'Foz Questionmark'. A Devant gig was an unforgettable theatrical experience, incorporating stage magic with cardboard props, manipulated by the 'spectral roadies', Iceman and Cocky Young'un. The Vessel might be fired from a cannon, levitated or sawn in half, and the climax of every show was the appearance of the Spirit Wife, who manifested herself in the form of a Victorian lace nightie waved on a long pole. The band won a fanatically loyal following and positive, though sometimes bemused, reviews. Caroline Sullivan described a 1996 show in the Guardian: 'Led by a quiffed and moustachioed waif called the Vessel, they offer penny-dreadful glam rock augmented by a host of special effects. The music alone is worth the price of admission ... but the Devants strive to provide a more complete experience... Long may they do their strange thing.'. The theatricality of an early Devant show was captured in the video for their debut single, "Pimlico".

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