The Strange Brew — the UK site and podcast run by Jason Barnard, covering rock from the mid-sixties onward — has published a long interview with Derek Ferguson under the headline “These Are Horcruxes, Several Centuries Early.”
The conversation traces the band’s name back further than it has been told before: Derek’s mother inherited the word from her grandmother, and Derek’s theory is that it began as the Latin revestiamus — “let us re-vest” — misheard in a Catholic industrial school in 1904 and carried down the family phonetically ever since. It also means “rearrange.” As Derek notes, the accidental upside is that “because the word doesn’t exist, every search result for it is us.”
The headline comes from the “Deathless” suite on Morri’s Rock Boutique, built on Kashchey the Deathless, the Russian folklore villain who cannot be killed because he keeps his death outside his body — needle in egg, egg in duck, duck in hare. “These are horcruxes, several centuries early,” Derek says, before explaining what the myth is really standing in for: power that has arranged to be beyond accountability. His imagined ending for it is not a reckoning but “the rest of their lives in a bunker somewhere, never seeing the sky again.”
On writing that kind of material without turning it into homework: “The moment you start providing footnotes in a lyric you’ve admitted the reference is doing the work instead of the song.”
The interview also covers the twenty-five years Derek spent in technology before lockdown removed the last excuse not to make records again; how Ian Beabout’s role grew from engineering the mixes to questioning the song structures; the move from the assembled-online Decoupage (2021) to a real band on Intouríst (2024) and Morri’s Rock Boutique (2026); Van der Graaf Generator, Kansas, Styx, Crack the Sky and Procol Harum as the load-bearing influences; HRH Prog 15 with David Jackson on saxophone, and how attentively a British prog audience listens; and the plan to make album four in a room together instead of over the wire.
Read the full interview: https://thestrangebrew.co.uk/refestramus-derek-ferguson/
Morri’s Rock Boutique (Melodic Revolution Records, March 2026) is available now: