played primarily improvised music

The band claimed that they got their new name from a scene in a Frankenstein movie, stating “where a woman dreams that her husband, whose name is Herman, gets turned into a dog,” although the phrase actually occurs in the 1933 horror The Vampire Bat . When the band started, they played primarily improvised music , “like bashing oil drums and hitting the guitars without actually playing very many tunes,” according to drummer Wilf Plum. Their longer improvisations were condensed into shorter arranged songs that still maintained their experimental qualities. The Dog Faced Hermans’ lineup stayed constant throughout their tenure, with Marion Coutts fronting the band on vocals, trumpet, and percussion, Andy Moor on guitar, Colin McLean on bass, and Wilf Plum on drums. Within their first three years as a band, the Hermans recorded and released a few singles and two full-length albums on their own label, Demon Radge Records, and on journalist Everett True’s label, Calculus. These early records demonstrated the breadth of the band’s influences, including English and Scottish post-punk, American no wave , and various styles of folk music, exemplified in their renditions of the Italian partisan song ” Bella Ciao ” and the blues standard ” John Henry “.