Rayleigh, Pink Toothbrush

FOSTER PILKINGTON is a surname used as a stage name. Its owner won a deal with Arista by turning up in their A&R office and singing to them using a taped backing and a live violin. In front of normal people he employs the same devices and a similar measure of unusual behaviour to attract and coerce them into a response.

At the Pink Toothbrush (typical small town nitespot: late drinking, mixed tribes), he runs and hops across the stage not as part of some elaborately anarchic choreography but simply, it seemed to me, as a way to compensate for his own nervousness and the lack of eye stimulus provided by one man and his tape recorder. Solo on stage the choice is either they come or you go to them. Foster Pilkington goes at them with a vengeance.

He harangues and taunts the largely indifferent crowd and silences one heckler with the impressive line: "Can you play Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto?". But after a while the jibes become tiresome.

The limitations of pre-recording and the fact that the composer plays all the instruments (he's a classically trained violinist but a hack at everything else) tends to constrain the material's sparkle but 'In The Town Of Forgotten Talent', rendered with a Rottenesque spleen, provides a nicely anthemic sketch of '80s Britain.

Behind the physical jerks and the acid mouth, Foster Pilkington has a talent of some kind. Exactly what kind remains to be seen.