CANI5+3R TIT BITZ

* Dr One was hatched wrong out of a mechanical womb producing servo-drones for the Campus of the Goat on the east side of Hell, Planet Bastard. A pint of male eggnog fell into the machine, which spawned Dr One (The Drone): part-manimal, part-machine, half-genius, half-idiot hybrid. From his genitals hang complex mechanical circuitry. He lived most of his life on his home world in a giant skip, where he met his first guitar. They married, and went on to forge a loving but consensually violent relationship. They have six lovely guitar pedals and an amp.

* Clanx was the son of a rebel chieftain on the lawless wasteland, bad-side of Checkpoint Grind. From a young age he became interested in gibberish propaganda, spreading discord with confusion and seriously brassing off the establishment by yammering balls in a confrontational style. This was at a time when yammering balls in a confrontational style was strictly forbidden by the authorities. He held poetry-reading seminars round the back of the Factories, where his anthems of nonsense rebellion baited the rulers of the bleak, scaffolded world of Bastard and Boris and the Baggage Handlers.

* Dr One first met Clan X when Clanx took shelter in Drone's skip when he went into hiding after releasing a radically abstract pamphlet warning the population about The Haystack Problem. The Powers That Be had ruled The Haystack Problem as an Official Misnomer, despite the hard evidence that haystacks were gulping up the tiny commuter-landmass of Eyeland. The real reason for the blackout, of course, was the role that Tesco played in the whole affair.

* 'The Canister Machine' was a primitive electro-mechanical instrument containing sampled percussion noises, which Clanx used to punctuate his more elaborate pronouncements. When he leapt into Drone's Skip, the machine started to wheeze and clatter and grind. Despite the fact that ravenous Baggage Handlers were searching the quadrant, the pair were startled and entranced by the sound, and resolved to form an experimental surrealist industrial grind combo.

* They hot-wired what they thought was a silver oil tanker and headed for Checkpoint Grind, bad-side. But the silver oil-tanker turned out to be a flying canister that went anywhere in time and space. This was the Hybernizer, a semi-sentient slow travel machine much spoken of in Bastardian technomythology circles. Although thoroughly reliable as a road-going heavy goods vehicle, its time travel circuits are fizzing bonkers. A bit like the TARDIS, but not close enough to trouble any legal representatives.

* The first world visited by the Hybernizer was Earth, in the year of their Lord 1992. The Hybernizer was wounded in transit by a squadron of airborne Baggage Handlers, tenacious little bleeders at the best of times ("It's random survival out there," said Drone as the lasers hurtled past the wing mirrors), but the Hybernizer broke the grind barrier and tumbled into a field near the Farnborough Air Show, unnoticed due to the Red Arrows.

* Baggage Handlers are made of shadow matter. They are squat mercenaries favoured by Boris who resemble silhouettes of very short, very wide men in trench coats and trilbies. Nobody has ever heard them speak, but they communicate psychically in American accents and make a kind of soft 'swooshing' sound. On the planet Bastard, is not rare for so-called 'undesirables' to be visited in the small hours by Baggage Handlers, who crawl through terraces and ransack bedrooms looking for the flimsiest evidence of what they call 'shite', which includes any kind of non-state-approved art and music.

* Boris has ruled the planet Bastard since the war that nobody can remember. He is eternal, and never seen, though rumours persist that for the past half-epoch he has communicated only through beeping.