Paul Vickers: "You can't work out if it's bollocks or amazing"

“I’ve never really seen myself as one particular art form. I’m a bit of an ideas person really, and I didn’t really fully intend to get into songwriting; it just sort of happened.”

Paul Vickers, former frontman of 90s indie darlings, Dawn of the Replicants, has stumbled into comedy and surprised himself that it’s going well. He’s a serial creator, meandering into whatever takes his fancy. I asked him where it began:

“I started doing drawings; city landscapes, kind of like Lowry, but quite intense. I thought I was going to do well in my art GCSE, but I only got a C, which I was disappointing, because my friend got a B+ and all he’d done were really accurate drawings of Roland Rat...”

Undeterred by exam-board taste, he trundled off to art college, joined a band, and was then nudged in the direction of comedy, eventually gracing the Fringe with a surrealist’s wet dream; songs, stories, a windmill, a cottage, an underwater circus and a Twonkey: a cytpozoological puppet accomplice with a knack for numbers. Where do you even begin writing something like that?

“You have a spazzy moment, and you can’t work out if it’s utter bollocks or if it was amazing, and you reflect on that a few days later. That seems to be how it works with comedy. When you’re at your most mad and out there— which is what worries me— people like that the most.”

Since then, he and his moveable pal have peppered another two festivals with their own flavour of folklore, occasionally disturbing crowds with loaves of talking bread. He’s not so much a man who does it by the book, as one who writes his own. Make sure you catch it before the wind takes him somewhere else.