Silverfish were a UK

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

-based indie rock

Indie rock

Indie rock is a genre of alternative rock that originated in the United Kingdom and the United States in the 1980s. Indie rock is extremely diverse, with sub-genres that include lo-fi, post-rock, math rock, indie pop, dream pop, noise rock, space rock, sadcore, riot grrrl and emo, among others...

 band, which formed in the late 1980s, and first performed in Camden

Camden Town

-Economy:In recent years, entertainment-related businesses and a Holiday Inn have moved into the area. A number of retail and food chain outlets have replaced independent shops driven out by high rents and redevelopment. Restaurants have thrived, with the variety of culinary traditions found in...

 in 1988. The band split up in 1993.

Their female lead singer was Scottish

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

-born Lesley Rankine. The band had a high octane, indie punk metal sound that was set alight by Rankine's distinctive vocals and strongly feminist

Feminism

Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...

 views. Famous lyrics "Hips, Tits, Lips, Power" adorned a popular T-shirt

T-shirt

A T-shirt is a style of shirt. A T-shirt is buttonless and collarless, with short sleeves and frequently a round neck line....

 of the time.

The other members of the band were; guitar

Guitar

The guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with...

ist Andrew "Fuzz" Duprey; bassist

Bassist

A bass player, or bassist is a musician who plays a bass instrument such as a double bass, bass guitar, keyboard bass or a low brass instrument such as a tuba or sousaphone. Different musical genres tend to be associated with one or more of these instruments...

 Chris P Mowforth; and drum

Drum

The drum is a member of the percussion group of musical instruments, which is technically classified as the membranophones. Drums consist of at least one membrane, called a drumhead or drum skin, that is stretched over a shell and struck, either directly with the player's hands, or with a...

mer Stuart Watson. Founding member Fuzz was a regular "face" at London indie gigs of the time, and is now a regular DJ at the Dublin Castle pub in Camden Town, London. The band stood out from many of their scene-contemporaries with a lineup that was mixed in terms of both gender and ethnicity and a setlist that was more liberally strewn with expletives than that of anyone else. Silverfish were the main focus of the so-called Camden lurch scene, a term invented by the music press to describe the fact that many of the prominent indie bands (outside of the dominant indie dance and shoegazing

Shoegazing

Shoegazing is a subgenre of alternative rock that emerged from the United Kingdom in the late 1980s. It lasted there until the mid 1990s, with a critical zenith reached in 1990 and 1991...

 scenes) of the time resided in Camden.

The band's 1980s EP

Extended play

An EP is a musical recording which contains more music than a single, but is too short to qualify as a full album or LP. The term EP originally referred only to specific types of vinyl records other than 78 rpm standard play records and LP records, but it is now applied to mid-length Compact...

s were collected in a 1990 compilation album

Album

An album is a collection of recordings, released as a single package on gramophone record, cassette, compact disc, or via digital distribution. The word derives from the Latin word for list .Vinyl LP records have two sides, each comprising one half of the album...

 called Cockeye. The following year, they released their debut album, Fat Axl, and toured with the band Pigface

Pigface

Pigface is an industrial rock supergroup formed in 1990 by Martin Atkins and William Rieflin.-History:Pigface was formed from Ministry's The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste tour, which produced the In Case You Didn't Feel Like Showing Up live album and video. For the tour, Al Jourgensen brought...

. In 1992, the group gained wider acclaim with their second album, Organ Fan and supported the band 7 Year Bitch

7 Year Bitch

7 Year Bitch was an American punk rock band from Seattle, Washington that was active for 7 years, between 1990 and 1997. Their career yielded three albums, and was impacted by the deaths of their guitarist Stefanie Sargent and close-friend Mia Zapata of fellow Seattle punks The Gits.-Career:7 Year...

. During the broadcast of a Peel session, BBC Radio 1

BBC Radio 1

BBC Radio 1 is a British national radio station operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation which also broadcasts internationally, specialising in current popular music and chart hits throughout the day. Radio 1 provides alternative genres after 7:00pm including electronic dance, hip hop, rock...

 DJ

Disc jockey

A disc jockey, also known as DJ, is a person who selects and plays recorded music for an audience. Originally, "disc" referred to phonograph records, not the later Compact Discs. Today, the term includes all forms of music playback, no matter the medium.There are several types of disc jockeys...

 John Peel

John Peel

John Robert Parker Ravenscroft, OBE , known professionally as John Peel, was an English disc jockey, radio presenter, record producer and journalist. He was the longest-serving of the original BBC Radio 1 DJs, broadcasting regularly from 1967 until his death in 2004...

 summed up their level of success: "If they were from New York, we'd be mad for them of course."

When the band split up in 1993, Rankine moved to Seattle and formed the band Ruby with Mark Walk

Mark Walk

Mark Walk is an American composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist and current member of the bands Skinny Puppy and ohGr. He also composes material for film and television under his name or as a ghostwriter. One such piece was for the "Kitchen Confidential" opener, which was a Fox TV show that...

.

Albums

• Cockeye (mini album) (1990)
• Fat Axl (1991)
• Organ Fan (1992) - UK
  UK Albums Chart
  The UK Albums Chart is a list of albums ranked by physical and digital sales in the United Kingdom. It is compiled every week by The Official Charts Company and broadcast on a Sunday on BBC Radio 1 , and published in Music Week magazine and on the OCC website .To qualify for the UK albums chart...
  
  #65

EPs

• Dolly Parton (1989)
• T.F.A. (1990)
• Fuckin' Driving or What? (1991)
• Silverfish With Scrambled Eggs (1992)
• Crazy (1993)
• Damn Fine (1993)