A ground-breaking multimedia project offering a unique expose of the inner madness of the music industry…and some great music. Who is The Vicar? Does it even matter? Perhaps he is the frustrated artist in all of us, as we struggle to bring Art into a fallen world.
“I would like to put on public record right now, once and for all: I AM NOT THE VICAR”
Brian Eno
Throughout my life I’ve frequently found myself, metaphorically speaking, sat on the Vicar’s knee”
David Sylvian
“THE VICAR is a genius. He didn’t pay me to play on his record, but he paid me to say that”
Bill Rieflin
“The Vicar? Half Budhha, half backstreet ****”
Nick Cave
The multimedia universe of THE VICAR encompasses three novels, two graphic novels, two audiobooks, a fourteen track songbook of “psychedelic chamber-pop” and two seasons of Punk Sanderson’s unique videobook podcasts.
THE VICAR is a world-renowned music producer - a contrary, pompous, manipulative genius from the English countryside – who, like many artists, is forced to break off from his passion for music to deal with the injustices of the world in which he finds himself: a corrupt world, which, in the words of The Vicar himself “encompasses the very best and the very worst of humanity, its excesses, greed, jealousies, capacity for infinite beauty, strange attraction to mind-altering substances, big people with big egos and even bigger erections.”
And then there is, of course, THE VICAR’s assistant, PUNK SANDERSON (who, by his own admission, has deliberately changed his name to avoid libel suits). As THE VICAR himself would say, there really is no excuse for him. PUNK is the witty, irreverent chronicler of THE VICAR’s world - a function he performs with an engaging combination of inspiration and ineptitude. A drummer and wannabe rock-star, he is keen to succeed - but not if it means getting up early in the morning. He wishes he was Keith Richards but despite himself is rather more Bart Simpson.
“…I have no luck with women…I could fall into a bag of nipples and come out sucking my own thumb”.
The characters of THE VICAR and PUNK - the well-centred and the malleable, the disciplined and the disordered, the lofty and the venal, the Volvo-driver and the Ferrari-dreamer - embody contradictions that lie at the heart of us all.
Everything is true. Except the bits that aren’t. Fact as Fiction. Or maybe just a joyous mad romp through the twisted imagination of one of the little people the world overlooks.
“Sherlock Holmes meets Spinal Tap”
And behind the veil, not THE VICAR, but expertly pulling the strings like a puppet-master, lurks DAVID SINGLETON - who is himself of course, just someone else’s puppet.
KEY ALBUMS
