Comedian James Acaster has launched a new band and shared their first single ‘Zacuti’ featuring BC Camplight – find all the details below.
READ MORE: Soundtrack Of My Life: James Acaster
The Wow! Scenario has been in the making for 20 years and is finally completed by Acaster’s friend Graeme Wicks, BC Camplight and Emma Daman.
They have announced their debut album ‘Stand in the Star. A Verse and a Chorus’, which is due for release on October 23 via Bella Union. You can pre-order it here.
The band have also shared the first taster from the record, the jazz driven ‘Zacuti’, which you can listen to below.
Formed in Kettering in 2004, Acaster and Wicks “had already decided to call it a day when they recorded all of their songs in December 2007 with producer Chris Hamilton” according to a press release.
It went on to say the band name itself “came from a drunk audience member trying to tell them they didn’t have ‘the X factor’” but repeatedly got the term “wrong instead saying: ‘You don’t have the wow scenario, guys. You need to get the wow scenario’”.
They went back to the record with Hamilton in 2018, scrapped the vocals and re-recorded the vocal melodies on saxophone, clarinet and fiddle, with the intention of releasing it as an instrumental album.
Unhappy with the final product they went back to record it a third time in March 2023 with singers BC Camplight and Emma Daman before it was mixed and completed in March 2025.
The tracklisting for ‘Stand in the Star. A Verse and a Chorus’ is:
1. ‘Diving!’
2. ‘Once More!’
3. ‘Golf Socks!’
4. ‘Alpaca Spinner!’
5. ‘Reality!’
6. ‘Instructions!’
7. ‘Zacuti!’
8. ‘The Curse!’
Acaster has previously worked on the musical project called Temps, which featured a 40-strong musical collective featuring Quelle Chris, Xenia Rubinos, Shamir, NNAMDÏ and Seb Rochford.
Around the time of the collective’s announcement, the stand-up comedian and Off Menu podcast co-host spoke to NME as part of our ‘In Conversation’ interview series, and explained how the venture came about.
“I was doing bands when I was a teenager into my early 20s, and I was like, ‘This is gonna be my entire life, all I’m gonna do is music,’” Acaster said. “When the band split up I started doing stand-up as a placeholder, and then I fell in love with stand-up and got really obsessed with that.
“I’d never made an album from scratch that didn’t exist yet – recording it and writing it at the same time – and I’d never produced anything before, or mixed something as intensely as this one. There’s a lot of new things – if I had been doing it on my own, I don’t know how long I would have lasted.”
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