When it comes to music that's likely to clear a room as rapidly as possible it's hard to think of something that'd be more effective than Captain Beefheart in one of his more extreme modes.
Actually, that mightn't work so well if you were looking at a room full of punk, new wave or grunge aficionados - something like Engelbert Humperdinck or Johnny Mathis might fit the bill in that department - but if you're looking for somebody frequently cited as influential, groundbreaking or critically acclaimed and will clear a room full of supposedly normal people, Beefheart's probably your man.
Listening to his earlier work, however, The Legendary A&M Sessions, for example, or the classic Safe As Milk album you'd wonder where that reputation came from.
Somewhere along the line Hughesy seems to have acquired a reputation for liking the more extreme end of the Captain Beefheart spectrum (the room-clearing stuff) and while I duly headed out and shelled out for Lick My Decals Off, Baby and company, my regular playing interest really only extends to Safe As Milk.
In other words, while I've got a fair chunk of the artist formerly known as Don Van Vliet's catalogue there's only one album where the iTunes play count runs past the bottom end of the play count scale.
I'd been familiar with the name Captain Beefheart from some time in 1967 when one of the American magazines ran an article about the origins of various band names. A reference to Captain Beefheart and the Grunt People transforming into Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band is the sort of thing that tends to stick in your memory.
Apart from that actual hard information about Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band was thin on the ground. I knew that English DJ John Peel was an enthusiastic advocate and that John Lennon owned two copies of Safe As Milk. Beyond that, not much was known, or if it was it didn't manage to filter through to Hughesy in Townsville.