Anonymity is not usually a priority for recording artists but the Residents have played the faceless card with great effect for more than 40 years.
Dig around and you'll likely turn up some names but to expose this collection of writers, performers, film-makers and collaborators as ordinary men would be to rain on their wonderfully kooky parade.
And anyway, why would you wish to diminish the power of the giant eyeball, top hat and tails?
The Residents' signature look lends their art an unnameable quality somewhere between the deeply unsettling and the hilarious, exactly the place from which to toy with conventional representations of music, film and theatre.
This outsider art has never been Top 40 fodder but the Residents found a way around that.
On releasing Commercial Album (1980), the band bought 40 one-minute advertising slots on San Francisco radio station KFRC, guaranteeing full play of each of the album's minute-long tracks over three days. Genius!
The album's haiku-like songs, none of which are overtly ''commercial'' in sound or are product endorsements, are surprisingly entertaining exercises in economy.
Having stripped each composition down to a structure of (loosely) verse and chorus, the challenge to make each track feel complete and neatly formed, and not simply a sound-bite from some larger work, has been met.
The songs are presented as snapshot glimpses of modern life, albeit in some parallel universe where the grotesque mixes with the everyday.
Set predominantly against backgrounds of woozy synthesizer and modest percussion, vocals are delivered in the manner of the well-worn nursery rhyme, often double-tracked and manipulated to remove any sense of the ordinary.
It's creepy stuff but hugely fascinating, the knowledge that another oddly bent lesson is never more than 60 seconds away a compelling reason to stick with it.
A 1988 CD release adds 10 longer tracks to the tail of this curiosity, providing wider insight into the Residents' world.
