GALA UNDERGROUND: The Sun Zoom Spark years + Crunchy joseph & the early Dawn Of The Replicants


SPARKS FROM THE MOTHERSHIP's continuing series on the Secret History of Alternative Music, DIY Zines, Indie Labels and Underground Cinema in the Scottish Borders, 1990s-Now...

 

GALA UNDERGROUND: THE SUN ZOOM SPARK YEARS
(also featuring Crunchy Joseph, the early Dawn Of The Replicants,
Pralines & Snoopy On Sax)

MELODY MAKER, JAN 31 1998, Sharon O'Connell:
(PUBLISH AND BE BAND! A Guide to Dawn Of The Replicants' publishing sideline)

SUN ZOOM SPARK: Accomplished, very funny, glossy colour fanzine with national distribution. Originally started to promote Crunchy Joseph, but eventually overtook band. Published monthly, issues were chock full of features and reviews until the end of 1995. Edited by mate Brendan McAndrew, designed by Grant Pringle, who also drew superb caricatures. Off the wall interviews and random, inspired nonsense contributed by Paul Vickers. Sadly missed.

Sample content:
* A real recipe for "David Bowie's October Cobbler" in "Foodstuffs Of The Stars", with footnote: "Although this delicious recipe is credited to David Bowie, it is believed that the blackberries were actually Mick Ronson's idea."

>>>>>

1992: The Year Indie Broke in Gala...

Known widely for running Club DM – a monthly Alt-Disco / Gig Night in one of the nightclubs – Galashiels four-piece, The Pralines, were the first local band to sign to an Indie label when they released their 12" mini-album, Pronounced Praylines, on Alva Records, an off-shoot of Edinburgh's Avalanche store in '92. The release made it into Melody Maker's Top 20 Indie Charts.


That same year, a troupe of self-proclaimed "Indie weirdos", mostly from the surrounding villages, decided to set up a music publication in the town. The resultant magazine, Sun Zoom Spark - named after a track from maverick blues-freak pioneer Captain Beefheart’s 1972 album, Clear Spot - was initially intended as the promotional arm of Gala-based three-piece, Crunchy Joseph.




Crunchy Joseph: Mike Small, Grant Pringle & Roger Simian

Crunchy Joseph had formed several years earlier in the village of Earlston, as a jokey, Lo-Fi four-track portastudio recording collective, mostly inspired by satirical Scouse Indie combo, Half-Man Half-Biscuit, and repeat viewings of somebody's worn-out video tape of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. CJ – who were, at that point, fronted by John Lynch, a street-smart, lippy kid brought up in an Edinburgh Children's Home - were not adverse to recording punked up covers of The Lambeth Walk or shoving an antiquated Singer Sewing Machine across the sitting room floor to record its annoyingly squeaky wheels, in lieu of Velvets / Jesus and Mary Chain style guitar feedback. Sample song-titles included: The Ballad of Mr Potato Hed, Something Inished, Last Year's Picnic Fiasco and Chicken Face Baby.

For a few years Crunchy Joseph existed more as a concept than a fully-fledged band with hiss-drenched four-track porta demos mailed out willy-nilly and letters, written under fake names (such as Gaye Quakers on Oatmeal), published regularly in NME, Melody Maker and Sounds. These missives alternated between praising and disparaging the Crunchy Joseph brand, much to the mild bewilderment of readers. 

Crunchy Joseph - The Birthday e.p.


By the early 1990s, CJ's line up had trimmed down to brothers, Roger Simian and Mike Sorensen Small (on guitar and bass respectively), along with their classmate from Earlston High School, the 6 ft 5 "bearded behemoth", Grant Pringle, who provided drums and intermittent wonky guitar-play. Described in M8 magazine's demo review as "Three ordinary looking bastards", the combo were happy to add a visual distraction to their performances with their own low budget take on Pink Floydian stage theatrics. There was the occasional video backdrop, comprising of a haphazard mega mix-tape of their Lo-Fi music videos, Trap Door style plasticine animations and early arthouse b-movie efforts. Another mate, Skett Wight, also frequently donned a home-made afro wig and 70s hippy clobber for his Bez style dance routines.

Weekly marathon rehearsals in a goose-shite splattered shed on Grant's Mum's Farm allowed the trio to hone their brand of Pixies / Sonic Youth influenced Alt Rock instrumentation, with three-part vocal harmonies on top, earning them joint first place in a local Battle of the Bands (along with Hawick metal outfit, Skoll 10/80); a couple of support slots with the Wedding Present and a disastrous appearance on the A&R line-up at Tony Wilson's inaugural music festival / convention, In The City, in Manchester.


As the first issue of Sun Zoom Spark was being knocked together most of the Crunchy Jo propaganda was spiked in favour of a wider editorial. SZS quickly expanded outwards into a fully-fledged music and underground culture periodical, inspired by the Beat Writers, Dada, Tom Wolfe's 1960s dreams of a "New Journalism"; the Gonzo rock 'n' roll writing of Lester Bangs and Hunter Thompson; the 60s / 70s underground press (Oz, International Times, New Worlds, Rolling Stone, Creem); the Post-Punk DIY 'zine / home recording culture of the ‘80s and the sweary Geordie adult comic, Viz.

The two early, prototype fanzine editions of Sun Zoom Spark (which for obscure reasons were numbered as “issue 3” and “issue 4”), were put together in '92 and ‘93 around a kitchen table in a converted Kirk House in Gala, home of the Crunchy Jo bros’ parents, Liz and Sandy.

These early editions amounted to two purposefully messy, jumbled collections of caricatures, writing, comic strips and photography crafted with gumption, scissors, glue, ink and spoonfuls of granular coffee heaped high. Even at this early stage the team were not willing to settle for churning out a smudgy, photocopied 'zine like the ones they’d seen stacked up in the independent record shops they frequented. Instead they somehow managed to wangle a good deal on some glossy black & white printing from a Cozmic Cat in Carlisle named Smoz: a thousand copies of each issue. Half hearted attempts were made to sell these to students at the Textiles College and on the streets of Edinburgh but the majority were handed out free.


The SZS founders:-

The lads from Crunchy Joseph would later make up three fifths of the early Dawn Of The Replicants line-up, but for now they concentrated on bringing Sun Zoom Spark to life, along with a dedicated posse of accomplices, composed of friends and family.

CJ drummer, Grant Pringle, provided the distinctive ripped & pasted design / layout and band caricatures. Bassist, Mike Sorensen Small, took on the role of publisher, with the editor's role falling to school friend, Brendan McAndrew, future lyricist for The Stone Ghost Collective & Electron Mass. Crunchy Jo guitarist, Roger Simian, dedicated himself to trying to ape his underground press hero, the proto-Punk hack, Lester Bangs, churning out copy along with his pals, Arthouse / Indie obsessives Hector Prole and Dermott hACK (both now long-term residents of Amsterdam). Local DJ, Jason Moyes – aka Charles S. Bravo, frontman of Vacuum Spasm Babies - was the music editor and it was generally he who set up interviews: everyone from punk rock old-timers (e.g. The Ramones, Jonathan Richman) to the up and coming Brit Pop whippersnappers (Blur, Radiohead, Pulp, Elastica, Supergrass, Manics, Echobelly, Oasis, Sleeper etc.), various noisier American acts (Beck, Sonic Youth, Pavement, Mercury Rev), pop stars (Coolio, TLC and Erasure) and a gaggle of Riot Grrrl influenced female-fronted bands.






Paul Vickers

In the early '90s, Sun Zoom Spark publisher, Mike Sorensen Small, met Paul Vickers, just over the Border on the Performing Arts course at the Cumbria College in Carlisle. Resembling a cross between 1960s entertainer Tommy Steel and 4th Doctor, Tom Baker, Vickers was a natural-born Dadaist, raised in the North-East of England. At college in Carlisle he and Mike Small formed the “clumsy calypso” three-piece, Snoopy On Sax, with Earlston High School alumnus, Andy Foggin. The Snoops – two guitars, three voices, no drums, no bass - played lyrically odd, musically jaunty numbers with titles like Little Red Lighthouse and The Bent Sergeant on support slots around the city. 

 
Snoopy On Sax

A couple of years later, Mike Small persuaded Vickers to ditch the experimental music degree he was by then studying in Nottingham and move into the spare room at the CJ family's converted church house in Galashiels so he could draw his wonky Flag Woman cartoons and pen articles about the bands he liked. Being a serial collaborator, Vickers was soon co-writing songs individually with all three members of Crunchy Joseph. Much of this material would eventually meet the light-of-day on the early Dawn Of The Replicants releases, by which point Paul Vickers had pretty much become an honorary Scotsman.

The remainder of Sun Zoom Spark's early core team was made up of: Grant Kirk and Andy Foggin (now both High School teachers) and local journalist Vicky Davidson, aka Vicky Vileda, (who later moved on to a healthy career in Scottish journalism, eventually landing the role of Assistant Editor at The Big Issue). The team even put two of their Mums to work: Beth Tocher taking on much of the proofreading duties and Liz Small providing additional sketches of assorted musicians - the likes of The Fall, Zappa and Patti Smith.


By January 1994, Mike Sorensen Small and Grant Pringle had formed a partnership with Brendan McAndrew in order to run Sun Zoom Spark as a full-time business concern. This much more polished affair stuck with the more traditional publishing practice of starting at issue number one and working sequentially from there in an orderly chronological fashion. The magazine soon became a full colour monthly with distribution in major retailers throughout the UK where it competed for shelf-space with other major music magazines of the day: Mojo, Vox and Select.

There were mentions on night-time BBC TV and Radio by John Peel and Mark & Lard (Mark Radcliffe & Marc Riley); a celebrity feature on Nuggets-era '60s Garage Bands written by be-quiffed indie poet Mark Lamarr (soon to find mainstream fame as the host of BBC2's Nevermind the Buzzcocks); and a trip to New York City (for the lucky few) to see how viable the idea was of setting up a US office within gobbing distance of CBGBs.

Grant Pringle's band caricatures and general design gave the new look magazine its distinctive style. He and Brendan McAndrew also sprinkled silly, sarcastic and absurdist humour in the spaces between articles and onto the t-shirt ads. Hector Prole and Dermot hACK exhaustively tackled many of the features, interviews and reviews. Much of the chaotic, mildly subversive feel of the mag came from the Spunktrumpet rant page, Paul Vickers's Adventures of the Flag Woman cartoons, and Roger Simian's fragmentary serial, Son Of Dada – starring dimension-hopping guitarist, Rachel Blue - which mixed up sci-fi, realism, postmodernist experimentation, Love & Rockets style comic-strip art (by Pringle) and Indie Rock shenanigans.


Soon, more pages in Sun Zoom Spark were being filled by contributors from across the British Isles than by the original core Gala-based team.

A host of writers and artists from the West Coast of Scotland became prominent contributors. Amongst their number were David Keenan (frontman with Telstar Ponies who, after Sun Zoom Spark, went on to write regularly on experimental music for The Wire, produce radio programmes for XFM, collaborate with Ricky Gervaise and write books, including the recent novels, This Is Memorial Device and For The Good Times); his then girlfriend Jane Graham (aka Jade Gordon, who later became John Peel's producer and now writes about the Arts for The Big Issue and the Guardian etc.); Alistair D. McGown (Children's TV Historian and writer for Doctor Who Magazine) and Alison Freebairn (a two-time Nova award winning fan fiction writer).

Other notable contributors to Sun Zoom Spark and its successor, the short-lived fortnightly broadsheet The Trigger, include:- East Anglian illustrator Borin Van Loon (whose serialized absurdist cartoon strip, A Severed Head, was a kind of Boy's Own expedition over the moustache and into the left nostril of Salvador Dali); Galashiels-raised journalist Graeme Virtue (who like several other ex-Sparkers is now writing for the grown up papers); London-based Nick Johnstone (who has penned countless biographies of everyone from Patti Smith to Johnny Depp and Amy Winehouse as well as an autobiographical account of his struggles with alcoholism, A Head Full of Blue); and, of course, Sun Zoom Spark's one-and-only intern, Lorcan McGrane, from Monaghan in Ireland. Lorcan, who arrived in Galashiels in the mid-1990s with a permanent grin and a fist-full of comics, is a fully qualified, card-carrying Geek, having studied Superhero Movies to PHD level at the University of East Anglia. Much like Paul Vickers (who performs stand-up as Mr Twonkey), Dr McGrane is now gaining much attention in and around Belfast for his cheerfully surreal stand-up shows.


Eventually, rising paper prices, and the difficulty of keeping a national publication afloat from a grubby office in Galashiels, sadly ended Sun Zoom Spark some time in mid 1995.

The core-team attempted to keep the dream alive and, in October '95 launched the fortnightly, broadsheet inky, The Trigger, which ambitiously attempted to mix SZS's trashy pop-cultural vigour with more serious, mainstream news reportage. It was an unsuccessful venture and The Trigger unfortunately folded after a mere handful of issues.

Taking a different tack the collective then put together Genius, a social issues themed pop culture magazine distributed throughout high-schools. This was followed by Border Life magazine, a popular journal covering rural life and the history and traditions of the Scottish Borders, published in collaboration with Tweeddale Press Group, to whom the magazine was later sold. In early 1997, when Dawn Of The Replicants signed to East West records, the full-time running of Border Life was taken over by ex-Snoopy On Sax guitarist and keen fishing enthusiast, Andy Foggin.

Meanwhile, Roger Simian ditched all commercial concerns and began producing the cut, pasted & photocopied zine, dumb/SULK trigg-er, inspired by the rash of LoFi zines which had been flooding SZS's post bags for years, as well as the more ambitious self-published magazines, such as Karen Ablaze's pre-Riot Grrrl zine, Ablaze, in the UK, and Lisa Carver's Rollerderby from the USA.

MELODY MAKER, JAN 16 1999, Stevie Chick:
"When Sun Zoom Spark went professional, there was pressure to make it sellable," remembers Roger. "It became about responsibility and maturity. So when I started dumb/SULK trigg-er, I decided I'd be selfish, fill it with the rubbish I'd wanted to do before."
"Early on we supported Arab Strap and Prolapse," remembers Paul Vickers of the Replicants. "And Roger would go around pestering them with a tape recorder, making use of the fact that we were playing a gig with them to get stories for the fanzine."
"I was quite drunk when I did that."


The work involved in putting each issue of Sun Zoom Spark together, in its heyday, had resulted in Crunchy Joseph being put into hibernation, long before the magazine folded. However, Paul Vickers continued writing and recording songs individually with all three members of CJ: producing material which would eventually make up the majority of tracks on Dawn Of The Replicants' debut album, One Head, Two Arms, Two Legs.

In 1996, Vickers and Simian took a handful of their LoFi 4-track portastudio recordings into a local studio – Sound Station in Galashiels – to add some sparkle. The pair soon hit it off with the studio's owner Dave Little (aka Dottle), a future DOTR drummer , who was particularly struck by Vickers' lyrical prowess.

When Paul and Roger played the resultant songs – Cocaine on the Catwalk (named after an article in Hello magazine), Lisa Box, Diggin' Bear and revamped Crunchy Joseph recording, Bizarre Concoction, to the others, they were impressed, insisting it was the pair's best material yet and that it should, by all rights, be released into the world in Extended Play format.

Being fans of Ridley Scott's Bladerunner, and the writings of Philip K Dick, Vickers & Simian named themselves The Replicants. The duo used a student loan to press up 300 copies of their 7" So Far So Spitfire EP in the winter of '96 – greatly inspired by the burgeoning Glasgow LoFi DIY scene. Soon after the disks arrived back from the pressing plant they were informed by a smirking local music fan that there were already several far more famous combos already arguing over the name The Replicants. Undeterred Simian and Vickers painstakingly stencilled "DAWN OF" onto each disk: in so doing, becoming Dawn Of The Replicants.

Being too impatient to source a decent distribution deal, the pair opted to give most of their singles away free to anybody happy to send them a Stamped Addressed Envelope. It was an approach that paid off. For several months the DOTR mail-bags were full of requests for the Dawn Of The Replicants debut, and the EP was soon being aired on night-time Radio 1 by John Peel and Mark 'n' Lard and receiving favourable reviews in NME and Melody Maker.

Within a few months the duo of Paul Vickers and Roger Simian were to expand to a five-piece, along with Mike Sorensen Small (now on guitar), Grant Pringle (drums) and friend, Donald Kyle (bass), signing to Warners off-shoot, East West Records, where they would go on to release two albums and a slew of EPs and singles.
Dawn Of the Replicants - So Far So Spitfire e.p.

Cocaine On The Catwalk


Diggin Bear


Lisa Box


Bizarre Concoction


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