Indianapolis, current. Margot and the Nuclear So and So's came into existence when songwriter Richard Edwards and Andy Fry met in a pet shop in Fountain Square. Richard was buying a kitten he intended to name "Margot", and Andy was preparing to purchase a sort of foreign lizard, which he planned to name, "Mice". The two struck up a conversation which focused mainly on obsessions, and Richard confessed that he had always been obsessed with Paul Simon and Pavement. Andy was quite fond of the Cardigans. Richard (fmly of Archer Avenue) had been writing songs since he was 13 or 14, and he gave some to Andy to listen to. Andy (The Academy) really liked the songs, and the two decided to start a band. Andy's brother, Chris (The Academy), played the drums, so he joined the group. A mutual friend, named Jesse Lee (Pravada, the 100's), joined up on cello. After that, Richard recruited his friends Tyler Watkins and Emily Watkins to play bass and rhodes. With the band completed, the gang went in to make a record, eventually recruiting Hubert Glova to play trumpet and round out the sound. Wes Anderson said that when he made 'The Royal Tenenbaums', he was trying to re-create a New York that never really existed, or only existed in his memory. For much of the so and so's debut, "The Dust of Retreat", the musicians attempted to re-create their own unreal ideas of how Greenwich Village might have been in the 60's. When Richard was 16, he and a few friends rode to New York in the back of a pickup truck to play a show at Manhatten's Luna Lounge, and images from his trip still work their way into many of his lyrics. .