Repomen - Interview

  by John Clarkson

published: 1 / 1 / 1

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Article

RepoMen, as highlighted in ‘Occasional Sensations’, a short 2015 documentary film about them, were Sheffield’s longest-serving and most durable indie band. Formed in 1990, they released fifteen EPs, a compilation and three studio albums in their lifetime, most of were released on vocalist Denzil Watson’s Phantom Power Records. The group, which as well as Watson also consisted of Ric Bower (guitars, keyboards), Simon Tiller (bass) and James Hughes (drums), had fallen into hiatus in 2018, but planned to return to the stage for the Sheffield festival Tramways in 2023. Watson, Bower and Hughes had in the interim formed with three other local musicians Batman’s Treaty, who had released a solitary EP. In October 2023 Bower, who was the main songwriter in both bands, died tragically from the injuries he had sustained after he was knocked off his bike in a road accident. Pennyblackmusic spoke to Denzil Watson about Tic Bower, his songwriting and their thirty years plus friendship, and the recent sold-out ‘A Concert for Ric’ which took place in March and saw final sets from both Batman’s Treaty and RepoMen. PB: You and Ric played together in the bands RepoMen and latterly Batman’s Treaty for about thirty years. How did you first meet each other and start working together? DENZIL WATSON: I remember, I’d just finished playing with my goth-rock band Poisonous Little Creatures back in 1990. I wanted to get back to being in a band as soon as possible, so I was about to put up a ‘Musicians Wanted notice in Wavelength Music on London Road in Sheffield. While I was in the shop about to pin my notice up, I saw Ric’s advert looking for musicians on the board and thought, “He sounds like an interesting chap. I’ll give him a ring.” I took down his number, rang him up and arranged to meet him in my local pub in December 1990. On meeting up with him, it was almost intuitive that this was a great person and someone I could work with.And the rest, as they say, is just history! PB: What were Ric’s prime musical influences? DW: He was wearing an IcIcle Works T-shirt on the day that I first met him. They were a big influence on him, so, as a fellow fan, that was an immediate win. He was also a massive fan of Bowie and The Beatles. He introduced me to The Go Betweens and Robert Forster, in particular, was a big influence on his song writing. It was, however, Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground that were our real touchstones that we bonded over.aa PBM: What do you think that his main abilities were as a songwriter? DW: Firstly, he was a fantastic lyricist. He could say a lot in very few words and the words always had meaning. He could take the briefest of experiences and grow it into this beautiful song. He was also very good at coming up with melodies too. Finally, he was incredibly supportive with respect to other people who were writing with him and also very inclusive. He never appeared to get ‘writers block’ but also had very high standards. For me, he never wrote a bad song, in terms of the ones that reached us as a band. In a nutshell, he was a brilliant song writer. PB: RepoMen were labelled early on as being a punk pop act and perhaps initially were but grew into something far beyond that. Do you think that labeling was something that benefited you or went against you? DW: To be honest, I’ve never really thought about it. We were never part of any scene and just did our own thing. Hence, we were never really very conscious of the label, either way. I think that was a good thing because if a song was good, we went with it, rather than asking the question ‘Does this fit with our image and sound?’ PB: How did the idea for ‘A Concert For Ric’ come about? DW: Funerals tend to be pretty sad affairs and we wanted to do something uplifting and positive that celebrated Ric in the context of what he loved doing; playing music. It also felt like it was what Ric would have wanted us to do in his name too. PB: Why did you choose Sidney and Matilda as your venue? DW: Because it’s a wonderful venue with a perfectly sized room for the event we were putting on. Plus it is run by the legend that is Paul ‘Tufty’ Tuffs, with whom we back along way with when he used to work at The Grapes pub in Sheffield where we played so many times. PB: Selling over 200 tickets for an indie gig is a big achievement. Did that surprise you? DW: In some ways, yes, and in other ways, no. Being a local indie band, we were never big sellers in terms of tickets, but this was a very significant gig and there was a lot of love for Ric out there. PB: Ric had written various songs for Batman’s Treaty but that band had not had the opportunity to release very much. How did you decide what songs were going into their opening set? DW: It was always going to be a brief set as it was all we could really face given everybody in the band was still so raw, even after well over a year. We couldn’t really face the as yet unreleased second EP tracks, so it ended up being four older songs. PB: RepoMen in contrast had recorded so much material that it would have impossible to get them all into the two forty-minute sets that you did play. How did you decide what was going into each set? DW: The starting point was to go through the seventeen tracks on the ‘Best of’ album we were launching and deciding whether we could do them justice live. That yielded thirteen songs. We then just picked songs that we enjoyed playing live and felt we could do justice to. PB: How did you get around the task of filling Ric’s guitar and keyboard parts on stage? DW: This was quite a challenge. The short answer is with multiple skilled musicians! John Groves from fellow label mates, Screaming Mimi did a fantastic turn on guitar. Howard Price of Balor Knights used to play trumpet for us so was an obvious choice, especially given he can play a pretty mean guitar and is also handy on the keys. Loretta, also of Screaming Mimi, did the backing vocals. The three of them did an incredible job. PB: You said last year that you didn’t want to be in another band without Ric? Do you still feel like that? DW: That was how I felt at the time when I said that, as, without Ric, I do feel lost, to be honest. I’d still like to perform as it is so enjoyable and it has been a constant in my life over the last forty or so years. There’s still unfinished business with Batman’s Treaty, so we’ll need to get together as a band and talk about what we are going to do on that count, if anything. I was going to continue with the Punk Covers band me and Ric were in with drummer Ian Sharpe before he passed away just after Ric. With bass player Steve Hulme, however. sadly passing away just recently, I’m now the only one left from the original line-up, so that has really kicked that into touch. PB: You have already released Ric Bower’s mini-album ‘Ruin Songs’ digitally. You have got various other releases coming out digitally and on vinyl. What other releases do you have planned? DW: Digitally yes, but probably not on vinyl. As alluded to earlier, there’s a number of Batman’s Treaty tracks that are to yet to be released, including the last four tracks Ric recorded. We’ve not yet worked out how we are going to do this yet, but that’s next on the list. There’s nothing left RepoMen-wise as the vault is empty, after the recent rarities album and the live album. But The Poisonous Little Creatures back catalogue definitely needs a digital release. I think a Phantom Power Records complication album so people could see what the label was about would work well. Also there’s the possibility of a full-length album of Ric’s solo stuff too. So still plenty of things to release in the coming months definitely. PB: Thank you.

Band Links:-

https://www.facebook.com/RepoMenband
https://repomen.bandcamp.com/
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5z7b

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