Courtesy of Gary Ramon


“W


hat do you mean, you don’t have a drummer?” I ask. There’s an awkward silence. I’m sitting with Sun Dial


founder Gary Ramon and long-time collaborator/bassist Russell Barrett, enthusing that I’d just secured them a London show at Dingwalls. “Well, our previous drummer lives in Italy. And we’re looking for his replacement... but he can’t just be any drummer. We’ve tried loads.”


Welcome to the world of Sun Dial, a rock band who still search for a perfect prescription in a world of innocuous placebos. Founded by Ramon 20 years ago, Sun Dial’s pursuit of excellence has resulted in some odd career decisions and at least one sabbatical; but it’s also forged a defiantly unique mindset. Drummer aside, Sun Dial have spent the last five years honing their craft; now they’re ready to return to the stage with a brand new studio album (their first since 2003’s Zen For Sale), a label deal with Cherry Red (their own Shrunken Head imprint) and a career- spanning 20th anniversary anthology, Processed For DNA.


Having endured a bracing seaside stroll on a particularly blustery day, we’re huddled around a table savouring hot drinks and a slice of home-made cake, grateful for shelter within the welcoming environs of a seafront cafe in St-Leonards-On-Sea. It’s a sleepy retreat on the Sussex coast right next door to the historic landmark of Hastings. Over the years, the area has come to harbour a growing community of outsiders and itinerants from all walks of creative life. Ramon himself lives in a two-floor maisonette, which was previously home to


Sir John Betjeman’s illustrator, in a huge Edwardian house with a dramatic view overlooking the sea.


The designer of some of those legendary Blue Horizon record covers lives opposite – with a huge figurine of a parrot in the window. The whole place evokes the spirit of the film Performance, with its sense of faded grandeur and an otherworldly charm. That said, Ramon is anything but the hedonistic character played in Performance by Mick Jagger; he’s a one-man cottage industry whose home acts as a nerve centre for both Sun Dial and his reissue label Acme Records, as well as a glorified recording studio backing onto his bedroom.


In a way, Ramon’s current DIY set-up is his one continuum across a quarter of a decade of making music. Those two years signed to Beggars Banquet (and Atlantic in the States) in the mid-90s proved to be the exception, when Sun Dial threatened to be a traditional band, flying round the world on an album- tour-album treadmill. That brief flirtation with mainstream success had followed widespread critical acclaim for their debut album Other Way Out, recorded on a shoestring in a bedroom with broken-down old equipment. Issued in 1990, the album was heavily indebted to the moodiest of late ’60s psychedelia, evoking the spirit of Pink Floyd’s debut or SF Sorrow-era Pretty Things while avoiding the usual pitfalls of retro bands obsessed by past glories.


Talking through Sun Dial’s convoluted, topsy-turvy history, riddled with personnel changes and strange about-turns, it’s apparent that Ramon’s role as Sun Dial’s standard bearer hasn’t always been an easy


one. In fact, he’s far more comfortable discussing their current incarnation – now very much an equal partnership with Russell Barrett. As such, their history from today’s perspective can be thought of as the eventual winding together of two disparate strands.


One strand began in East London in what Ramon describes as “the concrete jungle of Walthamstow, London”, as a personal passion from the earliest age. “No one in my family had as much interest as me in music. For me, it was either pop music or football. Pop music won out in the end.” As a teenager, Gary fell in with other local kids who’d learnt the rudiments of an instrument. “My first band was Mystery Plane, a garagey/Cramps-like psych outfit,” he explains. “I played guitar on their first album The Dead Presley Tapes. This was about 1984. I liked all the ’70s punk stuff – the Pistols, Clash, Damned and later Joy Division. I remember getting ‘Don’t Cry Wolf’ by The Damned on pink vinyl and thinking this was the best thing ever! But in the ’80s, there was nothing around. Rock music had lost its way somehow, which was why I started getting into ’60s/’70s stuff like the Elevators, MC5, Stooges and Sabbath.”


Speaking of which, the other strand in Sun Dial’s story began far closer to the home of Ozzy & Co. “My parents emigrated from Aston, Birmingham to Vermont, USA, and came back when I was two, from green valleys to factories,” laughs Barrett, “which meant the three constant factors in my life have been Aston Villa, Black Sabbath and HP sauce. Most of my relatives lived near where Sabbath grew up. My dad liked American rock ’n’ roll so I remember Little Richard, Elvis and Chuck Berry bellowing in


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