PETER BLEGVAD is a polymath – a writer, cartooonist, and, most often a musician. He was a founding member of the avant-pop band Slapp Happy (“the Douanier Rousseau of rock’n’roll”), and has played and recorded with  Faust, The Golden Palominos, John Greaves, Andy Partridge, and others, as well as recording a half dozen solo albums. Born in New York, he lives, like Leviathan, in Shepherds Bush. He conducts writing courses at Warwick University and is president of the British Institute for Pataphysics, which in 2012 published an interview-biography of Blegvad entitled The Bleaching Stream.

Blegvad’s lyrics are a treasure house of word games and rhyming schemes, and include (on the album Kew. Rhone.) one of the world’s longest grammatically correct palindromes: Peel’s foe not a set animal laminates a tone of sleep.

Here is Peter Blegvad’s Wiki page, including a discography. And here are a couple of treats: an interactive Leviathan page and Peter’s own Amateur website, including his Milk Museum and a wonderful sequence called ‘Imagined, Observed, Remembered’.

Oh – and here are two of his best songs – Daughter and Gold – on YouTube, posted unofficially, so buy the book to justify the piracy.