The Boy Least Likely To

I was hoping for it to become a lost classic," says The Boy Least Likely To singer Jof Owen of his band's debut album, The Best Party Ever. When it was first released in July 2005, the disc seemed destined for obscurity: Owen and multi-instrumentalist Pete Hobbs, two English lads from the countryside village of Wendover, recorded the album in Hobbs' bedroom, adding glockenspiel, recorder and accordion to Owen's deceptively childlike tunes about monsters, spiders and a Japanese beverage called Warm Panda Cola. But after they released the album through their Too Young to Die label, it became an indie hit in the U.K. -- and last fall James Blunt asked the duo to open for him in England. Now the band is supporting Blunt on an American tour.

SOUND The Best Party Ever is a homespun blend of tender country folk, Beach Boys melodies and ramshackle disco that sounds like Belle and Sebastian mucking about in the family rec room. Delicately ornamented valentines like "My Tiger My Heart" and the bouncy, banjo-laden "Be Gentle With Me" -- on which Owen sings, "If I wasn't so happy/I wouldn't be so scared of dying" -- elicit the heart-on-your-sleeve sadness of two of Owen's biggest lyrical influences: Winnie the Pooh and English poet and children's author Ted Hughes.

BACK IN THE DAY Hobbs and Owen met in their early teens and quickly became best friends. "We didn't drink or do anything rock & roll," Hobbs says. "Mainly we shopped for records." The pair would routinely scour "car boot" sales in the English countryside, where they scored cheap treasures like a set of Smash Hits! magazines from the early Eighties that introduced them to bands such as Orange Juice and the Smiths. That's also where they began to compile the unusual instruments they used on The Best Party Ever. "Every time a friend goes to Thailand or wherever," Owen says, "they'll come back and say, 'I bought you this: It's an elephant, and if you scrape its back it sounds like a frog.' We're like, 'Oh, great! We'll use that on the next record.' "

STAYING CONNECTED Owen's blog (theboyleastlikelyto.blog spirit.com) began as a chronicle of his daily life but has since morphed into a forum for Owen to sound off on everything from rock journalists to the new Jenny Lewis record. "When I found out that 3,000 people a week were reading it, I couldn't just talk about the new pub down the block," Owen says. "It's mostly about what I'm listening to at the moment, which is anything strange and wonderful."

BUBBLING UNDER Onstage, Owen and Hobbs are assisted by five friends, who handle keyboard, bass and drums and also work the band's prized bubble machine. The crew's oddball appearance caused a minor stir when they opened for Blunt last fall. "When we first came on, his fans were saying, 'What the hell is this?' " Owen says. "But by the end of the show they were singing along."

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