James Acaster starts the band The Wow! Scenario with a jazz-driven single

Comedian James Acaster has launched a new band, The Wow! Scenario, sharing its first single, the jazz-driven "Zacuti," featuring BC Camplight. The band's debut album, Stand in the Star. A Verse and a Chorus, is due October 23 via Bella Union, one of the more unusual entries in the release calendar this fall, closing out a project 20 years in the making.

Acaster and his friend Graeme Wicks formed the band in Kettering in 2004. According to a press release, the pair had already decided to call it quits by the time they recorded their songs in December 2007 with producer Chris Hamilton. The band's name comes from a drunk audience member who mangled the phrase "the X factor," telling them instead, "You don't have the wow scenario, guys. You need to get the wow scenario."

The record went through two more overhauls before it was finished. In 2018, Acaster and Wicks returned to the songs with Hamilton, scrapped the vocals, and re-recorded the vocal melodies on saxophone, clarinet and fiddle, intending to release it as an instrumental album. Unhappy with that version, they went back a third time in March 2023, this time with singers BC Camplight and Emma Daman, before the album was finally mixed and completed in March 2025.

Stand in the Star. A Verse and a Chorus runs eight tracks: "Diving!," "Once More!," "Golf Socks!," "Alpaca Spinner!," "Reality!," "Instructions!," "Zacuti!" and "The Curse!"

Acaster previously led Temps, a 40-strong musical collective featuring Quelle Chris, Xenia Rubinos, Shamir, NNAMDI and Seb Rochford. He told NME that after his teenage bands split up, he took up stand-up "as a placeholder," before falling in love with it. He said this is the first time he has written and recorded an album from scratch at the same time, and the first time he has produced or mixed anything this intensively.