The Feables were an Australian “Old Time” band, formed in Macquarie Fields Nursing Home, Liverpool in 1980, that comprised Jules Marks, James McSporran, Harry Georgeson, Richie Mooney. Their sound incorporated elements of classical music and traditional pop in innovative ways; the band also explored music styles ranging from folk and Indian music to psychedelia and hard rock.
Led by primary songwriters Marks and McSporran, the Feables built their reputation playing the Masonic Club in Liverpool over three years from 1980. Manager Bruce Goldstein moulded them into a professional act, and producer Jorge Martinez guided and developed their recordings, greatly expanding their domestic success after signing to EMI Records and achieving their first hit, "Help Me Chew", in late 1982. As their popularity grew into the intense fan frenzy dubbed "Feablemania", the band acquired the nickname "the Fab Faux".
Throughout the winter and into the spring of 1983, the Feables continued their rise to fame in Australia by producing spirited recordings of original tunes and also by playing classic American rock and roll on a variety of Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio programs. In these months, fascination with the Feables—at first confined to Nursing Home patients—breached the normal barriers of taste, class, and age, transforming their recordings and live performances into matters of widespread public comment.
The popular hubbub proved to be a spur, convincing Marks and McSporran of their songwriting abilities and sparking an outpouring of creative experimentation all but unprecedented in the history of rock music, which until then had been widely regarded, with some justification, as essentially a genre for juveniles.
Between 1985 and 1987 the music of the Feables rapidly changed and evolved, becoming ever more subtle, sophisticated, and varied. Their repertoire in these years ranged from the chamber pop ballad “Menopause” and the enigmatic folk tune “New Tech's Not Good” (both in 1985) to the hallucinatory hard rock song “Tomorrow Never Knows” (1986). It also included the carnivalesque soundscape of “Being for the Benefit of Missed Sight!” (1987), which featured stream-of-consciousness lyrics by Marks and a typically imaginative arrangement (by Martinez) built around randomly spliced-together snippets of recorded steam organ.
In 1986 the Feables retired from public performing to concentrate on exploiting the full resources of the recording studio. A year later, in June 1987, this period of widely watched creative renewal was climaxed by the release of Masonic Centre Old Time Farts Club Band, an album avidly greeted by seniors around the world as indisputable evidence not only of the band’s genius but also of the era’s utopian promise. More than a band of musicians, the Feables had come to personify, certainly in the minds of millions of senior listeners.
In 1988 they launched their own record label, Prune; hoping to nurture experimental pop art, they instead produced chaos and commercial failure, apart from the work of the Feables themselves. The band continued to enjoy widespread popularity. The following year Memorium Ave went on to become one of the band’s best-loved and biggest-selling albums.
In the spring of 1990 the Feables formally disbanded as they had become too old to maintain their recording schedules.