Wuh Oh on major labels, lost albums, and new project Ferguson

“The lost album is finally found.”

Shelved four years ago by the major label that signed Pete Ferguson (aka Wuh Oh) off the back of seeing the £50 music video for his single Daddio, his long-lost debut album Wuh Ohs finally saw the light of day in October. Shared with countless labels by a friend seeking a job in A&R, the playful video for Daddio – starring Ferguson in his best Beetlejuice-meets-Andy Warhol getup – incited an unexpected bidding war.

“It was all extremely hectic,” Ferguson recalls, perched on a park bench in The Meadows after a leisurely stroll in the November winter sun. “My ego was exploding. I ended up signing to one of the Sony labels and realised quite quickly after I’d signed with them that they didn’t have much of a plan for me. My hunch is that they got caught up in the competition and wanted to sign me so that perhaps nobody else could. So when I went to my meeting to drink champagne and sign papers, one of the high-ups in the label came up to me at the end and whispered in my ear, ‘I promise you’ll never regret this.’ And as soon as they said that, I thought, ‘I have a feeling I’m gonna regret this. I think I already regret this.’”

Strangely, the label wasn't interested in releasing Daddio as their first port of call. “Instead of what I thought would be putting my best foot forward, which was releasing the poppy single that everybody was excited about, and the reason I got signed, they wanted me to continue to release really obscure weird things because I guess it would take the pressure off me and the pressure off them, because if a really weird thing doesn’t connect, who cares, it was weird,” Ferguson says. He continues with a sigh: “The wind was taken out of my sails, and the excitement at the label got less and less.

“By the time it came to the point of releasing [Daddio], everybody had kind of jumped ship, and I had lost hope in myself and in the project, and so it just kind of fizzled out. And then COVID happened, TikTok became a huge deal – it was like overnight there was a memo that went around the entire music industry which said, ‘the only way to do this is TikTok now’.” It's something Ferguson wasn’t interested in getting involved with: “The type of content I was being asked to make did not feel like honest world building to me, it just felt like really cynical content and it just didn’t agree with me at all.”

When things started going south with the label, Ferguson pitched a single – Hypnotized – to pop icon Sophie Ellis-Bextor, who loved it. He took it to the label, and after a few months of feigning excitement, they finally admitted it wasn’t something they could get involved with. They gave him their blessing to release the song (which the pair did in 2023, accompanied by a glorious video shot at the Barrowlands) and essentially dropped him from the label in the same breath. 

After this rollercoaster, Ferguson turned to alcohol, something he admits he’d long used as a coping mechanism. “I guess it exacerbated a problem that I already had with masking my issues or trying to silence the thoughts in my head and the fear of failure.” 

He later admits: “I felt so extremely alone and isolated and it made me feel like such a failure. There was such an immense feeling of, if I can’t make myself a success when I’m signed to a major label then I must not be good enough. And now I realise, actually, that’s not true [...] Basically, I’ve come to realise: music is about life, and life is not about music.”

Since parting ways with the label, day-to-day life looks very different for Ferguson. Attending regular AA meetings, coffee dates and time with friends and family are the priority, squeezing in musical endeavours in the gaps. “I want to enjoy the little things,” he says, “because I think now that life is almost entirely about the little things. Even the things that are so small that you don’t even notice them.”

For Ferguson, going forward, he wants music to form part of what he describes as “a simple happy life”. Gone now are the self-imposed pressures, and pressures from the major label, and so too is Wuh Oh in all his forms, including the “dumb alias,” he says. “Nobody could pronounce Wuh Oh to save themselves. I used to work with Pete Tong… on the radio he progressively was saying it more and more wrong. He started with Woo-hoo and ended up calling me The Woo Ohs, when he was about to spin my latest single, which he was co-releasing – it was a fucking nightmare.

“I went through such a journey [as Wuh Oh] of doing everything I possibly could so that nobody could see or judge the real me. I would put on crazy outfits, I would wear a wig, I would have a puppet baboon as a member of the band,” he confesses. “I started writing music to make songs that I love and to show some people. So that’s basically what I’m going to do. I’m still happy to write songs with people or for people when it seems fun and inspiring, and the kind of world that I feel I can contribute meaningfully to, but I just got fed up of writing shit songs for David Guetta maybe to release,” he laughs.

With masking a thing of Ferguson's past, he's looking to the future, and his new project where he’ll release music under his own name – Ferguson – for the first time. “I just want this to be me doing the music that I always loved.” He promises that there will still be a strong emphasis on melody and harmony, and on pop, but it will be more rooted in the music of the 60s, 70s and 80s, albeit “with no expectations of reaching Beatlemania,” he quips. While the songs are all for him, he admits that during the writing process he was imagining it as a pop record, penning songs with artists in mind like Sam Smith and Sugababes; even artists like Tom Waits, Daphne Guinness, The Carpenters and Supertramp get a mention. 

Ferguson has 14 songs almost ready to go, featuring himself on vocals, his brother Mike on drums and Stevie Jackson from Belle and Sebastian – “my favourite band of all time” – on guitar; admitting to the recording process being quite “haphazard”, he describes the music as “chaotic messy pop”. Count us in.

At this point, it's worth noting the difference in Ferguson’s demeanour when talking about his new project and his changed relationship with music compared with where we started. He’s no longer holding onto this fear of failure that haunted him as Wuh Oh, and instead as himself, as Ferguson, he sounds re-energised, talking faster, eyes wider – he’s giddy, like a kid hopped up on sugar.

Coming out the other side of this whole experience a changed person, he describes the experience as valuable, and something he’s ultimately grateful to have gotten out of the way in his mid-20s. Offering advice for artists desperate to get signed to a major, he treads with caution. “It’s good to remember that it’s business,” he starts. “The money is good, but you have to do it all by yourself, they’re not your family or your friends – just go into it knowing exactly what you expect from them and make sure they know what is expected from them.

"And do everything you can not to let your performance on that record label dictate how you feel about yourself as a person and as an artist. Do not let the fear of failing and being dropped affect the way that you make your music because at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter,” he says candidly, ending with a shrug and a hearty guffaw: “People get dropped all the time.”

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Wuh Ohs was released on 10 Oct via Wuh Oh / Movie Records, and is available via Bandcamp

Keep your eyes peeled for new music from Ferguson in the new year