EMF - Whatever Happened to The Band Behind 'Unbelievable?'

The tragic story of the band E.M.F. who lost their bassist and wrote the hit song 'Unbelievable'

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This is a request I had from one of my subscribers. Side note guys and i don’t promote this enough. If you guys have topics you’d like to see us cover go use the link in the description box and submit as many ideas as you wish. Today let’s talk about whatever happened to the British group EMF. They undoubtedly had one of the biggest hits of the early 90s with unbelievable but fell off the radar afterwards and would soon be struck by tragedy. Stay tuned for the full story .

Hailing from the English region Forest of Dean vocalist James Atkin,; drummer Mark Decloedt, bassist ; Zac Foley, and keyboardist ; Derry Brownson would meet in school and play in different bands around the local music scene. They would come up with the monicker EMF which stood for Epsom Mad Funkers, a term that was coined by a writer of New Musical Express for fans of the band New Order. In the early 90’s as the band rose to prominence there was a lot of media coverage over what EMF stood for with
The washington post who profiled the band in 1991writing ‘The band officially claims it stands for "Epsom Mad Funkers." But if you follow the pop scene at all, you've heard another meaning: "Ecstacy Mother {expletive}", which you can hear in a rude, manic chant heard on the flip side of their hit single.” The band’s drummer would tell the paper "I think the latest one we've heard was 'Eat More Fruit,' " And there's some that I wouldn't like to repeat. I remember one show, a girl came up with a list,of a hundred different names she had made up. I'm sure the {British band} KLF get the same problem."

The four members would meet keyboardist and guitarist Ian Dench at a local battle of the bands contest. Dench proved to be the missing piece for the band as he had already been playing in the music scene for nearly a decade mostly in the group Apple Mosaic. Dench would drop out of his art program Oxford University to pursue music and soon learned that his run down home he lived in was next door to a serial killer named Fred West.

After Apple Mosaic fell apart, Dench would be dumped by his girlfriend who thought his prospects looked grim. He would recall to the Guardian. I hitched a lift home and the lorry dropped me on the M50. I remembered this cool kid called James that I’d met at Glos Music Co, who had kept saying: “You should come to the Forest of Dean. We’ve got this great band. We wear Afghan coats and play death metal.” I phoned him from a call box, 10 minutes later he arrived with Zac, we went out and got drunk and I didn’t go home for three days.

Dench who was older than the rest served as a type of father figure for the band and gave them a musical direction. Dench lived in the town of Gloucester, (Glaster) but his bandmates hailed from the small village of Cinderford. Dench suggested to the LA Times that some of EMF’s perspective and personality were tied to the isolation of their village life revealing “People in Gloucester (glaster) always say, ‘Oh, don’t go to Cinderford, funny people there, funny people.’ But they’re really kind of warm, friendly, energetic, drunken, mad people, inbred sort of. Some small community that’s kind of gone wild in the middle of these woods. That’s the most notable thing about the people in the band, is that they have that sort of oblivious energy, do their own thing. I think that’s one of the driving forces.”




After adding Dench to the lineup they would hold rehearsals at a clothing store owned by Brownsen. Brownsen would tell Seattle Times "We didn't sell a lot of clothes. It was just a good place to hang out, listen to records and get wrecked. I finally went bankrupt. So I had to do something else. We got the band, and it's been decidedly downhill ever since."

By the point Dench joined, the band already had a name with EMF, but hadn’t yet written any songs. One of the first sources of inspiration and the biggest song the group wrote would be their huge hit unbelievable. That girlfriend who broke up with Dench served as the inspiration behind the track with him telling the guardian One day, I was riding my bike home, still obsessed with this girl who had dumped me, and the idea just came to me: My dad was a classical guitarist, so I’d learned classic