Their singles were commercially unsuccessful, though the band would find major success with "Mouldy Old Dough" (1972) under the extended line-up of Lieutenant Pigeon.

Rob Woodward (born in Coventry in 1945) became a professional musician in 1963 and released two unsuccessful singles under the name Shel Naylor on Decca Records between 1963 and 1964 before the label dropped him, which resulted in him returning to performing on the nightclub circuit.

They moved into the Coventry home of Woodward's mother Hilda, and set up their own makeshift recording studio in her living room.

They dubbed their project Stavely Makepeace and added Pete Fisher on bass and Don Ker on drums to flesh out their initial sessions.

[6] The single was followed by 1971's "Smokey Mountain Rhythm Revue", whose tongue-in-cheek instrumental B-side, "Rampant on the Rage," inspired the creation of a side-project band named Lieutenant Pigeon, who had the same line-up as Stavely Makepeace but with the addition of Woodward's mother Hilda on piano.

[7] Meanwhile, as Lieutenant Pigeon, the members had found success when "Mouldy Old Dough", a novelty instrumental that unfaithfully replicated vintage pub music in an "odd and off" fashion with growled vocals, reached number 1 on the UK Singles Chart,[8] becoming one of the best-selling singles of 1972 and also allowing its 1973 follow-up "Desperate Dan" to reach number 17.

Nonetheless, when the 1980 Hammer Records single "Songs of Yesterday" and 1983's self-released "Just Tell Her Fred Said Goodbye" both flopped, the pair permanently discontinued Stavely Makepeace and once again focused on the long-lived Lieutenant Pigeon.

Uncut felt that the band fused 1970s MOR music with DIY avant-garde, and wrote: "Speeding up and multi-tracking home recordings in their mum's front room, they concocted phased, clunking West Midlands exotica and spliced whole new genres: radiophonic cajun reggae, yodelling steam-punk, Joe Meek boogie.

"[10] AllMusic made note that, as was the case with Lieutenant Pigeon's output, Stavely Makepeace's home productions focused on applying quirky, moderately lo-fi production to simplistic pop songs with strong echoes of both British novelty music and 1950s rock and roll, with songs boasting fiddle lines, horns, old-fashioned piano and "anachronistic" use of echo.

Unlike the largely instrumental Lieutenant Pigeon, the music on The Scrap Iron Rhythm Revue is generally more focused on songs with vocals.

As was the case with The Best of Lieutenant Pigeon,[9] The Scrap Iron Rhythm Revue received four and a half stars out of five from AllMusic and was named an "Album Pick".

[12] Writing for the website, Richie Unterberger felt that even though the singles compiled on the album "aimed for the pop charts," they had been unsuccessful because Woodward and Nigel were "just a little too strange for their own good."

[12] Uncut felt that the compilation proved that the band consistently created genuinely unusual songs, and wrote that: "Their destiny was as a novelty footnote, but this exemplary reissue excavates a weirdly potent homebrew 10cc.

[15] In 2015, Stavely Makepeace reunited to release the one-off comeback single "Time Marches On," a song which was described by the Coventry Telegraph as "as quirky" as the band's other material and as tracking the advent of pop music since the 1950s.