Paper Rifles: ‘I’m never going to be a virtuoso shredder… I’m more interested in how things might work and allowing melodies to be where they need to be’

Edinburgh-based rock band Paper Rifles has released a split EP with Wrong Life featuring two of their tracks, ‘Dear Hope’ and ‘The Lighthouse’, both of which boast singalong choruses that are bound to be crowd pleasers.

The band comprises Jon Dick (vocals and guitar), Kev Cameron (guitar and vocals), Kieran Andrews (bass) and James Johnson (drums and recording). 

Not originally from Edinburgh, they all grew up in North East Scotland in Dundee, Kirriemuir and Ellon. Cameron and Andrews went to school together: ‘In the mid to late 90’s, our sort of scene such as it was in Dundee wasn’t totally massive and so we all played with each other’s bands,’ Dick said. ‘I knew Kev was the frontman in a band called Taking Chase, among plenty of other bands. Kieran was in a band called Robot Doctors, which I thought were fabulous. They were the next iteration of a band called State of Affairs who’d been in that scene as well. So I knew Kieran through that and James I knew through loads of bands.’

Initially, Paper Rifles started out as Dick’s solo project in 2014, when he started playing on his own acoustically: ‘I missed playing in bands over time,’ he said. ‘I got Kev initially to come in and play another guitar and sing harmonies and then we had James on the drums and a pal called Tony initially played a bit of bass but that didn’t quite come together. And then with Kieran, we were at a gig and he said: “Listen I’m up for it if you’re up for it” and so he came along a couple times, played, we had a couple rehearsals and it clicked immediately.’

Of their band name, Dick says: ‘When I started out doing the solo thing, I didn’t want to be just my name or a name, I wanted it to sound like it could be a band,’ he said. ‘I quite like the sort of slight oxymoron, it was actually well after the fact that I became aware that there was a whole online scene of people making rifles out of paper!’

‘Dear Hope’, which erupts with a Foosey intro before turning punky, had been around for years before becoming the song we hear today: ‘I actually had an original version of that written with my previous band but it didn’t have the chorus. It took me until last year to say: “I’m overthinking it, this is three chords in the melody, so let’s just do three chords in the melody and make that the chorus and make it much poppier” and then it all came together. It’s a letter to the concept of hope and optimism that came from getting the chorus right years after getting the rest of it!’

‘The roof was the original 1848 roof it had never been fixed and literally every time it rained, something would leak somewhere’

One of their catchiest tracks is ‘It Always Rains In Scotland’, a massively anthemic, singalong song that would get the crowd singing along in unison, hands in the air: ‘There are houses in Edinburgh called “colonies” to show essentially you could build good quality workers’ housing without it being rubbish, so there’s a whole lovely story behind it,’ Dick said. ‘This was before me and my wife had kids and we lived in one of them – to call it a fixer-upper is understating it somewhat (laughs), the roof was the original 1848 roof, it had never been fixed and literally every time it rained, something would leak somewhere. It became my kind of obsession, this leaking roof, so I had a silly little keyboard and the chords are just the obvious chords like C, Am, F and G and I was mucking about and just singing about it always raining and the roof leaking! There’s a guy called Mitch who used to run Struck Dumb Records and I’d sent him, as a joke, this little 10 second clip and he said: “Oh that’s that good, you should make that into a song” so we did and recorded an initial version of that which came out as a charity single.’

However, the version that we now hear has very much been expanded on: ‘It’s a really obvious big pop song really, so our thinking was let’s make it that and it’s definitely the one that’s been the biggest crossover, it got played at football stadiums, it’s a nod to The Proclaimers,’ he said. ‘Somebody described us on Twitter as “a shit Proclaimers” (laughs), so I thought “Fine, okay, let’s have that” and then it ended up in the lyrics! We’ve got a lot of songs to draw from but it usually comes back into the reckoning in a set.’ The layered vocals on the new version, which are just courtesy of Dick and Cameron, make it feel like an even bigger track: ‘We’ve always been in bands that liked harmonies. I did two or three takes, double and treble tracked them and then did backing vocals,’ he said.

As the track kicks off: “I’m never going to be a millionaire and that’s alright. I’d just like to pay my bills now and then, on time. But the house where we live has a roof that’s full of holes and it always rains in Scotland, don’t you know?”

‘That is the song that made me do this as a thing rather than a one-off, I think, because I remember it came very naturally, it was very on the nose to begin with’

Other tracks, such as ‘Politics’ (2018), have a much punkier bent, you could imagine Frank Turner singing it. It even reminds me of Turner’s own song ‘Once We Were Anarchists’, although Paper Rifles are vowing not to give up the fight. ‘That is the song that made me do this as a thing rather than a one-off, I think, because I remember it came very naturally, it was very on the nose to begin with,’ Dick said. ‘My wife said I was miserable not playing in bands, it became about nostalgia, everything is black and white when you’re young. There’s a slight “Up yours” behind it! It ticks all of the different boxes, I was really pleased with how it came out. We tracked almost all of the tracks on that album (The State Of It All, 2018) live.’

As the track goes: “Every young man pins his colours to a mast. Piles the liars high, smiles, and lights a match. But I’m an old man now, settled in my ways. I learned that mixing drinks and politics won’t pay.”

‘Four Hours’ on the same album has a furious energy, underpinned by belligerent drums, which seems fitting given that it’s a hard-hitting anti-war song. ‘I’m a history teacher by day and I’ll get really into something for a bit and want to read everything about it,’ he said. ‘I had a period when I was really obsessively reading about the American counternarrative around the Vietnam war. There’s a book called “Four Hours In My Lai” about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam (1968). There was a helicopter pilot called Hugh Thompson who witnessed what was happening and threatened to turn his guns on his own men unless they stopped, so there was this nice idea of a little bit of morality existing in a world where you didn’t expect it.’ Dick also borrowed imagery from the book ‘If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home’, an autobiographical account of Tim O’Brien’s tour of duty in the Vietnam War.

‘This one came together quite quickly because most of the lines were taken from different chapters in that book and perspectives looking back at it’

‘Whenever we play ‘Four Hours’ live, it’s twice as quick as the version on the record and it’s often the one we sound check with because it’s got everything in it,’ Dick said. ‘I don’t have any huge reason or rhyme to the songwriting, often there’s a line or a couple of lines I really like and I’ll try and work around that and maybe just hum gaps in around it. This one came together quite quickly because most of the lines were taken from different chapters in that book and perspectives looking back at it. There’s a whole bit about a guy who can’t sleep because he’s haunted by images of what he’s done that comes into one of the bridges – there’s a documentary about it.’

As they’ve got older, they’ve got better at putting songs together, according to Dick: ‘None of us are spring chickens anymore (laughs), but it does mean that we’ve all paid our dues but, more importantly, I think we’re all just pretty happy across what we’re doing. When we’re writing, things can come together quite quickly. We’re never going to go out on a nine-week tour, I’ve got two kids, Kieran’s a dad, everyone’s got jobs. We do what we can and, to a point, what we want to and what’s really good about that is sometimes it can be just me, sometimes it can be just me and Kev and other times it’s all of us. So it works nicely, it’s quite a flexible way of doing things.’

There are elements of punk, rock and even folk across their tracks, which makes them hard to pigeonhole, something that has often worked to their advantage: ‘We are part of a very inclusive sort of punk scene but we’ve also played folk shows, poetry shows, and literary sort of things. In a couple of weeks, we’re doing a combination of music and poetry, which is cool but on the other hand, we’ve played festival stages as a rock band.’

However, one element that ties all of their tracks together is their love of melodies and harmonies: ‘Even when I was wee, my dad, who was never a musician but always had a good singing voice, always used to sing and we would listen to The Eagles and always be doing the harmonies in the car, so I think that came from there,’ he said. ‘In my first band, some of those songs are awful rubbish (laughs) but they’re still part of a process. I was maybe 18, writing for the first time because prior to that I’d been in bands but I’d played bass where other guys wrote the songs. When Paper Rifles started, it was just me and that was quite nice in a way because I didn’t really have to worry about anything other than if I liked it, which was quite naive but actually it worked quite well because there was no need for it to be unnecessarily complicated. I’m never going to be a virtuoso shredder (laughs) because I’m not really interested in that, I’m more interested in how things might work and allowing melodies to be where they need to be.’

In addition to singing along to his father’s The Eagles and Dire Straits records, Dick was ‘obsessed’ with Manic Street Preachers as a teenager: ‘There’s so much about what I still do and think about music now that is inspired by their initial four records,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘Weirdly, I’ve completely fallen out of love with things subsequent to that but those four records and the EPs before it, I just love that kind of pretentious noisy, overtly intellectual stuff, it appealed to my pretentious teenager (laughs). I was never hugely into a number of American bands when I was younger but latterly I got into Weezer and Hot Water Music, I was quite obsessive! My favourite record of all time is the Manics’ The Holy Bible (1994) and I can’t really imagine any record nudging that off the top spot now because it came out I was 14, it was perfect timing for a pretentious teenager! In terms of being like a solo acoustic person, Frank Turner’s original folk punk stuff was an influence on me, as was Billy Liar (an acoustic folk-punk band from Edinburgh). We toured Germany with Billy Liar and I thought this was a guy who just had an acoustic guitar, it was about the stories and the songs and he played it like he was playing in the loudest punk band I’ve ever seen, I loved it. It really sparked something.’

They’ve had some hilarious moments along the way: ‘The funniest moment was probably sharing a stage with a bad magician in Aberdeen on the same evening that there was a hotdog eating contest! A six hour round trip for that!’

If he could go for a drink with anyone, he picks Richey Edwards from the Manics: ‘Well before his disappearance, just to talk and drink with him,’ he said. ‘Or James Dean Bradfield from the Manics, I think he’d be great company. I’d say to him: “Come on, write a record like in the 90’s so I can get back into it!”‘