Seems like it's been "Old Dummies Week" around here.

"Did you know Ben Darvill's been busking in London?" was the first tidbit I heard.

Then I was told that Ellen Reid, the Dummies flamboyant keyboardist and vocalist, had quit the music business altogether, just months after releasing her much-lauded, and long-awaited solo album, Cinderellen.

While there was truth to each tale, the realities are rather different.

Darvill has been busking in London, where he lives, but he's also been doing his one-man show as Son of Dave at a variety of venues all over the U.K., Europe and Canada.

In fact, he played The Toad in the Hole in Osborne Village last night and opens for Toronto's Lindy at the Pyramid tonight as part of a tour which will take him to Vancouver and back.

"I've played all kinds of places in London. Fifty shows in the last year. At magazine openings, posh private clubs, strange cabarets -- one where a woman laid an egg. I've even played comedy venues, trying to extend my act," Darvill explains.

Describing his solo show, Darvill says "I'm basically a one-man R&B/funk machine. I do the beats orally -- with my mouth -- sample them with a foot-pedal, play harmonica over top and hum the basslines."

He seems to have found a niche for his sound as well. He recently scored a TV ad for the Nike London Run, a charity event held every year, and says that a British bank is also using his music in an ad campaign. A Son of Dave II album is planned in the next year.

"I don't know why I've ended up doing this, but it seems to work," Darvill says.

The other much-discussed Dummy, the lovely Ms. Ellen Reid, explained this week she isn't entirely leaving music.

She is returning to university this fall in Toronto, where she now lives, to study social work.

But she says she's going to keep playing and writing and intends to work with Dummies' frontman Brad Roberts on an ongoing recording project he's working on in New York City (supposedly a Dummies' Christmas album.)

"I still want to record one more solo album, do the occasional acoustic gig ... " Reid said via e-mail this week.

"I just figured it was time get something else on my resume."

If she does obtain her degree and goes to work, Ellen will certainly become the only social worker in Canada who can boast of being part of a band that sold eight million albums.