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)
(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.
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.
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.
Diggin Bear
Lisa Box
Bizarre Concoction
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Dawn Of the Replicants - So Far So Spitfire e.p.
Cocaine On The Catwalk
Cocaine On The Catwalk
Diggin Bear
Lisa Box
Bizarre Concoction
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