[1] Supporting The Photos that year at a local gig convinced Tim he wanted to do a lot more of it, while Martyn insisted they needed a band, and so recruited his drumming friend Chris Houghton.
A capable local muso Mick Davies (aka Dick Crazies) joined on bass, soon replaced by Stuart Dyke, who only appears on a recording for a Chainsaw fanzine flexi-disc of "The Rhythm Section Sticks Together".
Dyke was killed in a car crash in 1981 (which led to the formation of the band Finish the Story by his girlfriend Nicola), by which time the Dids were making quite a live reputation for themselves and getting a lot of positive press.
[citation needed] NME's Barney Hoskyns wrote: "This excellent four-piece is playing a highly original, wait for it, pastoral Edwardian rockabilly, a delightfully rough, tough little sound whose untapped source is mythical village England, specifically in their case the county of Worcestershire...
Writer Dave Thompson described the band: "punkabilly madmen who looked at the directions drawn by Dexys on the one hand, Tenpole Tudor on the other, and then drove a gap-toothed grinning juggernaut through the heart of all of them".
[6] Record Collector magazine, reviewing the reissued album described the band as "a theatrical, intellectual outfit with a driven sound somewhere between early Bunnymen and Southern Death Cult", calling them "a true English oddity".
[9] Paul Du Noyer, reviewing the 1982 single release "Badger Boys", describes the Did's musical approach as being like "A Clockwork Orange transposed... to the rural past.
Maxim Jakubowski describes the band's subject matter as "most unusual",[8] embracing bizarre and unlikely topics including ghosts, Vikings, dandified street gangs, burning witches, lost army platoons, wandering funerary spirits, feral wolves, nuclear war, haunted tea rooms, and even roadkill.