Cult comedy hit Forgotten Masters is back with its inspired, almost-believable "guitar-legend" mayhem
Gary Jones and Ken Lawson’s comedic webseries returns with a Glaswegian punk and a Norwegian folkie
Forgotten Masters returns on October 13 on YouTube
FOR MUSIC LOVERS, the new season of Forgotten Masters is a trove of obscure trivia and novel history. Who knew, for instance, that experimental guitar legend Tony Hugget was hired by David Bowie to “just come in and do nothing” on the album Heroes? Or that Scottish punk innovator Keith Bellend recorded four albums in only three weeks with the band Sepsis (just before they all died)? Or that, according to folk songwriter Knute Kroblett, Norway enjoys an annual holiday entirely dedicated to its hatred of Eric Clapton?
“Oh yes, signs all over the streets,” Kroblett tells interviewer Ian Leighton, of Vancouver’s Co-op Radio. “Children wear shirts that say ‘Fuck That Guy’.”
“Huh,” responds the nonplussed host. “We really don’t know a lot about the Norwegians.”
It’s fascinating stuff and pure ambrosia to the kind of person who regularly shops at Neptoon Records. It’s also gloriously stupid and largely improvised by actor-comedians Gary Jones, who plays the academic twit Leighton, and Ken Lawson, who gets to do his Peter Sellers bit in multiple roles as the underappreciated Forgotten Masters of the show’s alternate musical universe. Apart from the laughs, the locally-produced webseries, getting its season two launch on YouTube on October 13, is clearly made by people who know their way around a vinyl bin.
“We originally thought it would be great if it was just totally for music nerds and people that really know their shit,” says Lawson, in a call to Stir from his Vancouver home. “‘Wouldn’t it be great if people actually believed this was real?’” Anyone catching the final minutes of any given episode might be fooled. As a gifted player, Lawson gets to exercise his considerable chops in a variety of genres—season one featured blues, funk, and orchestral metal—but only after the mounting and inspired absurdities of each interview, which are invariably met with unflappable reverence by the idiot Leighton. It’s the job of director John Murphy to somehow marshal the inspired silliness generated by these two TheatreSports veterans.
“The three of us will sit down and pitch an episode, but it’s also based on my playing,” explains Lawson. “These guys have been pushing me to do a jazz guy, and sure, I can fake things well enough, but I’d need to work my ass off to do that. But we come up with a name, we come up with where this person is from, and then we figure out their genre. Gary never tells me what he’s going to ask. It’s always a complete surprise.” Apparently, this is only true until it isn’t. Season two folkie Knut Kroblett was originally conceived as a yogic Californian, at least until makeup artist CJ Kapetan applied a grotesque monobrow to the character, prompting Lawson to realize, not unreasonably: “I think I’m from Norway.”
“We were literally 10 minutes from shooting and I said to John, ‘By the way, I’m gonna be Norwegian,’” says the actor, giggling. “I hadn’t practised it and it’s potentially my favourite of these three because we were so in the moment. We had to be. Everything Gary had planned he had to throw out.” Bear this in mind when viewing the episode: Jones and Lawson achieve a kind of soaring lunacy as they invent Kroblett’s ridiculous backstory in real time. No less impressive is Lawson’s possessed performance as Glaswegian punk, Keith Bellend—a man so hard that he tunnelled out of and then back into prison 150 times.
“Keith was a bit of a struggle,” confesses Lawson, whose family moved to Canada from Scotland when he was eight. “After I did it, I had to kinda shake him off. He was so intense. I was nervous about watching it. It sounds so typical airy-fairy actor-y to say this, but when you get going the character sort of takes over. And there was a bunch of swearing that we cut out of that one. It was too much.” Happily, the episode retains at least two cunts, and ends with a performance of the timeless Bellend classic, “Mince and Totties”.
Middle episode guest Tony Hugget might be the show’s wildest creation: a saucer-eyed Adrian Belew-type who toured with Shamu the whale and releases invisible records of silence. Jones bagged a Leo Award for the first season of Forgotten Masters, which hit YouTube in 2021, and it’ll be robbery if Lawson walks away empty-handed this year. Equally, it sounds like he has more pressing ambitions.
“I just love inhabiting a character,” he says, “and I just want to really listen to Gary and screw with him—hard. That’s really one of my biggest goals. I won’t stop doing the show until I make him burst out laughing on camera.”
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