Vocals - JJ Juliette Joyce, aka Juliette Navis
Saxophone, vocal - Howie Hughes, aka Lawrence Williams
Trumpet, vocals - James Davis Jnr, aka Imre Lichtenberger Bozoki
Drums, vocals - Fender Rhodes, aka Levente Boros
Guitar - The Reverend Pepper Marley, aka Adam Meszaros
Bass, vocals - Teddy Thomson III, aka Erno Hock

All words and music by The Pry Minisiters

Produced by Krétakör and The Pry Ministers.



In 1969, Howie Hughes left the English mining town of Cruddleston to rediscover his family roots in Baja California. At the same time, James Davis Junior quit the Slopic high school of Belgrade and headed off to make his fortune in the Colorado Springs. Chance lead these two formidable and idiosyncratic men to board the same plane in Paris bound for New York. After bonding over a mutual love of the in-flight Die Hard movies, they each abandoned their plans and
decided, quite simply, that they must form a band.
New York was not an easy city for them to find friends, musicians, or work, so they soon decided to leave in a Buick Hughes had “borrowed” from an “uncle”, who in turn put a bounty on his head. Davis and Hughes fled, heading west, each cursing the other to be damned in hell. On the point of deciding to part ways, they bumped into the Reverend Pepper Marley, who at this time was working in a gas station somewhere outside of Kansas.
The Reverend was a calm man and an immediate positive influence on the two horn players. When they discovered he could play the guitar like the devil himself, they got him stoned, and press ganged him into joining the band. He was calm about that too. They hit the road again, but soon they were out of gas and the Buick gave up the ghost in a clearing deep in the forest. A loan house stood on the edge of the clearing, home to the simple Fender Rhodes and his aggressive grandfather, Teddy Thompson III. Thompson and Rhodes took in the dysfunctional trio and whipped them into shape with the bass and drum grooves that they had been working on after having retreated to the woods alone twenty years earlier. The Pry Ministers was born.
Their first gig came soon after - Eszter, the air hostess who had seated Hughes next to Davis on their maiden voyage was a Parisienne lady of an eccentric family. Her father owned a nightclub called “Le Trou Noir” where people swapped wives and drank pernod. She had taken a shine to Davis and one day wrote him a long letter offering The Pry Ministers their first gig.
It was in this Parisienne haze that the band met the sultry and disarming JJ Juliette Joyce. She was singing in a dive bar somewhere off the Rue de Paradis. Hughes describes their first meeting. “We were a mess. A real mess...we did nothin' but eat feta cheese and smoke menthol cigarettes for three days. We were almost dead. Sitting there in that smoked filled bar, I wished I was dead. And then she stepped on the stage, and she opened that mouth o' hers and she started singing like a fountain o' honey and I said, “James man, that's her, man! That's what we need in our band!” James agreed, so I gave her the job there and then.”
With JJ fronting the band, The Pry Ministers set off on tour. They played in every European city, town and village that would take them, gaining a solid fanbase who sadly forgot all about them approximately thirty minutes after the end of the show, owing to Teddy Thompson's “Hypnosis” number he performed mid set. The others let him do it, convinced it was completely ineffectual, but in fact Teddy had learnt Voodoo in the swamps of Louisiana and did not even know his own strength. He cleanly erased all memory of band and music from the audiences mind with a handful of gestures he believed would bring the most beautiful of the young ladies in the crowd to his trailer. Despite their mammoth five hour long sets and the Dionysian parties their music invoked, they remained in the shadows of the music world.
Exhausted, flagging and broke The Pry Ministers found themselves in Budapest without a thing to do but learn Hungarian. They soon had friends, lángos and fröccs enough to keep them happy, but they'd lost artistic focus and the tensions between the group were showing. They needed a new project. Süsü, the “Hungarian dragon”, found the band jamming for tips in an underground bar he had stumbled into unwillingly in order to use the toilet. Struck by their musical prowess, and shocked by their evidently rapid and continuing decline, he resolved to keep the group alive.
Süsü employed the band to play for his spectacular shows and with his support, they began work immediately on the album “This Is Party Music”. The result of those sessions is what you have now in your possession.
Forgettable, incredible, inedible and predictable this is The Pry Ministers - Party on!