The Wow! Scenario formed in 2004 in Kettering, Northamptonshire.
The sessions for their debut album began in 2007.
Stand in the Star. A Verse and a Chorus, the debut album by The Wow! Scenario will now be released in 2026.
Graeme Wicks and James Acaster had already decided to call it a day when they recorded all of their songs in December 2007 with producer Chris Hamilton - one of the few people who actually liked their music. Indeed, the band name itself came from a drunk audience member trying to tell them they didn’t have ‘the X factor’ but repeatedly getting the term wrong, “you don’t have the wow scenario, guys. You need to get the wow scenario.”
After three years of believing they were going to be one of the most important bands of all time, the duo had lost faith. They were playing poorly attended gigs every week and the response from the small audiences ranged from throwing shoes at the band to chasing them out of the car park and trying to punch their car. They were working extremely hard but making no progress. They’d both attended singing lessons every week since the band’s inception but still hadn’t reached the standard they’d hoped for when it came to harmonies or (in Acaster’s case) basic pitch. In the end, they had to accept The Wow! Scenario was an acquired taste - or at least it would be if they could fully execute the ideas they had in their heads. Which they could not.
Even though they’d decided to give up, they approached the recording sessions with a new found enthusiasm. Other people’s opinions no longer mattered to them, they were recording this for themselves, with Chris - someone who liked them so much he’d contacted them on MySpace and practically begged to record their songs. They spent a month sleeping in the studio, recording jazzy guitars and freewheeling drums, singing flatly, and periodically visiting the airport to make field recordings. In January 2008, Hamilton mixed all the songs, delivered the album, then the band split up and kept all of it to themselves.
Ten years later, in January 2018, The Wow! Scenario returned to the studio. They’d independently revisited the album and loved all of it except for the vocals. The plan was to delete the vocals, re-record the vocal melodies on saxophone, clarinet and fiddle, then possibly release the project as an instrumental album. Mark Brown and Guy Fletcher recorded their parts beautifully, Hamilton mixed the entire album for the second time in ten years, then Wicks and Acaster listened back to everything and agreed that while the instrumentals had been elevated, the songs still sounded incomplete. They needed vocals after all, apparently. Ha. Ha. Ha.
The third and final studio session took place in March 2023 when singers Emma Daman and BC Camplight performed the vocal parts the way they were always meant to be performed. Finally the songwriters heard what had been in their heads all those years ago. They’d finally graduated from ‘impenetrable’ to ‘an acquired taste’. This was huge.
Just over a year later, Hamilton sat down to mix the album for the third time in his goddamn life, and by March 2025, ‘Stand in the Star. A Verse and a Chorus’ was actually, properly, hilariously, complete.
Obviously, the decision to go back on their original plan and share this music with other people could result in more shoes being thrown at them and open their car up to multiple punches but it’s a risk they're willing to take. It took them over 20 years, but James Acaster and Graeme Wicks finally ‘got the wow scenario’.
Whether anyone else will get The Wow! Scenario remains to be seen.