At first, The Wombats were a joke they didn't want anyone to find funny.
For our first gig we wore jesters' hats with sunglasses," says guitarist/singer Matthew 'Murph' Murphy. "They had bells on the end," adds drummer/singer Dan Haggis.

Murph: "In the middle of the songs we'd break into uncontrollable screaming. The idea was not to be funny."

Dan: "If people laughed we'd be like 'ah we dogged it'. We wanted it to die on its feet. Literally people would just stand there and there'd be this awful silence. You know like in The Office when there's a dreadful silence, and the next day we'd be like 'Ah that was amazing that bit, wasn't it?' We still love dying on our feet sometimes."

Murph: "It was a lot of silliness. The idea of the band was to be stupid. We were just idiots."

But this was back in 2003, when The Wombats were enrolled in Paul McCartney's Liverpool Institute Of Performing Arts (LIPA). Local lads Murph and Dan, despite playing cricket against each other for their respective schools near Strawberry Fields, only actually met each other at LIPA aged 19 when Murph turned up turned at Dan's flat. Murph thought Dan was "a complete muppet with pink and grey hair," Dan (quite rightly) thought Murph was a "fellow block-head." So naturally they started playing gigs together (at The Cavern Club, notably) before they nabbed bassist Tord Overland Knudsen (fresh at LIPA from his hometown of Elverum in Norway) from the seven other bands he'd joined within two weeks of arriving. Armed with such early pop classics as 'The Ostrich Song' and a tune now only remembered by the band as "the standing at the bus stop one," the three — plus an American guitarist called Ben who was in the band for a few months, whose speciality was a Mexican "areeeeba!" noise — embarked on four years of tall tales of boys and girls and marsupials."We fiddled ourselves a gig in a place called Hannah's Bar in Liverpool," Murph recalls, "and we didn't really have a name and me and Dan went through a period of calling each other Wombo."
Dan: "Basically Wombo the Wombat was a fictional kind of character in our daily talk."
Murph. "We used to call each other 'stupid wombats' as well, and then we needed a name for this first gig so Dan was like 'just call us The Wombats'."

Dan: "And the guy just laughed and went 'yeah, that's funny, that'll do for now'."

But it wasn't too long before Liverpool had to start taking The Wombats very seriously indeed. Ditching the sanatorium moods and comedy outfits (although they went through a "stripe period" before settling on their trademark primary color t-shirt look) they set about playing their infectious punk pop deviance around Liverpool and beyond. Their gigs were laced with a cappella intros, between-song stand-up and Facts Of The Day (did you know that rabbits aren't nocturnal, they're crepuscular? Not until you went to a Wombats gig you didn't). They took every gig they were offered, whichever corner of the country it was in (using Dan's grandmother's Postman Pat van to get there); if plotted on a map, their travels would look like the crazed scrawlings of a madman.

Over the next two and a half years of casual gigging they played at a pub in London called Lark In The Park under the impression it was a big open-air festival; they played the legendary Three Fat Fish in Exeter; they got management offers from tattooed amphetamine maniacs at 3am in Tottington; and they were selected by LIPA to go to China to play to 20,000 people at Beijing's Midi festival: "It was basically kids from the streets, that was the idea of the festival," says Dan. "For some reason we were the 'kids from the streets' from the UK. It was amazing"