Part Two

IN THE BEGINNING
Back in the Winter of 1996, The Replicants were still a duo: Paul Vickers and Roger Simian (two renegade hacks from the short-lived Scottish music monthly, 'Sun Zoom Spark'). A couple of years earlier Paul had dropped out of his experimental music class at Nottingham University and relocated North of the Border. Of course, it was inevitable that such a pair of like-minded freaks would gravitate together in this small community. Boredom, frustration and a common interest in the quirkier areas of pop history led to the formation of Dawn Of The Replicants. Mister Vickers wrote and sang the words, and Mister Simian made the music.

There may well have been faulty circuitry in the skullboxes of these two founding Replicants as they crouched over their beetle-infested porta-studio, cloistered away in some converted old Kirk-house, their eyes blazing red with determination and too much caffeine. But, please do not judge these poor creatures too harshly for their antisocial behaviour. The Replicants were not yet fully domesticated. They knew not the folly of their ways as they hunkered down, hammering out oddly shaped lo-fi pop ditties about Class A-snorting super-models, wicca wedding cakes and World War I battle-birds. Besides, once a little bionic stardust had been sprinkled by a qualified technician at the local studio (Dave Little, SoundStation), the aural offerings scrubbed up nice enough. And so it was that, following an unexpected electrical storm, the duo poured the remains of a student loan into dumb/SULK trigg-er records, printing up 500 vinyl copies of the hand-stencilled 'So Far So Spitfire' ep, which they subsequently gave away free to anyone with a couple of stamps and a sturdy constitution.

Pinkos!

The gamble paid off: Peel played it, Radcliffe played it, NME loved it, Melody Maker gave it Single Of The Week and a deranged A&R man called George Tyekiff decided to sign those ramshackle Replicants to eastwest, bolstered by three new recruits: the bespectacled Joy Divisionist Donald Kyle (bass); long-haired muso Michael Sorensen Small (guitar, keyboard, vocal) and the 6-foot-five bearded behemoth Grant Pringle (drums, guitar, keyboard, vocal). These three (already accomplished songwriters in their own rights) brought musical refinement and a bunch of great new tunes to the mix. Check out these early album tracks, for instance: 'Ten Sea Birds' and 'Hogwash Farm' (Vickers / Pringle), 'Mary Louise' and 'Fatal Firework' (Vickers / Small) and 'Sgt Growley' (Vickers / Kyle).

(I guess the Scottish Borders music scene must be pretty incestuous. Grant, Mike and Roger previously played together in the 3-piece Crunchy Joseph; Grant and Donald were in Da Hsiang and Placenta Party; Mike and Paul were in Pennies From Heaven and Snoopy On Sax; and the whole frikkin' lot of them produced the full-colour monthly music magazine Sun Zoom Spark.)

It was this new improved 5-piece Dawn Of The Replicants line-up which went on to record a classic collection of songs for eastwest, the band producing music of startling originality as they dipped their big toes in whichever genre took their sid 'n' nancy (swamp rock, pop, glam-punk, electro, girlie jazz, doo-wop, nasty-ass blues, hip-hop, redneck, experimentalism). There were many influences on display (Tom Waits, The Beachboys, Sonic Youth, Blondie, The Beatles, Howlin' Wolf, Kraftwerk, Velvet Underground, Roxy Music, PJ Harvey, Bob Dylan, Beefheart), and, yet, Dawn Of The Replicants somehow had a sound all their own.

PARANOID ABOUT PUFF
(No Pictures 'zine, issue 8)

JASON GRAHAM: Who's the strongest in the band?

DONALD KYLE: Grant's the strongest. The rest of us are weak men.

PAUL VICKERS: I only have one major vitamin running through my body at any one time.

GRANT PRINGLE: It's the one that means you can see in the dark.

GEORGE TYEKIFF (bursting through the door): There's a coach load of police outside. The owner's getting really paranoid about puff. He said you can puff but there's a door there that opens to go outside. Puff out there!

MEET THE MONSTER, TONIGHT!
I have to say, Paul Vickers is one damn fine lyricist, a natural born bar-room Baudelaire, born into the bleak industrial landscape of the North East. (The elder son of a docker and a computer analyst, if the genealogy interests you.) Words seem to sprinkle effortlessly from his head like droplets from a raindog's fur, each song glittering with gaudy jewels, snatched from the gutter (or a sperm whale's wet dreams): rough-hewn metaphors and quick-cut imagery jostling shamelessly with darkly humorous oneliners. Replicants lyrics always seem to reflect a distorted world back at us, like the mirror shattered on the pavement, but just look a little closer and you'll see something interesting: the words are fractured shards, shining light onto all those magical places we rarely glimpse in the greyness of our everyday lives. I first realised this back in 1997 when I heard 'Chaos In An Inkwell' (the b-side of the original 'Hogwash Farm' 10"), a song about dyslexia, which seemed to find poetry in confusion. ("The scattered papers on your floor... numbers slip like water.")

I can understand why Paul Vickers's talents as a songwriter were pretty much ignored in the climate of the late '90s, where the humdrum tabloid realism of the Brit-Poppers was applauded over genuine imagination. But it still hurt me, as a fan. I always, for some reason, expect others to see my idols the way I see them. But, then, I guess I'm just a sucker for this stuff. I've always preferred the magical conjuring of writers like Lennon, Ivor Cutler, the later Tom Waits, Bjork, Mark E Smith, Beefheart and Bowie to the Play For Today storytelling of Ray Davies or Damon Albarn.

That's not to say, that Vickers isn't comfortable tackling the real world head on whenever it suits him. Just check out songs such as 'Mary Louise' and 'Love Is A Curse', where our baffled balladeer charts the highs and lows of star-crossed lovers; or, more recently, 'Rockefeller Center, 1932' whose narrator seems to be sat on a scaffold high above New York, admiring the handiwork of his fellow immigrant labourers, with nary a thought for his wife back home.

I think it's interesting that the bleak North-Eastern city of Middlesborough - reportedly the inspiration for Ridley Scott's dystopian cityscape in 'Bladerunner' - was also the place where head Replicant, Paul Vickers, honed his imaginative skills:

"Creativity always thrives in downtrodden areas. In the North you need an imagination to survive and once you're bitten by the chilly polluted wind and black humour there's no way back. I always enjoyed the grittier side of life, which may have something to do with the fact that I've had to cope in my life with the reality of a chip butty and a rainy day in Hartlepool. That really hardens you. Haha. Everything I have ever done, every song I've ever sung has had an undeniable air of downtrodden glamour. As a child I remember thinking that ICI and British Steel were Las Vegas. My brother had similar delusions. He thought dinosaurs lived in the local scrapyard and that Middlesborough town hall clock was Big Ben."

THEME PARK
(Rebel Scum 'zine, issue 1)

EMILY: You've won the National Lottery. What's the first thing you buy?

PAUL VICKERS: Probably a church steeple and some roofs and chimneys - strange, I know - just the top halves of buildings. Then I'd buy a big field and I'd put the buildings in it so it'd look like the buildings had been buried. I'd open it up as a place for sightseers to come along and witness the village that got buried. All you'd see would be the tops of buildings. You'd get loads of tourists. A brilliant theme park. It'd make Legoland and Alton Towers look pretty stupid!

Part One and Three