Back in the depths of time, probably around 1980, I was in a second-hand record shop in Canterbury, trawling through a rack of singles when I came across a single by a band called Swell Maps. I’d heard them on the John Peel show and been suitably impressed so I decided to make the purchase. Later on, I was at a friends house and he offered to play the record, having mentioned that he’d actually seen the single in the shop a day earlier but didn’t buy it because he hadn’t heard it before. But as soon as it started playing, he got pissed off… the single was called ‘Dresden Style’ and he had previously heard and enjoyed it but had assumed (quite reasonably) that it was called ‘City Boys’. He started offering to buy it from me, but it was too late and, by then, I was totally hooked.
Of course, at that time it wasn’t easy to find out about lesser-known bands but I was able to track down copies of their other records over the next few years and continued to be impressed. But by then the band had split-up (ironically around the same time that I bought ‘Dresden Style’ as it turned out) and I never got to see them, although I did get to see bassist Jowe Heads’ band The Palookas and also saw drummer Epic Soundtracks several times while he was playing alongside Rowland S Howard and Mick Harvey in Crime & The City Solution.
Sadly, it was Epic’s untimely death in 1997 that eventually prompted a Swell Maps ‘reunion’, headlining a memorial gig at The Garage along with various other guests. Swell Maps played a short but blistering set which was met with great enthusiasm from the packed audience. I’m sure that fans would have preferred this to have happened in happier circumstances, but the band had certainly returned in fine musical style. Unfortunately, tragedy struck again in 2006 when singer/guitarist (and Epics’ brother) Nikki Sudden also passed away. However, the legacy of Swell Maps has continued to remain strong, with various reissues of the original records as well as compilations appearing on an occasional basis, proving that the interest in the band still continues. The most recent of which is the excellent double-album, ‘Mayday Signals’, released this year on Easy Action records. Compiled by Jowe Head and consisting of various previously-unreleased recordings, it’s a great collection of tracks from different sources that give a glimpse into the way Swell Maps worked and the broad range of creative ideas and influences that helped to make them so special.
Swell Maps as a specific band didn’t really exist until the end of 1977, but the individual members had been playing together in various formations since 1972. Nikki Sudden (Adrian Godfrey) had initially started playing with Phones Sportsman (David Barrington) before they were joined by Epic Soundtracks (Kevin Godfrey) and Jowe Head (Stephen Bird.) Up until 1977, they concentrated on writing and recording only, before being inspired by the early Punk scene to start playing live and to release the classic ‘Read About Seymour’ single on their own independent label, Rather Records. They quickly gained an enthusiastic following and went on to release further singles and two albums before splitting-up in 1980.
The release of ‘Mayday Signals’ gave me an ideal excuse to meet-up with Jowe Head and have a conversation about his former band and the plans he has for the future…
Of course, at that time it wasn’t easy to find out about lesser-known bands but I was able to track down copies of their other records over the next few years and continued to be impressed. But by then the band had split-up (ironically around the same time that I bought ‘Dresden Style’ as it turned out) and I never got to see them, although I did get to see bassist Jowe Heads’ band The Palookas and also saw drummer Epic Soundtracks several times while he was playing alongside Rowland S Howard and Mick Harvey in Crime & The City Solution.
Sadly, it was Epic’s untimely death in 1997 that eventually prompted a Swell Maps ‘reunion’, headlining a memorial gig at The Garage along with various other guests. Swell Maps played a short but blistering set which was met with great enthusiasm from the packed audience. I’m sure that fans would have preferred this to have happened in happier circumstances, but the band had certainly returned in fine musical style. Unfortunately, tragedy struck again in 2006 when singer/guitarist (and Epics’ brother) Nikki Sudden also passed away. However, the legacy of Swell Maps has continued to remain strong, with various reissues of the original records as well as compilations appearing on an occasional basis, proving that the interest in the band still continues. The most recent of which is the excellent double-album, ‘Mayday Signals’, released this year on Easy Action records. Compiled by Jowe Head and consisting of various previously-unreleased recordings, it’s a great collection of tracks from different sources that give a glimpse into the way Swell Maps worked and the broad range of creative ideas and influences that helped to make them so special.
Swell Maps as a specific band didn’t really exist until the end of 1977, but the individual members had been playing together in various formations since 1972. Nikki Sudden (Adrian Godfrey) had initially started playing with Phones Sportsman (David Barrington) before they were joined by Epic Soundtracks (Kevin Godfrey) and Jowe Head (Stephen Bird.) Up until 1977, they concentrated on writing and recording only, before being inspired by the early Punk scene to start playing live and to release the classic ‘Read About Seymour’ single on their own independent label, Rather Records. They quickly gained an enthusiastic following and went on to release further singles and two albums before splitting-up in 1980.
The release of ‘Mayday Signals’ gave me an ideal excuse to meet-up with Jowe Head and have a conversation about his former band and the plans he has for the future…
As mentioned above, the earliest incarnation(s) of Swell Maps actually appeared as far back as 1972. Since Nikki and Epic were brothers, most people assume that the roots of the band started with them…
‘Well, that’s been said but it was never really as simple as that. In fact, Epic actually joined a bit later on. I think people tend to focus on the two brothers because it’s an easy way to digest what is, in fact, a rather complicated history. I think the four of us all really started making music around the same time, but initially it was Nikki and Phones, then Epic joined and they started playing together, and then I joined in very shortly afterwards, because I liked what they were doing. I’d been a friend of Nikki since we were at school, when we were both about 13 I suppose, so we’d both got into music around the same time. Phones was already a very enthusiastic noise-maker, but Nikki was the first one of us who got into writing songs… The rest of us were experimenting with making noise and improvising to a great extent with whatever came to hand. None of us had much money, so we couldn’t afford expensive drums, guitars, amplifiers or anything…
Were you all into similar types of music at that point?
‘No, we were actually all into completely different music! We weren’t united by a common set of musical tastes, although there were certain things that we all had in common. Nikki was a huge T Rex fan and that’s what really got him into music in the first place. The first stuff I listened to was Soul and Tamla Motown, before I got into rock music and the more experimental side of Progressive rock. Epic was into Alice Cooper before he started listening to some of the Prog albums with me. Phones was really into Roxy Music and then got into the really heavy stuff like Stockhausen and other experimental composers. I think we all liked some of the so-called ‘Krautrock’ bands, although at the time we didn’t really think of them as a separate category. We just saw them as another part of the Prog scene. I remember that I found a second-hand copy of a Can album, ‘Limited Edition’, I think… I just thought, ‘Wow, this is strange!’ And then both me and Epic bought copies of ‘The Faust Tapes’, mostly because it only cost 49 pence at the time… Everybody we knew kept going on about how rubbish it was, as they’d all bought copies because it was so cheap and they thought it was worth a punt. But then they were all saying, this is rubbish, I could do that! They can’t play… you know, all of that kind of thing. A lot of it was very challenging to listen to, but in a way it was also very inspiring for us, because it proved that anyone could make a record and even if it was strange and experimental, people would still get to hear it. Whether they’d like it or not was another matter, but it was food for thought. Later on, of course, Punk started to emerge and we all became interested in that. I think me and Nikki latched onto it first. Nikki asked me if I’d heard the Sex Pistols yet and we both went out to buy ‘Anarchy in the UK’… Funnily enough, I always preferred the b-side, ‘I Wanna Be Me’, which I thought was fantastic! A short while after that, we got copies of the first Buzzcocks EP, which was very inspiring. When we found out that they’d made their own record on their own label, it was a pivotal moment for us. It was unprecedented and, up until then, we hadn’t thought it was possible to do something like that. So we did a bit of digging around and found out that there was a place where you could get a record pressed and that there were printers who would print covers to our specifications. Perhaps even more importantly, we found out that there were recording studios that would actually let us in and allow us to make a noise for a couple of hours! Meanwhile, we also discovered that there were other people around who were having the same ideas… people like the Television Personalities, who were making their first record at around the same time, and the Desperate Bicycles, who were a real catalyst because they brought out a couple of records and included details on their sleeves about how to get your own records made. That really made the whole thing very accessible. We heard things like that on the John Peel show and they were pretty wild. We’d certainly not heard anything like that before. But it also proved that you could be as bold and strange and natural as performers and still be able to make an exciting sound. Perhaps it would sound a bit off, but the thing was, you didn’t have to aspire to be someone else or just copy something that was already out there. You could do something that was your own style, which suited us because what we were doing was pretty strange, probably down to all of our different tastes.’
‘Well, that’s been said but it was never really as simple as that. In fact, Epic actually joined a bit later on. I think people tend to focus on the two brothers because it’s an easy way to digest what is, in fact, a rather complicated history. I think the four of us all really started making music around the same time, but initially it was Nikki and Phones, then Epic joined and they started playing together, and then I joined in very shortly afterwards, because I liked what they were doing. I’d been a friend of Nikki since we were at school, when we were both about 13 I suppose, so we’d both got into music around the same time. Phones was already a very enthusiastic noise-maker, but Nikki was the first one of us who got into writing songs… The rest of us were experimenting with making noise and improvising to a great extent with whatever came to hand. None of us had much money, so we couldn’t afford expensive drums, guitars, amplifiers or anything…
Were you all into similar types of music at that point?
‘No, we were actually all into completely different music! We weren’t united by a common set of musical tastes, although there were certain things that we all had in common. Nikki was a huge T Rex fan and that’s what really got him into music in the first place. The first stuff I listened to was Soul and Tamla Motown, before I got into rock music and the more experimental side of Progressive rock. Epic was into Alice Cooper before he started listening to some of the Prog albums with me. Phones was really into Roxy Music and then got into the really heavy stuff like Stockhausen and other experimental composers. I think we all liked some of the so-called ‘Krautrock’ bands, although at the time we didn’t really think of them as a separate category. We just saw them as another part of the Prog scene. I remember that I found a second-hand copy of a Can album, ‘Limited Edition’, I think… I just thought, ‘Wow, this is strange!’ And then both me and Epic bought copies of ‘The Faust Tapes’, mostly because it only cost 49 pence at the time… Everybody we knew kept going on about how rubbish it was, as they’d all bought copies because it was so cheap and they thought it was worth a punt. But then they were all saying, this is rubbish, I could do that! They can’t play… you know, all of that kind of thing. A lot of it was very challenging to listen to, but in a way it was also very inspiring for us, because it proved that anyone could make a record and even if it was strange and experimental, people would still get to hear it. Whether they’d like it or not was another matter, but it was food for thought. Later on, of course, Punk started to emerge and we all became interested in that. I think me and Nikki latched onto it first. Nikki asked me if I’d heard the Sex Pistols yet and we both went out to buy ‘Anarchy in the UK’… Funnily enough, I always preferred the b-side, ‘I Wanna Be Me’, which I thought was fantastic! A short while after that, we got copies of the first Buzzcocks EP, which was very inspiring. When we found out that they’d made their own record on their own label, it was a pivotal moment for us. It was unprecedented and, up until then, we hadn’t thought it was possible to do something like that. So we did a bit of digging around and found out that there was a place where you could get a record pressed and that there were printers who would print covers to our specifications. Perhaps even more importantly, we found out that there were recording studios that would actually let us in and allow us to make a noise for a couple of hours! Meanwhile, we also discovered that there were other people around who were having the same ideas… people like the Television Personalities, who were making their first record at around the same time, and the Desperate Bicycles, who were a real catalyst because they brought out a couple of records and included details on their sleeves about how to get your own records made. That really made the whole thing very accessible. We heard things like that on the John Peel show and they were pretty wild. We’d certainly not heard anything like that before. But it also proved that you could be as bold and strange and natural as performers and still be able to make an exciting sound. Perhaps it would sound a bit off, but the thing was, you didn’t have to aspire to be someone else or just copy something that was already out there. You could do something that was your own style, which suited us because what we were doing was pretty strange, probably down to all of our different tastes.’
From the outset, Swell Maps were writing and recording material that was very distinctive and separate from anything else around at the time. As you said, it was probably all the different musical tastes and influences going into it that combined to produce something so unique… One song could be sleazy punk rock, but the next would sound more experimental or even freeform…
‘I think the three tracks on the first single were roughly in the same style, but from then on we decided to diversify a bit more and allowed our other influences to creep in. It was a constant debate about what we were going to record next, because there was so much that we wanted to do and so many avenues that we wanted to explore. Our minds were constantly boiling with ideas, so it was difficult to get enough down to satisfy everybody. We’d built up a huge kind-of store-house of ideas over the previous few years, which we drew-on for the first album… That’s why we ended-up with the extra tracks that were on the four-track EP that came with the original pressing. It was the only way we could accommodate everything that we’d recorded for the album! But there was still further stuff that was left-out, and I’ve only really re-discovered a lot of that material recently. A lot of that has been used on the new compilation, ‘Mayday Signals’, which has just come out…’
The band didn’t actually play live until the end of 1977…
‘I think we first played on the evening of Boxing Day, 1977. Nobody had ever offered us a gig, so we foisted ourselves on a hastily set-up Punk Rock festival at Barbarellas in Birmingham. We literally just turned up and said, ‘Can we play a few songs?’ and they said, ‘Alright then…’ They looked at us a bit suspiciously because we didn’t look like typical punk rockers… although, then again, we weren’t, so that was actually true! I mean, when I first went to a punk rock gig, Nikki took me to The Roxy to see The Damned and The Adverts. The audience were a very strange looking crew. Some of them were wearing bondage gear and looking rather mean, so initially I was a bit nervous about being there, but it turned out to be a pretty peaceful event. Some people were jumping around when the bands played, but I don’t think there was even any spitting at that point. That didn’t really start until the newspapers began sensationalising it. The audience may have looked weird but they were pretty peaceful and there was no violence or anything. That didn’t come until later on, when the idiots stared coming in.’
You were also briefly involved in a band with Spizz around that time…
‘We already knew Spizz, because me and Epic had gone to the same Art College as him in Solihull. I think we’d even gone to the same Junior school as well… Anyway, Spizz found out that me and Epic were playing in our own band and he recruited us… or rather, we allowed ourselves to be drawn into his plans for world domination, haha! We agreed to play with him for a few months, I played bass and Epic played drums. It was a good experience and a good laugh. I think we just wanted to play as much as possible and playing with Spizz was never going to be dull! I mean, he’s never been shy of self-publicity!’
When did you actually settle on the name ‘Swell Maps’?
‘We’d always had lots of different combos between us and they usually had different names. Along with the basic line-up of Nikki, Epic, Phones and me, there was also Richard (aka Biggles Books) and John (aka Golden Cockrill) involved to different extents, which resulted in different duos, trios and quartets which would look like a big, messy Venn diagram if anyone tried to explain it… I was actually trying to draw up a kind of family tree, but it all became too complicated. The thing was, all of these combos did sound different and had their own styles. In fact, I’m not even sure we were called Swell Maps when we played at the Punk festival. We only started using it when we played at The Crown pub a few months later, in early 1978. We’d already recorded our first single by then, but we didn’t decide on a name until we had to have it for the cover design!’
‘I think the three tracks on the first single were roughly in the same style, but from then on we decided to diversify a bit more and allowed our other influences to creep in. It was a constant debate about what we were going to record next, because there was so much that we wanted to do and so many avenues that we wanted to explore. Our minds were constantly boiling with ideas, so it was difficult to get enough down to satisfy everybody. We’d built up a huge kind-of store-house of ideas over the previous few years, which we drew-on for the first album… That’s why we ended-up with the extra tracks that were on the four-track EP that came with the original pressing. It was the only way we could accommodate everything that we’d recorded for the album! But there was still further stuff that was left-out, and I’ve only really re-discovered a lot of that material recently. A lot of that has been used on the new compilation, ‘Mayday Signals’, which has just come out…’
The band didn’t actually play live until the end of 1977…
‘I think we first played on the evening of Boxing Day, 1977. Nobody had ever offered us a gig, so we foisted ourselves on a hastily set-up Punk Rock festival at Barbarellas in Birmingham. We literally just turned up and said, ‘Can we play a few songs?’ and they said, ‘Alright then…’ They looked at us a bit suspiciously because we didn’t look like typical punk rockers… although, then again, we weren’t, so that was actually true! I mean, when I first went to a punk rock gig, Nikki took me to The Roxy to see The Damned and The Adverts. The audience were a very strange looking crew. Some of them were wearing bondage gear and looking rather mean, so initially I was a bit nervous about being there, but it turned out to be a pretty peaceful event. Some people were jumping around when the bands played, but I don’t think there was even any spitting at that point. That didn’t really start until the newspapers began sensationalising it. The audience may have looked weird but they were pretty peaceful and there was no violence or anything. That didn’t come until later on, when the idiots stared coming in.’
You were also briefly involved in a band with Spizz around that time…
‘We already knew Spizz, because me and Epic had gone to the same Art College as him in Solihull. I think we’d even gone to the same Junior school as well… Anyway, Spizz found out that me and Epic were playing in our own band and he recruited us… or rather, we allowed ourselves to be drawn into his plans for world domination, haha! We agreed to play with him for a few months, I played bass and Epic played drums. It was a good experience and a good laugh. I think we just wanted to play as much as possible and playing with Spizz was never going to be dull! I mean, he’s never been shy of self-publicity!’
When did you actually settle on the name ‘Swell Maps’?
‘We’d always had lots of different combos between us and they usually had different names. Along with the basic line-up of Nikki, Epic, Phones and me, there was also Richard (aka Biggles Books) and John (aka Golden Cockrill) involved to different extents, which resulted in different duos, trios and quartets which would look like a big, messy Venn diagram if anyone tried to explain it… I was actually trying to draw up a kind of family tree, but it all became too complicated. The thing was, all of these combos did sound different and had their own styles. In fact, I’m not even sure we were called Swell Maps when we played at the Punk festival. We only started using it when we played at The Crown pub a few months later, in early 1978. We’d already recorded our first single by then, but we didn’t decide on a name until we had to have it for the cover design!’
Again, the name was hardly a typical Punk moniker…
‘It came from one of the Gerry Anderson puppet shows on TV. In fact, that’s the little intro at the beginning of ‘A Trip to Marineville’. That’s the giveaway, which we thought would be amusing to add-on… and fortunately, we seem to have escaped the attention of copywriters and lawyers, so that’s alright! It was from an episode of ‘Stingray’, in a little bit where there’s a kid who’s been invited onboard by the crew and when they show him the control room, he looks around and says, ‘that’s a swell map!’ Although, I actually came across a different explanation recently, from some smart-alec in the USA, who was saying that there are surfers in California who use maps to predict the size of the waves over the following days, and they call them swell-maps! Since then, I’ve come across articles online that use that as the explanation for the name… But, you know, if people want to say that, why not? It’s interesting… maybe Gerry Anderson was a closet-surfer, who knows?’
Initially, the ‘Read About Seymour’ single was a completely DIY project…
‘Yes… we arranged for the tapes to be mastered and took them too George Peckhams’ master-room on Regent Street. He was a really nice bloke and very good at his job. For us, it was great to be involved in all stages of the record and we tried to do that with the following releases as much as we could… although some bits of that stuff can get a bit boring after a time. But I think having the knowledge of what was involved in each step of the process was very important and gave us an understanding of how things were. We even had to trudge around the shops with boxes of the record because we didn’t have a distributor at first. It was as simple as that. I did that in Manchester and Birmingham, while Nikki did it in London. Luckily for us, Nikki’s efforts in London ended-up with us getting a manufacturing and distribution deal through Rough Trade. But we always retained control of the master tapes and just licensed them to Rough Trade so they could handle the distribution. We always kept the recordings to ourselves…’
The single eventually became pretty successful…
‘It was very slow at the start as nobody knew about it, but it ended-up doing very well after we found out that we could send copies in to the music press reviewers. There were four weekly music papers at the time… NME, Sounds, Melody Maker and Record Mirror. They reviewed the new single releases every week and we found out that you could just turn-up at their offices and hand them a copy of your record. They wouldn’t review everything, of course, but I think we got lucky and got reviewed by all of them. They weren’t always complimentary, but they always seemed to come-up with a quote-worthy line, even if they were slagging us off. We also speculatively sent a copy to John Peel at Radio One, because he was really the only person playing Punk records at that time. He’d already played the Desperate Bicycles, so we thought we’d stand a chance with him. And again, we were lucky and he started playing all three tracks which really got it moving. Rough Trade had to ask us for more copies, because they really started shifting them and the first pressing sold-out. We then did a Peel session, which was really helpful as well… It was a lot of fun and it gave us more experience in the recording studio, which helped us to develop material for when we went in to record the next record... We still weren’t playing live very much back then and we didn’t really start doing so until 1979, after the second single. We were a bit slow on the uptake when it came to playing live, so we had to make up for that in ‘79. Although even then, we really didn’t play that often. A while ago, I wrote-up a schedule of all the gigs we played and it only took up one piece of paper. We never even toured around the UK… we did get around to quite a few different places, but just as one-offs.’
‘It came from one of the Gerry Anderson puppet shows on TV. In fact, that’s the little intro at the beginning of ‘A Trip to Marineville’. That’s the giveaway, which we thought would be amusing to add-on… and fortunately, we seem to have escaped the attention of copywriters and lawyers, so that’s alright! It was from an episode of ‘Stingray’, in a little bit where there’s a kid who’s been invited onboard by the crew and when they show him the control room, he looks around and says, ‘that’s a swell map!’ Although, I actually came across a different explanation recently, from some smart-alec in the USA, who was saying that there are surfers in California who use maps to predict the size of the waves over the following days, and they call them swell-maps! Since then, I’ve come across articles online that use that as the explanation for the name… But, you know, if people want to say that, why not? It’s interesting… maybe Gerry Anderson was a closet-surfer, who knows?’
Initially, the ‘Read About Seymour’ single was a completely DIY project…
‘Yes… we arranged for the tapes to be mastered and took them too George Peckhams’ master-room on Regent Street. He was a really nice bloke and very good at his job. For us, it was great to be involved in all stages of the record and we tried to do that with the following releases as much as we could… although some bits of that stuff can get a bit boring after a time. But I think having the knowledge of what was involved in each step of the process was very important and gave us an understanding of how things were. We even had to trudge around the shops with boxes of the record because we didn’t have a distributor at first. It was as simple as that. I did that in Manchester and Birmingham, while Nikki did it in London. Luckily for us, Nikki’s efforts in London ended-up with us getting a manufacturing and distribution deal through Rough Trade. But we always retained control of the master tapes and just licensed them to Rough Trade so they could handle the distribution. We always kept the recordings to ourselves…’
The single eventually became pretty successful…
‘It was very slow at the start as nobody knew about it, but it ended-up doing very well after we found out that we could send copies in to the music press reviewers. There were four weekly music papers at the time… NME, Sounds, Melody Maker and Record Mirror. They reviewed the new single releases every week and we found out that you could just turn-up at their offices and hand them a copy of your record. They wouldn’t review everything, of course, but I think we got lucky and got reviewed by all of them. They weren’t always complimentary, but they always seemed to come-up with a quote-worthy line, even if they were slagging us off. We also speculatively sent a copy to John Peel at Radio One, because he was really the only person playing Punk records at that time. He’d already played the Desperate Bicycles, so we thought we’d stand a chance with him. And again, we were lucky and he started playing all three tracks which really got it moving. Rough Trade had to ask us for more copies, because they really started shifting them and the first pressing sold-out. We then did a Peel session, which was really helpful as well… It was a lot of fun and it gave us more experience in the recording studio, which helped us to develop material for when we went in to record the next record... We still weren’t playing live very much back then and we didn’t really start doing so until 1979, after the second single. We were a bit slow on the uptake when it came to playing live, so we had to make up for that in ‘79. Although even then, we really didn’t play that often. A while ago, I wrote-up a schedule of all the gigs we played and it only took up one piece of paper. We never even toured around the UK… we did get around to quite a few different places, but just as one-offs.’
There seems to be different versions of who the ‘Seymour’ referred to on the first single actually was…
‘Well, Nikki told me that it was about someone that Marc Bolan had once spoken about in an interview… He was apparently the ‘King of the Mods’ and Marc had been in awe of this character. So, that’s the origin, as far as I know. He was a ‘face’… that’s what Mods used to call the most fashionable individuals. Nikki just liked the idea of someone being a king for a day, until someone else came along with a better suit…’
One of the tracks on the b-side of the single was called ‘Ripped & Torn’… was that a reference to the fanzine of the same name?
‘Yeah, I think it probably was. I remember that guy, Tony. We got to know people like him and Mark Perry, of course. Mark Perry was a very inspiring figure indeed, and Alternative TV were very radical and very bold in stretching the limits of what you could do on an album. Their first album was a really radical statement and I’ve always enjoyed them, even recently. Mark is still very creative and active.’
The core of the band, and the line-up that played live, was always a four-piece, but as you mentioned earlier, there were other people who came to be involved on the studio recordings…
‘In actual fact, we played our first two shows as a three-piece, because Phones refused to play live. He actually left the group in the end, because he didn’t want to face the pressure of the rest of us wanting him to play live. I think that was another part of why we were a bit slow on the uptake in terms of organising shows. But when Richard joined us that sort of focused our efforts and made the band into a stable unit that could play live. It made it easier that we had someone in the band that was a bit more together. But when we were in the studio, Phones would still come along and ‘guest’ with us… in fact, now that he wasn’t burdened with playing rhythm guitar, he was able to focus on the more experimental things we were doing. John would also get involved in a similar way and a few of his pieces are on ‘Mayday Signals’. They tend to be pretty unusual in terms of structure and whatever…’
Your second single, ‘Dresden Style’, also proved to be pretty popular but did cause some confusion as the title seemed to have no connection with the song or lyrics…
‘It was originally called ‘City Boys’, which is the obvious title when you listen to the lyrics, but it became a complicated business… We’d been playing ‘City Boys’ for several years and there were already a few different versions of it. When it came to releasing a second single we had two choices, which were ‘International Rescue’ and ‘City Boys’, so we put both of them down in the studio. I was personally in favour of ‘International Rescue’, but Nikki was convinced that we could do a better version of it and was more in favour of ‘City Boys’, even though he didn’t like the name. So he came up with a new name, which he picked from a catalogue that was selling pieces of fine bone china! He just thought it was really amusing, but when we put the artwork together for the record sleeve, I was worried that it might be a bit questionable as it featured a picture of an RAF fighter-pilot and, of course, the bombing of Dresden during World War Two still remains a controversial subject. But maybe that was just my own sick mind and the way my imagination works, because I’m sure that’s not something that occurred to Nikki at all. Just to make things a little bit more complicated, there’s actually two different versions of the single, as well! I think Nikki got a bit embarrassed by the words, so when the first pressing sold out and we were arranging for a second batch, he re-recorded the vocals with new lyrics, mixed it really quickly and sneaked it out! I didn’t know anything about it at the time, so when I got to hear the second pressing, I thought, ‘What’s this?’ Personally, I still think the first version was better but that’s just my opinion. I can see why he had reservations about it, but I still think it was a great performance.'
‘Well, Nikki told me that it was about someone that Marc Bolan had once spoken about in an interview… He was apparently the ‘King of the Mods’ and Marc had been in awe of this character. So, that’s the origin, as far as I know. He was a ‘face’… that’s what Mods used to call the most fashionable individuals. Nikki just liked the idea of someone being a king for a day, until someone else came along with a better suit…’
One of the tracks on the b-side of the single was called ‘Ripped & Torn’… was that a reference to the fanzine of the same name?
‘Yeah, I think it probably was. I remember that guy, Tony. We got to know people like him and Mark Perry, of course. Mark Perry was a very inspiring figure indeed, and Alternative TV were very radical and very bold in stretching the limits of what you could do on an album. Their first album was a really radical statement and I’ve always enjoyed them, even recently. Mark is still very creative and active.’
The core of the band, and the line-up that played live, was always a four-piece, but as you mentioned earlier, there were other people who came to be involved on the studio recordings…
‘In actual fact, we played our first two shows as a three-piece, because Phones refused to play live. He actually left the group in the end, because he didn’t want to face the pressure of the rest of us wanting him to play live. I think that was another part of why we were a bit slow on the uptake in terms of organising shows. But when Richard joined us that sort of focused our efforts and made the band into a stable unit that could play live. It made it easier that we had someone in the band that was a bit more together. But when we were in the studio, Phones would still come along and ‘guest’ with us… in fact, now that he wasn’t burdened with playing rhythm guitar, he was able to focus on the more experimental things we were doing. John would also get involved in a similar way and a few of his pieces are on ‘Mayday Signals’. They tend to be pretty unusual in terms of structure and whatever…’
Your second single, ‘Dresden Style’, also proved to be pretty popular but did cause some confusion as the title seemed to have no connection with the song or lyrics…
‘It was originally called ‘City Boys’, which is the obvious title when you listen to the lyrics, but it became a complicated business… We’d been playing ‘City Boys’ for several years and there were already a few different versions of it. When it came to releasing a second single we had two choices, which were ‘International Rescue’ and ‘City Boys’, so we put both of them down in the studio. I was personally in favour of ‘International Rescue’, but Nikki was convinced that we could do a better version of it and was more in favour of ‘City Boys’, even though he didn’t like the name. So he came up with a new name, which he picked from a catalogue that was selling pieces of fine bone china! He just thought it was really amusing, but when we put the artwork together for the record sleeve, I was worried that it might be a bit questionable as it featured a picture of an RAF fighter-pilot and, of course, the bombing of Dresden during World War Two still remains a controversial subject. But maybe that was just my own sick mind and the way my imagination works, because I’m sure that’s not something that occurred to Nikki at all. Just to make things a little bit more complicated, there’s actually two different versions of the single, as well! I think Nikki got a bit embarrassed by the words, so when the first pressing sold out and we were arranging for a second batch, he re-recorded the vocals with new lyrics, mixed it really quickly and sneaked it out! I didn’t know anything about it at the time, so when I got to hear the second pressing, I thought, ‘What’s this?’ Personally, I still think the first version was better but that’s just my opinion. I can see why he had reservations about it, but I still think it was a great performance.'
I can see that Nikki was just having fun when he named the track ‘Dresden Style’, but that idea also followed through in a lot of the lyrics, which were often quite playful. Even the names that you all adopted within the band were almost Monty Python-esque….
‘Well, Epic was the one who was really into Monty Python, but I’d often listen to his Monty Python albums with him and we’d both roar with laughter. He’d often start reciting the sketches and the rest of us would have to try to change the subject to stop him… But I think we all had an enthusiasm for that kind of absurdist approach, which I think was also one of the things we shared, to a certain extent, with Faust. I think they had a very healthy liking for absurdity and we certainly never saw anything wrong with that, although some people did seem to regard us with suspicion because we seemed to be a bit too light-hearted at times. People seemed to want bands to be dead serious or lark-about and you weren’t supposed to do both. But we liked to keep a balance between one thing and the other and thought that we could keep a delicate balance between the two. We didn’t see anything wrong with that at all, but I think it did confuse a lot of people. Sometimes, people try to think about things too much instead of just enjoying it, so it’s a shame when they can’t appreciate that kind of balance.’
The first album, ‘A Trip to Marineville’, was released in 1979. The first noticeable thing about it was the distinctive cover art…
‘It was taken from a small illustration in a magazine, which was advertising Home Insurance. There was some sort of ridiculous slogan alongside it, saying something like, ‘Would you want this to happen to your home?’ We just liked the picture, so we cut it out and had it enlarged maybe ten or twenty times until it was a twelve-inch square and somehow it still looked alright. All we needed to do was saturate the colours a little bit and it came out looking very exciting. If was pretty different to anything else that was being released around that time, you know, a suburban house on fire… It wasn’t the kind of thing that other people were using. And we were a suburban band, after all. We never tried to claim any kind of spurious street credibility. That was certainly not part of our plan and we even ridiculed certain bands who were trying a bit too hard to claim that sort of thing. That was the thing about Punk once it became a fashion… things just became boiled-down into generic concepts. Everybody wore black leather jackets, bondage trousers and spiky hair… You had to look mean and act macho, you had to sing about ‘the streets’ and certain attitudes had to be presented.’
Were there any particular bands that you did feel aligned with?
‘Well, Television Personalities, definitely. Their first single and our first single came out around the same time and we had both had to go through the same process of finding a studio we could afford, finding a place to cut the master-disk, finding a printer, finding a manufacturer and then finding a distributor. We had all of those things in common so we ended-up exchanging notes on the different places we could go to. I’m not sure where we found Dan Treacy’s contact details, maybe on the sleeve of their first single, but either way, we started corresponding with him and then, one day, me and Nikki were down in London and we decided to go and meet him. I think he was still living with his Mum at the time and she was fed-up with all these boxes of records in her hallway… Nikki later claimed that he got the idea for the song ‘Midget Submarines’ while we were there, and Dan also claimed that he wrote the song ‘A Picture of Dorian Gray’ partly about our visit, as it includes the line ‘a thousand midget Russians in their midget submarines…’ So it all ties together, you know? Anyway, we were big fans of the TV Personalities and I think the admiration was mutual. In fact, later on, I actually joined them and played with them for ten years or so… As well as them, we also liked Subway Sect. Me and Epic particularly admired them. We also liked Alternative TV, as I said, and Wire… Me and Epic loved them right from their first album, which was superb all the way through. It really worked well as a concept.’
‘Well, Epic was the one who was really into Monty Python, but I’d often listen to his Monty Python albums with him and we’d both roar with laughter. He’d often start reciting the sketches and the rest of us would have to try to change the subject to stop him… But I think we all had an enthusiasm for that kind of absurdist approach, which I think was also one of the things we shared, to a certain extent, with Faust. I think they had a very healthy liking for absurdity and we certainly never saw anything wrong with that, although some people did seem to regard us with suspicion because we seemed to be a bit too light-hearted at times. People seemed to want bands to be dead serious or lark-about and you weren’t supposed to do both. But we liked to keep a balance between one thing and the other and thought that we could keep a delicate balance between the two. We didn’t see anything wrong with that at all, but I think it did confuse a lot of people. Sometimes, people try to think about things too much instead of just enjoying it, so it’s a shame when they can’t appreciate that kind of balance.’
The first album, ‘A Trip to Marineville’, was released in 1979. The first noticeable thing about it was the distinctive cover art…
‘It was taken from a small illustration in a magazine, which was advertising Home Insurance. There was some sort of ridiculous slogan alongside it, saying something like, ‘Would you want this to happen to your home?’ We just liked the picture, so we cut it out and had it enlarged maybe ten or twenty times until it was a twelve-inch square and somehow it still looked alright. All we needed to do was saturate the colours a little bit and it came out looking very exciting. If was pretty different to anything else that was being released around that time, you know, a suburban house on fire… It wasn’t the kind of thing that other people were using. And we were a suburban band, after all. We never tried to claim any kind of spurious street credibility. That was certainly not part of our plan and we even ridiculed certain bands who were trying a bit too hard to claim that sort of thing. That was the thing about Punk once it became a fashion… things just became boiled-down into generic concepts. Everybody wore black leather jackets, bondage trousers and spiky hair… You had to look mean and act macho, you had to sing about ‘the streets’ and certain attitudes had to be presented.’
Were there any particular bands that you did feel aligned with?
‘Well, Television Personalities, definitely. Their first single and our first single came out around the same time and we had both had to go through the same process of finding a studio we could afford, finding a place to cut the master-disk, finding a printer, finding a manufacturer and then finding a distributor. We had all of those things in common so we ended-up exchanging notes on the different places we could go to. I’m not sure where we found Dan Treacy’s contact details, maybe on the sleeve of their first single, but either way, we started corresponding with him and then, one day, me and Nikki were down in London and we decided to go and meet him. I think he was still living with his Mum at the time and she was fed-up with all these boxes of records in her hallway… Nikki later claimed that he got the idea for the song ‘Midget Submarines’ while we were there, and Dan also claimed that he wrote the song ‘A Picture of Dorian Gray’ partly about our visit, as it includes the line ‘a thousand midget Russians in their midget submarines…’ So it all ties together, you know? Anyway, we were big fans of the TV Personalities and I think the admiration was mutual. In fact, later on, I actually joined them and played with them for ten years or so… As well as them, we also liked Subway Sect. Me and Epic particularly admired them. We also liked Alternative TV, as I said, and Wire… Me and Epic loved them right from their first album, which was superb all the way through. It really worked well as a concept.’
I can see that Nikki was just having fun when he named the track ‘Dresden Style’, but that idea also followed through in a lot of the lyrics, which were often quite playful. Even the names that you all adopted within the band were almost Monty Python-esque….
‘Well, Epic was the one who was really into Monty Python, but I’d often listen to his Monty Python albums with him and we’d both roar with laughter. He’d often start reciting the sketches and the rest of us would have to try to change the subject to stop him… But I think we all had an enthusiasm for that kind of absurdist approach, which I think was also one of the things we shared, to a certain extent, with Faust. I think they had a very healthy liking for absurdity and we certainly never saw anything wrong with that, although some people did seem to regard us with suspicion because we seemed to be a bit too light-hearted at times. People seemed to want bands to be dead serious or lark-about and you weren’t supposed to do both. But we liked to keep a balance between one thing and the other and thought that we could keep a delicate balance between the two. We didn’t see anything wrong with that at all, but I think it did confuse a lot of people. Sometimes, people try to think about things too much instead of just enjoying it, so it’s a shame when they can’t appreciate that kind of balance.’
The first album, ‘A Trip to Marineville’, was released in 1979. The first noticeable thing about it was the distinctive cover art…
‘It was taken from a small illustration in a magazine, which was advertising Home Insurance. There was some sort of ridiculous slogan alongside it, saying something like, ‘Would you want this to happen to your home?’ We just liked the picture, so we cut it out and had it enlarged maybe ten or twenty times until it was a twelve-inch square and somehow it still looked alright. All we needed to do was saturate the colours a little bit and it came out looking very exciting. If was pretty different to anything else that was being released around that time, you know, a suburban house on fire… It wasn’t the kind of thing that other people were using. And we were a suburban band, after all. We never tried to claim any kind of spurious street credibility. That was certainly not part of our plan and we even ridiculed certain bands who were trying a bit too hard to claim that sort of thing. That was the thing about Punk once it became a fashion… things just became boiled-down into generic concepts. Everybody wore black leather jackets, bondage trousers and spiky hair… You had to look mean and act macho, you had to sing about ‘the streets’ and certain attitudes had to be presented.’
Were there any particular bands that you did feel aligned with?
‘Well, Television Personalities, definitely. Their first single and our first single came out around the same time and we had both had to go through the same process of finding a studio we could afford, finding a place to cut the master-disk, finding a printer, finding a manufacturer and then finding a distributor. We had all of those things in common so we ended-up exchanging notes on the different places we could go to. I’m not sure where we found Dan Treacy’s contact details, maybe on the sleeve of their first single, but either way, we started corresponding with him and then, one day, me and Nikki were down in London and we decided to go and meet him. I think he was still living with his Mum at the time and she was fed-up with all these boxes of records in her hallway… Nikki later claimed that he got the idea for the song ‘Midget Submarines’ while we were there, and Dan also claimed that he wrote the song ‘A Picture of Dorian Gray’ partly about our visit, as it includes the line ‘a thousand midget Russians in their midget submarines…’ So it all ties together, you know? Anyway, we were big fans of the TV Personalities and I think the admiration was mutual. In fact, later on, I actually joined them and played with them for ten years or so… As well as them, we also liked Subway Sect. Me and Epic particularly admired them. We also liked Alternative TV, as I said, and Wire… Me and Epic loved them right from their first album, which was superb all the way through. It really worked well as a concept.’
‘Well, Epic was the one who was really into Monty Python, but I’d often listen to his Monty Python albums with him and we’d both roar with laughter. He’d often start reciting the sketches and the rest of us would have to try to change the subject to stop him… But I think we all had an enthusiasm for that kind of absurdist approach, which I think was also one of the things we shared, to a certain extent, with Faust. I think they had a very healthy liking for absurdity and we certainly never saw anything wrong with that, although some people did seem to regard us with suspicion because we seemed to be a bit too light-hearted at times. People seemed to want bands to be dead serious or lark-about and you weren’t supposed to do both. But we liked to keep a balance between one thing and the other and thought that we could keep a delicate balance between the two. We didn’t see anything wrong with that at all, but I think it did confuse a lot of people. Sometimes, people try to think about things too much instead of just enjoying it, so it’s a shame when they can’t appreciate that kind of balance.’
The first album, ‘A Trip to Marineville’, was released in 1979. The first noticeable thing about it was the distinctive cover art…
‘It was taken from a small illustration in a magazine, which was advertising Home Insurance. There was some sort of ridiculous slogan alongside it, saying something like, ‘Would you want this to happen to your home?’ We just liked the picture, so we cut it out and had it enlarged maybe ten or twenty times until it was a twelve-inch square and somehow it still looked alright. All we needed to do was saturate the colours a little bit and it came out looking very exciting. If was pretty different to anything else that was being released around that time, you know, a suburban house on fire… It wasn’t the kind of thing that other people were using. And we were a suburban band, after all. We never tried to claim any kind of spurious street credibility. That was certainly not part of our plan and we even ridiculed certain bands who were trying a bit too hard to claim that sort of thing. That was the thing about Punk once it became a fashion… things just became boiled-down into generic concepts. Everybody wore black leather jackets, bondage trousers and spiky hair… You had to look mean and act macho, you had to sing about ‘the streets’ and certain attitudes had to be presented.’
Were there any particular bands that you did feel aligned with?
‘Well, Television Personalities, definitely. Their first single and our first single came out around the same time and we had both had to go through the same process of finding a studio we could afford, finding a place to cut the master-disk, finding a printer, finding a manufacturer and then finding a distributor. We had all of those things in common so we ended-up exchanging notes on the different places we could go to. I’m not sure where we found Dan Treacy’s contact details, maybe on the sleeve of their first single, but either way, we started corresponding with him and then, one day, me and Nikki were down in London and we decided to go and meet him. I think he was still living with his Mum at the time and she was fed-up with all these boxes of records in her hallway… Nikki later claimed that he got the idea for the song ‘Midget Submarines’ while we were there, and Dan also claimed that he wrote the song ‘A Picture of Dorian Gray’ partly about our visit, as it includes the line ‘a thousand midget Russians in their midget submarines…’ So it all ties together, you know? Anyway, we were big fans of the TV Personalities and I think the admiration was mutual. In fact, later on, I actually joined them and played with them for ten years or so… As well as them, we also liked Subway Sect. Me and Epic particularly admired them. We also liked Alternative TV, as I said, and Wire… Me and Epic loved them right from their first album, which was superb all the way through. It really worked well as a concept.’
The original version of ‘A Trip to Marineville’ also included a 7” EP which seemed to be an integral part of the whole album, as you’ve already mentioned. There’s a story that ‘Stephen Does’ was written about you…
‘Nikki and Phones often enjoyed taking the micky out of me and they actually wrote and recorded a number of songs about me, basically just taking the piss… That was one of them. But it was all meant quite kindly, I suppose. I mean, they even included the slogan ‘We Hate Jowe’ on the cover of Phones’ solo single, but it was just taking the mick, it wasn’t malicious! I mean, I had to have a rather thick skin at times, but that’s what friends do to each other…’
Between 1978 and 1980, there were several singles released on Rather Records by different artists (Steve Treatment, Cult Figures and the Phones Sportsman Band) which all featured various members of Swell Maps as the backing band… how did they come about?
‘Oddly enough, I’ve been involved in some negotiations with the Cult Figures as they recently reformed, and I’m glad to say that their original material is going to be available again shortly. Although, what I’d actually like to see would be a compilation of all the Rather Records singles on one record… I think it would be pretty good, putting all of the Swell Maps singles together together with the collaborations… I’d really like that to happen and I think it would be a really good record, but in the meantime, I managed to find the original studio masters for the Cult Figures tracks and had the tapes processed so they can be remastered again. Unfortunately, no-one knows what happened to the original stereo masters, but at least we can now remix the tracks from the studio tapes rather than trying to take them off an original record, which is never a very satisfactory way to do things. I mean, sometimes there’s no other way to do it, but it does seem that original tapes do have a way of reappearing over time. I’ve managed to archive a lot of stuff, but it does seem that a lot of the original Swell Maps tapes have disappeared altogether.’
How did the two Cult Figures singles come about?
‘It was originally Gary Jones’ band and we knew him from Solihull Technical College... Me and Epic went there, and later on, Richard went there… Gary was a really amusing guy that we liked a lot. Another person from that scene was John Hodgson, who went on to study film-making in Liverpool. He was in a band called Scent Organs, who were also part of the Birmingham punk scene. When the original line-up of Cult Figures fell apart - Gary said they were useless, anyway - John joined-up with him and helped him write a few more songs. He already had this ridiculous thing about ‘Zip Nolan’ and John helped him work it into a coherent song. John and Gary became a good songwriting partnership and wrote loads of songs together but they didn’t have a full band, so we thought we could help out. We invited them over so they could use an hour at the end of a studio session that we already had and said we’d help them to get it down on tape, because it was a great song. We just wanted to document it. So we learnt ‘Zip Nolan’ and recorded it on the spot, as it was really only two chords and not too difficult to play… It came out well and we said that it would’ve been great if they had another song, so there would be enough for a single, at which point they said, well, as it happens, we wrote another song on the bus while we were coming over! So we learnt that as well, even though it was a bit more complicated… It was called ‘Playing With Toys’ and it was a really good track,. In fact, I think I actually preferred that one, although ‘Zip Nolan’ was one of those songs that, once heard, it was never forgotten!’
‘Nikki and Phones often enjoyed taking the micky out of me and they actually wrote and recorded a number of songs about me, basically just taking the piss… That was one of them. But it was all meant quite kindly, I suppose. I mean, they even included the slogan ‘We Hate Jowe’ on the cover of Phones’ solo single, but it was just taking the mick, it wasn’t malicious! I mean, I had to have a rather thick skin at times, but that’s what friends do to each other…’
Between 1978 and 1980, there were several singles released on Rather Records by different artists (Steve Treatment, Cult Figures and the Phones Sportsman Band) which all featured various members of Swell Maps as the backing band… how did they come about?
‘Oddly enough, I’ve been involved in some negotiations with the Cult Figures as they recently reformed, and I’m glad to say that their original material is going to be available again shortly. Although, what I’d actually like to see would be a compilation of all the Rather Records singles on one record… I think it would be pretty good, putting all of the Swell Maps singles together together with the collaborations… I’d really like that to happen and I think it would be a really good record, but in the meantime, I managed to find the original studio masters for the Cult Figures tracks and had the tapes processed so they can be remastered again. Unfortunately, no-one knows what happened to the original stereo masters, but at least we can now remix the tracks from the studio tapes rather than trying to take them off an original record, which is never a very satisfactory way to do things. I mean, sometimes there’s no other way to do it, but it does seem that original tapes do have a way of reappearing over time. I’ve managed to archive a lot of stuff, but it does seem that a lot of the original Swell Maps tapes have disappeared altogether.’
How did the two Cult Figures singles come about?
‘It was originally Gary Jones’ band and we knew him from Solihull Technical College... Me and Epic went there, and later on, Richard went there… Gary was a really amusing guy that we liked a lot. Another person from that scene was John Hodgson, who went on to study film-making in Liverpool. He was in a band called Scent Organs, who were also part of the Birmingham punk scene. When the original line-up of Cult Figures fell apart - Gary said they were useless, anyway - John joined-up with him and helped him write a few more songs. He already had this ridiculous thing about ‘Zip Nolan’ and John helped him work it into a coherent song. John and Gary became a good songwriting partnership and wrote loads of songs together but they didn’t have a full band, so we thought we could help out. We invited them over so they could use an hour at the end of a studio session that we already had and said we’d help them to get it down on tape, because it was a great song. We just wanted to document it. So we learnt ‘Zip Nolan’ and recorded it on the spot, as it was really only two chords and not too difficult to play… It came out well and we said that it would’ve been great if they had another song, so there would be enough for a single, at which point they said, well, as it happens, we wrote another song on the bus while we were coming over! So we learnt that as well, even though it was a bit more complicated… It was called ‘Playing With Toys’ and it was a really good track,. In fact, I think I actually preferred that one, although ‘Zip Nolan’ was one of those songs that, once heard, it was never forgotten!’
And what was the story behind the Steve Treatment EP?
‘That was actually before the Cult Figures record and the recording session was originally meant to be a Swell Maps session. We’d gone all the way to Spaceward studio in Cambridge, only for Nikki to turn up with this guy, Steve. All I knew about him was that he was another T Rex fanatic… Anyway, Nikki said that we’d do the Swell Maps tracks a bit later but first of all, we could record some tracks with Steve, which he said wouldn’t take long… I was actually bristling a bit about it, because I was expecting us to record one of my new songs, ‘Harmony in Your Bathroom’, which we had in mind for the next single. So I was pretty anxious to get that down, but Nikki was always a very persuasive fellow and talked us into altering our plans to accommodate Steve. We did a couple of tracks and I thought that was it, but then they said there were a few more and eventually, it turned out to be five tracks, which were what became the great ‘5 A-sided 45’ EP. I was really gritting my teeth all through the process, I must admit, but I actually listened to it again just recently and really enjoyed it. It sounds like fun, which wasn’t the way I remembered it. But that was all we ever did with him… after that, enough was enough! He wasn’t the easiest person to work with because he could be a bit arrogant in a kind of Marc Bolan, prima donna way. Which, strangely enough, I found to be quite common among Marc Bolan fans, as they all tried to copy his attitude…’
And the Phones Sportsman Band…
‘Ahh, well, that was another pretty strange experience as well and, again, it was a pretty spontaneous affair. It was all off the cuff, really… We said to Phones that we had some studio time booked, so why not just come down and we’ll record you doing your thing. He’d already left Swell Maps but we were still very good friends and he would still ‘guest’ with us. So we decided that we should do a record focusing on him as it seemed like a nice gesture and it was assured to be fun. But it turned out to be a really strange combination of tracks… ‘I Really Love You’, which was just this riff with a repeating chord sequence. Phones told us the chords, which sounded incredibly familiar, like a doo-wop song or some corny old record from the Fifties. We just played that for about three minutes and he sang the same line again and again and again! It was a minimalist classic, Steve Reich would have been proud! Then, after that, we blasted out this loud, dirty version of this song which had been Slade’s first hit, ‘Get Down and Get With It’…
I’m not sure if you’ve ever come across it, but there’s a website that said it was one of the worst cover versions ever recorded!
‘Hahaha! That’s great! The recording was very supercharged and unhinged, certainly. It made the Slade version sound quite civilised’
‘That was actually before the Cult Figures record and the recording session was originally meant to be a Swell Maps session. We’d gone all the way to Spaceward studio in Cambridge, only for Nikki to turn up with this guy, Steve. All I knew about him was that he was another T Rex fanatic… Anyway, Nikki said that we’d do the Swell Maps tracks a bit later but first of all, we could record some tracks with Steve, which he said wouldn’t take long… I was actually bristling a bit about it, because I was expecting us to record one of my new songs, ‘Harmony in Your Bathroom’, which we had in mind for the next single. So I was pretty anxious to get that down, but Nikki was always a very persuasive fellow and talked us into altering our plans to accommodate Steve. We did a couple of tracks and I thought that was it, but then they said there were a few more and eventually, it turned out to be five tracks, which were what became the great ‘5 A-sided 45’ EP. I was really gritting my teeth all through the process, I must admit, but I actually listened to it again just recently and really enjoyed it. It sounds like fun, which wasn’t the way I remembered it. But that was all we ever did with him… after that, enough was enough! He wasn’t the easiest person to work with because he could be a bit arrogant in a kind of Marc Bolan, prima donna way. Which, strangely enough, I found to be quite common among Marc Bolan fans, as they all tried to copy his attitude…’
And the Phones Sportsman Band…
‘Ahh, well, that was another pretty strange experience as well and, again, it was a pretty spontaneous affair. It was all off the cuff, really… We said to Phones that we had some studio time booked, so why not just come down and we’ll record you doing your thing. He’d already left Swell Maps but we were still very good friends and he would still ‘guest’ with us. So we decided that we should do a record focusing on him as it seemed like a nice gesture and it was assured to be fun. But it turned out to be a really strange combination of tracks… ‘I Really Love You’, which was just this riff with a repeating chord sequence. Phones told us the chords, which sounded incredibly familiar, like a doo-wop song or some corny old record from the Fifties. We just played that for about three minutes and he sang the same line again and again and again! It was a minimalist classic, Steve Reich would have been proud! Then, after that, we blasted out this loud, dirty version of this song which had been Slade’s first hit, ‘Get Down and Get With It’…
I’m not sure if you’ve ever come across it, but there’s a website that said it was one of the worst cover versions ever recorded!
‘Hahaha! That’s great! The recording was very supercharged and unhinged, certainly. It made the Slade version sound quite civilised’
Swell Maps didn’t play live very often and, as far as I know, you only played one brief tour in Europe…
‘Yes, that was our only ever tour, although it was actually in two parts, and it proved fatal or, at least, terminal. I think at that point, we’d already finished recording the material for the second album, ‘Jane From Occupied Europe’, but we hadn’t finished mixing it and putting everything together. We’d put a lot into it, but there was still loads to do and it hadn’t been an easy process. The first album had been difficult in a different way, because we had a hard time deciding what to use on it and what to leave out, what order to put the songs in and how to mix them… There were constant disagreements and difficult negotiations but I think we ended up with a really good result on ‘A Trip to Marineville’. We pretty-much started recording material for the next album straight after that… One thing you need to understand about Swell Maps and our recording process was that it was a continuous project. We didn’t decide that we would go in to record a single, or go in to record an album. We were just continually recording songs and we decided what we wanted to do with them as we went along. Nikki was a very prolific songwriter but I think one of the strengths we had as a band was that we found a way to work where we were able to filter-out his not-so-good material. Me and Epic would help him select the songs that we felt were the stronger ones and more suitable for the band… I have to say that was something that wasn’t always apparent in his solo work. But anyway, while that was all going on, Rough Trade managed to set us up with two dates in Holland and Belgium at the end of 1979 with Scritti Politti, which was a big deal for us. I’d actually just got out of hospital at the time and had been feeling a bit down, but I have happy memories of that jaunt… It was booked over a long weekend, just us and Scritti Politti, which seemed like an unlikely alliance but we were kindred spirits in some ways… Those dates were fun and then we were booked to do a short tour in Italy, which was going to be about ten dates, I think. That was like a proper tour for us, but it was also the first time that we’d all been crammed-in together, travelling and sharing accommodation. There were already certain tensions in the band leading up to that point anyway, as we’d been recording a lot of material towards the next album and it was proving to be a bit difficult. But we all hoped that we’d have a good time and it was a good opportunity to hone our live act into something we could use more productively. There were a lot of plans coming together for us at this point… Rough Trade were starting to book us for a lot of shows in 1980 and there was even some talk about us playing in America, so it seemed to be quite an exciting time. But for various reasons, I just don’t think it would’ve been viable on a personal level and the cracks really started showing, really seriously, when we went to Italy. Eventually, it became like a dam bursting open and all this personal stuff and creative tensions came out. We quickly realised that it was all going wrong and we had a series of arguments, quite serious ones, on that tour. It got to the point where we just couldn’t go on… it just became untenable and we broke up. Richard was the first one to say he couldn’t do it anymore, but then me and Epic agreed… We’d just had enough and it wasn’t going to work any more. I mean, you get some bands that become contractually or legally tied-together, so they’re not able to make that kind of decision. Their management would just tell them, you can’t do that, you’ve got to continue playing for the next ten years to pay-off your financial liabilities… But in our case, we didn’t owe any money or anything like that, so we weren’t in that situation. We’d always said that, if we got bored or fed-up with the band that we’d finish it, so that’s what we did. We didn’t want to continue in a situation where we hated each other, as some bands do… You hear stories like that all the time and it really isn’t the way for a band to continue. Me and Nikki had been at school together and most of us all knew each other from early-to-mid teens, so I think growing up and then becoming dependent on each other can be an awful pressure. You can’t expect anyone to continue like that indefinitely and it’s no wonder that you find so many bands that continue for too long and end up hating each other.’
‘Yes, that was our only ever tour, although it was actually in two parts, and it proved fatal or, at least, terminal. I think at that point, we’d already finished recording the material for the second album, ‘Jane From Occupied Europe’, but we hadn’t finished mixing it and putting everything together. We’d put a lot into it, but there was still loads to do and it hadn’t been an easy process. The first album had been difficult in a different way, because we had a hard time deciding what to use on it and what to leave out, what order to put the songs in and how to mix them… There were constant disagreements and difficult negotiations but I think we ended up with a really good result on ‘A Trip to Marineville’. We pretty-much started recording material for the next album straight after that… One thing you need to understand about Swell Maps and our recording process was that it was a continuous project. We didn’t decide that we would go in to record a single, or go in to record an album. We were just continually recording songs and we decided what we wanted to do with them as we went along. Nikki was a very prolific songwriter but I think one of the strengths we had as a band was that we found a way to work where we were able to filter-out his not-so-good material. Me and Epic would help him select the songs that we felt were the stronger ones and more suitable for the band… I have to say that was something that wasn’t always apparent in his solo work. But anyway, while that was all going on, Rough Trade managed to set us up with two dates in Holland and Belgium at the end of 1979 with Scritti Politti, which was a big deal for us. I’d actually just got out of hospital at the time and had been feeling a bit down, but I have happy memories of that jaunt… It was booked over a long weekend, just us and Scritti Politti, which seemed like an unlikely alliance but we were kindred spirits in some ways… Those dates were fun and then we were booked to do a short tour in Italy, which was going to be about ten dates, I think. That was like a proper tour for us, but it was also the first time that we’d all been crammed-in together, travelling and sharing accommodation. There were already certain tensions in the band leading up to that point anyway, as we’d been recording a lot of material towards the next album and it was proving to be a bit difficult. But we all hoped that we’d have a good time and it was a good opportunity to hone our live act into something we could use more productively. There were a lot of plans coming together for us at this point… Rough Trade were starting to book us for a lot of shows in 1980 and there was even some talk about us playing in America, so it seemed to be quite an exciting time. But for various reasons, I just don’t think it would’ve been viable on a personal level and the cracks really started showing, really seriously, when we went to Italy. Eventually, it became like a dam bursting open and all this personal stuff and creative tensions came out. We quickly realised that it was all going wrong and we had a series of arguments, quite serious ones, on that tour. It got to the point where we just couldn’t go on… it just became untenable and we broke up. Richard was the first one to say he couldn’t do it anymore, but then me and Epic agreed… We’d just had enough and it wasn’t going to work any more. I mean, you get some bands that become contractually or legally tied-together, so they’re not able to make that kind of decision. Their management would just tell them, you can’t do that, you’ve got to continue playing for the next ten years to pay-off your financial liabilities… But in our case, we didn’t owe any money or anything like that, so we weren’t in that situation. We’d always said that, if we got bored or fed-up with the band that we’d finish it, so that’s what we did. We didn’t want to continue in a situation where we hated each other, as some bands do… You hear stories like that all the time and it really isn’t the way for a band to continue. Me and Nikki had been at school together and most of us all knew each other from early-to-mid teens, so I think growing up and then becoming dependent on each other can be an awful pressure. You can’t expect anyone to continue like that indefinitely and it’s no wonder that you find so many bands that continue for too long and end up hating each other.’
The second album actually came-out after the band had split…
‘Yes, and we even had to complete putting it together after we’d broken-up, which was a very difficult process and rather tense. But I think in the circumstances, we still ended up with a rather good album. We had to make some pretty difficult decisions about what to leave out… With all the tracks we’d recorded, it could have been a double album, I suppose. Some of the unreleased material is also featured on ‘Mayday Signals’.’
Despite the band breaking-up, ‘Jane From Occupied Europe’ proved to be pretty successful, reaching the Top Five of the independent charts. At the same time, it was probably also more experimental…
‘I don’t know if it was more experimental, as such, but there’s more light and shade, perhaps. There’s a bit more space on it, I think. That’s my only way of judging it in terms of the sound… I also think you can hear that there’s a bit more experience there. You could say that it was a bit more serious, perhaps… It wasn’t as wild and there was less larking around, but there’s still some pretty fierce tracks on it. But I’m not sure if it’s a particularly easy listen and there aren’t so many tunes to digest, so perhaps it’s a bit more difficult than the first album.’
One more LP, ‘Whatever Happens Next’, was released as a double album the following year… did that include any of the unreleased tracks from the second album?
‘No, most of that was made-up of older home recordings, plus the second Peel Session. But I was never really happy with it, which is why I objected to it being re-released later on. I always thought that a lot of material on it wasn’t up to scratch… some of the tracks were either too long or just not good enough. Although I was very happy with that Peel session and, if all goes to plan, all three Peel sessions are going to be issued together on one album by Mute records later this year. In the meantime, I think that I rescued what I felt were the best tracks from the archives, remixed them and included them on ‘Mayday Signals’, so I think that’s been a good result.’
Most of the band members became involved in new musical projects pretty soon after the demise of Swell Maps…
‘What happened was that we went back to working in different duos and trios again, as we had been doing before Swell Maps. That meant that it took some of the pressure off, at least for me, and I’m sure it was the same for the others as well. I had been really traumatised when we split-up, but I knew it had been necessary. Nikki was traumatised by it because he thought it was unnecessary, which was a difference between us. But I was still on good terms with Epic and Phones, so I started working with them pretty-much straightaway. I was living in Stoke Newington by then and one day, I found out that Epic and Richard were moving into the house right opposite me! It was a total coincidence and I could hardly believe it, but we got a nice scene going. Swell Maps had bought an old TEAC four-track tape recorder from a studio in Leamington Spa… We thought it would be a good investment and that turned out to be correct… Anyway, they brought the TEAC with them so I was able to use it to record my own album, ‘Strawberry’, and Richard also recorded an entire album with it. Nikki would come down and record loads of stuff there and even Phones did some stuff on it… I guess Epic must’ve done some stuff with it as well, but if he did, I’m not sure what happened to those recordings. The funny thing was, I’d be using the TEAC at my house for a couple of weeks, then Richard would come over to get it and have to stagger across the road with this heavy tape machine before hauling it up to his room!. Then, another few weeks later, I’d have to stagger back with the tape machine to start making strange noises at my place again.’
‘Yes, and we even had to complete putting it together after we’d broken-up, which was a very difficult process and rather tense. But I think in the circumstances, we still ended up with a rather good album. We had to make some pretty difficult decisions about what to leave out… With all the tracks we’d recorded, it could have been a double album, I suppose. Some of the unreleased material is also featured on ‘Mayday Signals’.’
Despite the band breaking-up, ‘Jane From Occupied Europe’ proved to be pretty successful, reaching the Top Five of the independent charts. At the same time, it was probably also more experimental…
‘I don’t know if it was more experimental, as such, but there’s more light and shade, perhaps. There’s a bit more space on it, I think. That’s my only way of judging it in terms of the sound… I also think you can hear that there’s a bit more experience there. You could say that it was a bit more serious, perhaps… It wasn’t as wild and there was less larking around, but there’s still some pretty fierce tracks on it. But I’m not sure if it’s a particularly easy listen and there aren’t so many tunes to digest, so perhaps it’s a bit more difficult than the first album.’
One more LP, ‘Whatever Happens Next’, was released as a double album the following year… did that include any of the unreleased tracks from the second album?
‘No, most of that was made-up of older home recordings, plus the second Peel Session. But I was never really happy with it, which is why I objected to it being re-released later on. I always thought that a lot of material on it wasn’t up to scratch… some of the tracks were either too long or just not good enough. Although I was very happy with that Peel session and, if all goes to plan, all three Peel sessions are going to be issued together on one album by Mute records later this year. In the meantime, I think that I rescued what I felt were the best tracks from the archives, remixed them and included them on ‘Mayday Signals’, so I think that’s been a good result.’
Most of the band members became involved in new musical projects pretty soon after the demise of Swell Maps…
‘What happened was that we went back to working in different duos and trios again, as we had been doing before Swell Maps. That meant that it took some of the pressure off, at least for me, and I’m sure it was the same for the others as well. I had been really traumatised when we split-up, but I knew it had been necessary. Nikki was traumatised by it because he thought it was unnecessary, which was a difference between us. But I was still on good terms with Epic and Phones, so I started working with them pretty-much straightaway. I was living in Stoke Newington by then and one day, I found out that Epic and Richard were moving into the house right opposite me! It was a total coincidence and I could hardly believe it, but we got a nice scene going. Swell Maps had bought an old TEAC four-track tape recorder from a studio in Leamington Spa… We thought it would be a good investment and that turned out to be correct… Anyway, they brought the TEAC with them so I was able to use it to record my own album, ‘Strawberry’, and Richard also recorded an entire album with it. Nikki would come down and record loads of stuff there and even Phones did some stuff on it… I guess Epic must’ve done some stuff with it as well, but if he did, I’m not sure what happened to those recordings. The funny thing was, I’d be using the TEAC at my house for a couple of weeks, then Richard would come over to get it and have to stagger across the road with this heavy tape machine before hauling it up to his room!. Then, another few weeks later, I’d have to stagger back with the tape machine to start making strange noises at my place again.’
Your first new release after Swell Maps was the ‘Pincer Movement’ album…
‘Yes, although some of the material that’s on my new album, ‘Strawberry Birthmarks’, was actually recorded before that. But the way things turned out was that ‘Pincer Movement’ was released first. In fact, the songs on ‘Strawberry Birthmark’ were recorded during three sessions in 1980, the first with Joe Foster and Mark Sheppard from the Television Personalities, who had offered to help out. The next session was with Phones and the third session was just me on my own, multi-tracking everything. I just hope that I’ve been able to put it together in something approaching a coherent album…’
Well, that’s what I thought when I first heard it. Despite the songs coming from different sessions and with different people involved, it does sound like a very solid record…
‘Yes, I hope so… and it’s nice to hear that other people think that way. I think it all comes together. I think that, at the time, it was a question of choosing the right people for the material or perhaps the other way around, choosing the right material for the people.’
It’s quite removed from the material you’d been playing with Swell Maps… I was thinking of a Captain Beefheart influence and maybe Tom Waits, although the finished music was performed with a very English character…
‘Well, yes, I had been listening to Captain Beefheart for a few years before that. His records had certainly altered my world view and also my way of thinking about sounds and how you played them. I don’t think I was necessarily thinking about Tom Waits at the time, but I can kind of see links to some of the stuff he had done before ‘Rain Dogs’… I think there was a certain kinship with some of the things he was doing, you know, albums like ‘Swordfish Trombones’… but I think it was more a case of two people feeling the same things around the same time, rather than his music being a direct influence on me.’
Although you started-off by releasing albums in your own name, you also became a member of several different bands over the following years…
‘That’s right… actually, I ought to mention the album that Epic and I started to work on in 1981, after ‘Pincer Movement’ had been released and after he’d done his solo single, ‘Jelly Babies’. We started to work on a project just called ‘Soundtracks & Head’ and we released a single on Rough Trade called ‘Rain, Rain, Rain’, which came out in 1982. It was a good single and we were delighted with it, but for some reason Rough Trade decided they didn’t want to do an album with us… So that’s one of the projects I’m hoping to pursue this year, to finally get that album released. I’ve secured the original master tapes and I’m hoping to get them processed pretty soon so I can start work on getting them completed. But after that, I joined the Television Personalities in 1983 and played with them for the next ten years. Around the same time, I also became the singer in a pretty strange band called The Palookas, which was made-up of various people from Stoke Newington. It was an odd band, but we actually did quite a lot of touring and got into all these different adventures… we never actually toured in the UK and didn’t really play outside of London much, but we’d go over and play in places like Germany. It was good fun and it was also my first attempt to be a singer in a band.’
Some time later on, you also played in The Long Decline…
‘I already knew this guy Leigh (aka Kenny Wisdom) who was the singer in The Long Decline… he used to go to loads of gigs so we’d always bump into each other. He eventually became the booker at Thames Polytechnic and he’d organise gigs there for The Palookas and Television Personalities and he was always an interesting character. Then he came up to me one night, at Chats Palace in Hackney. He told me he had a band going and he was the singer, so I asked who else was involved and he said, I’ve got Mark Perry on drums and I’ve got Vic Godard playing guitar! I could only think to myself, you’re singing when you’ve got Vic and Mark in the band? So I knew I had to hear it and all I can say is, he’s an interesting singer! Eventually, he persuaded me that my efforts would be appreciated in this combo. Vic and Mark had both left by then, but it was still and interesting line-up because. by then, he had Karl Blake playing drums and Lee McFadden playing mandolin and guitar, so it was actually quite a lot of fun for a while. It was almost like performance art at times, because Leigh would come onstage with a plastic bag full of bits of paper and between songs he’d have to rummage through it, looking for the right lyrics for the next song! It really took a while, sometimes, and that could be a bit taxing on the patience, but I think we did some pretty good recordings together.’
‘Yes, although some of the material that’s on my new album, ‘Strawberry Birthmarks’, was actually recorded before that. But the way things turned out was that ‘Pincer Movement’ was released first. In fact, the songs on ‘Strawberry Birthmark’ were recorded during three sessions in 1980, the first with Joe Foster and Mark Sheppard from the Television Personalities, who had offered to help out. The next session was with Phones and the third session was just me on my own, multi-tracking everything. I just hope that I’ve been able to put it together in something approaching a coherent album…’
Well, that’s what I thought when I first heard it. Despite the songs coming from different sessions and with different people involved, it does sound like a very solid record…
‘Yes, I hope so… and it’s nice to hear that other people think that way. I think it all comes together. I think that, at the time, it was a question of choosing the right people for the material or perhaps the other way around, choosing the right material for the people.’
It’s quite removed from the material you’d been playing with Swell Maps… I was thinking of a Captain Beefheart influence and maybe Tom Waits, although the finished music was performed with a very English character…
‘Well, yes, I had been listening to Captain Beefheart for a few years before that. His records had certainly altered my world view and also my way of thinking about sounds and how you played them. I don’t think I was necessarily thinking about Tom Waits at the time, but I can kind of see links to some of the stuff he had done before ‘Rain Dogs’… I think there was a certain kinship with some of the things he was doing, you know, albums like ‘Swordfish Trombones’… but I think it was more a case of two people feeling the same things around the same time, rather than his music being a direct influence on me.’
Although you started-off by releasing albums in your own name, you also became a member of several different bands over the following years…
‘That’s right… actually, I ought to mention the album that Epic and I started to work on in 1981, after ‘Pincer Movement’ had been released and after he’d done his solo single, ‘Jelly Babies’. We started to work on a project just called ‘Soundtracks & Head’ and we released a single on Rough Trade called ‘Rain, Rain, Rain’, which came out in 1982. It was a good single and we were delighted with it, but for some reason Rough Trade decided they didn’t want to do an album with us… So that’s one of the projects I’m hoping to pursue this year, to finally get that album released. I’ve secured the original master tapes and I’m hoping to get them processed pretty soon so I can start work on getting them completed. But after that, I joined the Television Personalities in 1983 and played with them for the next ten years. Around the same time, I also became the singer in a pretty strange band called The Palookas, which was made-up of various people from Stoke Newington. It was an odd band, but we actually did quite a lot of touring and got into all these different adventures… we never actually toured in the UK and didn’t really play outside of London much, but we’d go over and play in places like Germany. It was good fun and it was also my first attempt to be a singer in a band.’
Some time later on, you also played in The Long Decline…
‘I already knew this guy Leigh (aka Kenny Wisdom) who was the singer in The Long Decline… he used to go to loads of gigs so we’d always bump into each other. He eventually became the booker at Thames Polytechnic and he’d organise gigs there for The Palookas and Television Personalities and he was always an interesting character. Then he came up to me one night, at Chats Palace in Hackney. He told me he had a band going and he was the singer, so I asked who else was involved and he said, I’ve got Mark Perry on drums and I’ve got Vic Godard playing guitar! I could only think to myself, you’re singing when you’ve got Vic and Mark in the band? So I knew I had to hear it and all I can say is, he’s an interesting singer! Eventually, he persuaded me that my efforts would be appreciated in this combo. Vic and Mark had both left by then, but it was still and interesting line-up because. by then, he had Karl Blake playing drums and Lee McFadden playing mandolin and guitar, so it was actually quite a lot of fun for a while. It was almost like performance art at times, because Leigh would come onstage with a plastic bag full of bits of paper and between songs he’d have to rummage through it, looking for the right lyrics for the next song! It really took a while, sometimes, and that could be a bit taxing on the patience, but I think we did some pretty good recordings together.’
There have been several retrospective albums of Swell Maps material over the years, from ‘Collision Time’ and ‘International Rescue’, both featuring a selection of tracks from the original records, through to ‘Train Out of It’ and ‘Wastrels & Whippersnappers’ (mixture of released / unreleased material.) In 2005, there was also the 7” boxset featuring represses of the original singles and a fifth single featuring unreleased tracks. So the interest in the band has seemingly remained pretty high over the years since the split…
‘Actually, the fifth single in that boxset, ‘Secret Island’, had been scheduled as a single on Rough Trade’s American subsidiary, potentially coinciding with a tour in the USA, but the whole idea got shelved when we split up… But, thankfully, yes, it has been gratifying to know that people are still interested. It seemed to me that interest took a dive after we broke up in 1980. From 1978 and over the next two years, I always felt there had been an extraordinary level of interest in what was a rather obscure band. We’d done things on a small level, financing everything ourselves, so the amount of interest was unprecedented. We didn’t have a record deal with anyone and we weren’t financed by anybody. We were producing our own records and managing to find an outlet for them, but somehow, without much support, we were selling thousands and thousands of records, which was incredible. I would certainly say it was beyond our expectations… We got quite a lot of coverage on the radio, which was quite modest by other peoples’ standards, but quite remarkable for what we were doing. But I did feel that the interest took a dive through the Eighties and it wasn’t until after then, in the late Nineties and past the Millennium, that people gradually started to take more of an interest in the band again. It’s been interesting to take note of that and monitor it, whilst also trying to encourage it. I certainly felt an increase in my own confidence, concerning what we’d been doing. I’d never doubted the music we made, but it was nice to have it confirmed and it’s been a vindication of our original vision and determination. We had a creative ideal which we pursued and I’m glad that we had the opportunity to document it… Not just in terms of the music, but in other media as well, and it’s now bearing fruit in a very pleasing way. I mean, just this year, there will be more records coming out, featuring songs that have only recently been rediscovered, and there’s going to be a book coming out too, which will also feature more tracks which I’ve only rediscovered since ‘Mayday Signals’ came out. Due to circumstances, it seems that it’s fallen to me to be the archivist and the sort-of spokes-person, but it pleases me to do it and I hope that I do it in a way that respects everybody’s individual roles. I just hope that I can be a reasonably good advocate of the work we achieved together.’
‘Actually, the fifth single in that boxset, ‘Secret Island’, had been scheduled as a single on Rough Trade’s American subsidiary, potentially coinciding with a tour in the USA, but the whole idea got shelved when we split up… But, thankfully, yes, it has been gratifying to know that people are still interested. It seemed to me that interest took a dive after we broke up in 1980. From 1978 and over the next two years, I always felt there had been an extraordinary level of interest in what was a rather obscure band. We’d done things on a small level, financing everything ourselves, so the amount of interest was unprecedented. We didn’t have a record deal with anyone and we weren’t financed by anybody. We were producing our own records and managing to find an outlet for them, but somehow, without much support, we were selling thousands and thousands of records, which was incredible. I would certainly say it was beyond our expectations… We got quite a lot of coverage on the radio, which was quite modest by other peoples’ standards, but quite remarkable for what we were doing. But I did feel that the interest took a dive through the Eighties and it wasn’t until after then, in the late Nineties and past the Millennium, that people gradually started to take more of an interest in the band again. It’s been interesting to take note of that and monitor it, whilst also trying to encourage it. I certainly felt an increase in my own confidence, concerning what we’d been doing. I’d never doubted the music we made, but it was nice to have it confirmed and it’s been a vindication of our original vision and determination. We had a creative ideal which we pursued and I’m glad that we had the opportunity to document it… Not just in terms of the music, but in other media as well, and it’s now bearing fruit in a very pleasing way. I mean, just this year, there will be more records coming out, featuring songs that have only recently been rediscovered, and there’s going to be a book coming out too, which will also feature more tracks which I’ve only rediscovered since ‘Mayday Signals’ came out. Due to circumstances, it seems that it’s fallen to me to be the archivist and the sort-of spokes-person, but it pleases me to do it and I hope that I do it in a way that respects everybody’s individual roles. I just hope that I can be a reasonably good advocate of the work we achieved together.’
A version of Swell Maps did come together in 1997, to play a set at a Memorial gig after Epic died… Had there ever been any other discussions about any sort of Swell Maps reunion?
‘The memorial gig was just a one-off thing… Nikki on guitar and vocals, I played guitar and bulbul-tarang (a stringed unstrument of Punjabi origin!) John Cockrill played bass and Max Descharne played drums… and another old friend, Andy Bean, played drums for the final song, ‘Midget Submarines’… But a few years before then, Nikki had told me that various shady characters had whispered in his ear at different times, trying to get us back together. Nikki was selling it to me as something that he and Epic wanted to do, but they felt they needed my involvement to make it a viable proposition. I think Nikki would have only done it if it was all three of us… So I said, Okay, I’ll think about it… If Epic was into it and Nikki was into it, maybe it’s worth considering. But sadly, before it went any further, Epic died, and after that I don’t think either me or Nikki would have wanted to do it. Nobody could drum like Epic, so that would have been a big problem. He was very charismatic and a very creative drummer, a highly unique musician and a remarkable stylist. Plus, by that point, he’d also metamorphosed into a remarkable performer behind the keyboards, and as a singer. I was fascinated by it and I still have all of his albums at home which are all remarkable records! Before he died, I had started to think that it might be nice to do some shows together again and, in fact, it did occur to me later-on that perhaps if we had given ourselves a break from one another back in 1980, maybe pursuing some other projects for a while, perhaps we could have found a way to continue as Swell Maps. Maybe it could have worked if we had a long-enough break, although obviously it’s no use saying what could have happened, because it didn’t. So, as it was, we just played the one show in London and another in Berlin as a tribute to Epic, and that was it. There was another memorial show after Nikki died, with me singing… That was strange, but I actually enjoyed singing his songs. Funnily enough, back in 1977, he’d actually tried to persuade me to be the lead singer because he didn’t really want to sing very much, as he just loved playing guitar and writing songs… I did try to sing a couple of his songs but I couldn’t get my head around them. I preferred him singing them because they really suited his vocal style…’
I always thought he had a kind of swagger to his vocal style…
‘Yeah, I like that! I think, after Bolan died, he really got into Johnny Thunders, so perhaps there was a bit of that in his style and that’s where the ‘swagger’ came from…’
I was wondering where the title for the new album, ‘Mayday Signals’, came from as it could be interpreted in a couple of ways… ‘Mayday’ as the emergency signal, or May Day as the Spring festival…
‘I’m glad you picked up on that nuance because it isn’t obvious, but… I think I thought of that title last year, around May Day time, so that would have made sense, I suppose. Plus, ‘Mayday’ as an emergency call has a kind of resonance with some of the other Swell Maps material and the military terminology that we used, as well as things like ‘International Rescue’… I was writing about this for the book, actually, because when we were growing up in the Sixties there were a lot of things bubbling-under which I don’t think influenced us consciously but perhaps on a subconscious level… There was the Vietnam War and the Birmingham Pub Bombing, which were both on the TV every night, and we were surrounded by this patriotic, jingoistic stuff about our parents’ generation and their noble efforts during the Second World War... That sort-of thing, about military service and uniforms was always just under the surface and it was a difficult thing for the following generation to live up to, you know? That noble sacrifice and all that jingoism, without wishing to demean it too much… So perhaps it was our subtle way of commenting on it, I think, without being too blatant or disrespectful. I still think that militarism and warfare is something that intrudes on our lives on a daily basis, even though we’re supposedly in ‘peace-time’… I mean, can we really call this ‘peace-time’? I’m not so sure! We’re led to believe this is ‘peace-time’, but there seems to be war everywhere and we can never escape from it.’
‘The memorial gig was just a one-off thing… Nikki on guitar and vocals, I played guitar and bulbul-tarang (a stringed unstrument of Punjabi origin!) John Cockrill played bass and Max Descharne played drums… and another old friend, Andy Bean, played drums for the final song, ‘Midget Submarines’… But a few years before then, Nikki had told me that various shady characters had whispered in his ear at different times, trying to get us back together. Nikki was selling it to me as something that he and Epic wanted to do, but they felt they needed my involvement to make it a viable proposition. I think Nikki would have only done it if it was all three of us… So I said, Okay, I’ll think about it… If Epic was into it and Nikki was into it, maybe it’s worth considering. But sadly, before it went any further, Epic died, and after that I don’t think either me or Nikki would have wanted to do it. Nobody could drum like Epic, so that would have been a big problem. He was very charismatic and a very creative drummer, a highly unique musician and a remarkable stylist. Plus, by that point, he’d also metamorphosed into a remarkable performer behind the keyboards, and as a singer. I was fascinated by it and I still have all of his albums at home which are all remarkable records! Before he died, I had started to think that it might be nice to do some shows together again and, in fact, it did occur to me later-on that perhaps if we had given ourselves a break from one another back in 1980, maybe pursuing some other projects for a while, perhaps we could have found a way to continue as Swell Maps. Maybe it could have worked if we had a long-enough break, although obviously it’s no use saying what could have happened, because it didn’t. So, as it was, we just played the one show in London and another in Berlin as a tribute to Epic, and that was it. There was another memorial show after Nikki died, with me singing… That was strange, but I actually enjoyed singing his songs. Funnily enough, back in 1977, he’d actually tried to persuade me to be the lead singer because he didn’t really want to sing very much, as he just loved playing guitar and writing songs… I did try to sing a couple of his songs but I couldn’t get my head around them. I preferred him singing them because they really suited his vocal style…’
I always thought he had a kind of swagger to his vocal style…
‘Yeah, I like that! I think, after Bolan died, he really got into Johnny Thunders, so perhaps there was a bit of that in his style and that’s where the ‘swagger’ came from…’
I was wondering where the title for the new album, ‘Mayday Signals’, came from as it could be interpreted in a couple of ways… ‘Mayday’ as the emergency signal, or May Day as the Spring festival…
‘I’m glad you picked up on that nuance because it isn’t obvious, but… I think I thought of that title last year, around May Day time, so that would have made sense, I suppose. Plus, ‘Mayday’ as an emergency call has a kind of resonance with some of the other Swell Maps material and the military terminology that we used, as well as things like ‘International Rescue’… I was writing about this for the book, actually, because when we were growing up in the Sixties there were a lot of things bubbling-under which I don’t think influenced us consciously but perhaps on a subconscious level… There was the Vietnam War and the Birmingham Pub Bombing, which were both on the TV every night, and we were surrounded by this patriotic, jingoistic stuff about our parents’ generation and their noble efforts during the Second World War... That sort-of thing, about military service and uniforms was always just under the surface and it was a difficult thing for the following generation to live up to, you know? That noble sacrifice and all that jingoism, without wishing to demean it too much… So perhaps it was our subtle way of commenting on it, I think, without being too blatant or disrespectful. I still think that militarism and warfare is something that intrudes on our lives on a daily basis, even though we’re supposedly in ‘peace-time’… I mean, can we really call this ‘peace-time’? I’m not so sure! We’re led to believe this is ‘peace-time’, but there seems to be war everywhere and we can never escape from it.’
One of the things I liked about the presentation of the new album is that, as well as your sleeve-notes, you were also able to include a set of sleeve-notes by Nikki, obviously written for some previous purpose but still very appropriate for this record…
‘Well, it was very important to include his voice. And, in fact, I’ve also used quotes from him and Epic in the upcoming book as well. I also dedicated the album to Nikki and Epic, and also to their parents because, as so many of the tracks were recorded in their house, it seemed like the respectful thing to do. I remember when their father came up onstage at the tribute show for Epic in London, to introduce Swell Maps… it was a really lump-in-the-throat moment. And for them then to lose Nikki as well, nine years later… it’s impossible to know how that must have felt for them. It must have been so difficult.’
You already mentioned that the complete Peel Sessions album should be finally released soon… is there any other material that’s likely to become available?
‘There’s loads of material which could be released, but whether it should be released is another matter. I’m trying to act as a sort of quality-filter or a curator, if you must… There are loads of cassettes of live recordings, for example, but I’m not in a great rush to allow them to be released. Our studio recordings are much more interesting and I think I’d rather concentrate on them. Actually, there are more home recordings out there, rather than studio recordings, and I think they might be worth considering. But that’s it for now. I don’t want to flood the market or allow too much to be released.’
As you’ve already mentioned, you’ve also been working on a book about the band…
‘Well, I’ve written the bulk of it but I’ve also asked for contributions from Richard, John and Phones, as well as other people like John Rivers, who recorded us at Woodbine Studio, Stephen Pastel, Geoff Travis from Rough Trade, Daniel Miller from Mute… lots of people. I’ve included them all in the epilogue at the end. I wanted other people to say what they thought the impact of Swell Maps was on other people who were trying to create their own music at the time and our affect on the scene generally. I’ve put a lot into this book and I hope it’s an effective portrayal of how we emerged from our background and developed what we did. It’s an unusual book, I think. I’ve already had three offers to publish it, so it’s definitely going ahead. And, as I said earlier, it’s been suggested that we have a 7” record with the first edition of the book, so I think we’re going to do that. Fortunately, after I’d completed ‘Mayday Signals’, I found some more tracks at the end of a cassette that hadn’t been labelled… a lot of the home recordings weren’t adequately catalogued! But they were terrific and I thought, wow, I’ve got to release these! So I edited them to use on one side of the record and there’ll be a couple of other things on the other side and I think it’ll be a nice little thing to accompany the book. Anyway, I’ve finished the proof-readings, so I’m hoping it’ll go into production in the next few months… I also hope it’ll work well as a reference book to things that were happening at that time, rather than just a personal memoir. I’ve tried to achieve a balance of the two things.’
And you’ve also re-scheduled some live shows, performing Swell Maps material, which had previously been planned before the first lock-down…
‘Yes, and I’m hoping the book will now be ready to coincide with the new dates (3/4 December 2021.) I’m going to be the ‘musical director’ for two nights of live Swell Maps music. I’m planning entirely different sets for each night… the first night will be for the ‘A Trip to Marineville’ era and the second will be for the ‘Jane From Occupied Europe’ era… approximately. It won’t be that simple as it’ll depend on who’s available for each night, really. But I’m hoping to focus on the earlier material on the first night and the later material on the second. Guests will include Dave Callahan from The Wolfhounds, Gina Birch from The Raincoats, Luke Haines from The Auteurs, Jeff Bloom from the Television Personalities, and Chloe Herrington from Chrome Hoof will be playing some saxophone. So I’ve got a pool of people to work with and I’ve also asked some of the other former Swell Maps members to join in… John Cockrill says he hasn’t played at all for a while, so he won’t play guitar but he might come down and play bass!’
‘Well, it was very important to include his voice. And, in fact, I’ve also used quotes from him and Epic in the upcoming book as well. I also dedicated the album to Nikki and Epic, and also to their parents because, as so many of the tracks were recorded in their house, it seemed like the respectful thing to do. I remember when their father came up onstage at the tribute show for Epic in London, to introduce Swell Maps… it was a really lump-in-the-throat moment. And for them then to lose Nikki as well, nine years later… it’s impossible to know how that must have felt for them. It must have been so difficult.’
You already mentioned that the complete Peel Sessions album should be finally released soon… is there any other material that’s likely to become available?
‘There’s loads of material which could be released, but whether it should be released is another matter. I’m trying to act as a sort of quality-filter or a curator, if you must… There are loads of cassettes of live recordings, for example, but I’m not in a great rush to allow them to be released. Our studio recordings are much more interesting and I think I’d rather concentrate on them. Actually, there are more home recordings out there, rather than studio recordings, and I think they might be worth considering. But that’s it for now. I don’t want to flood the market or allow too much to be released.’
As you’ve already mentioned, you’ve also been working on a book about the band…
‘Well, I’ve written the bulk of it but I’ve also asked for contributions from Richard, John and Phones, as well as other people like John Rivers, who recorded us at Woodbine Studio, Stephen Pastel, Geoff Travis from Rough Trade, Daniel Miller from Mute… lots of people. I’ve included them all in the epilogue at the end. I wanted other people to say what they thought the impact of Swell Maps was on other people who were trying to create their own music at the time and our affect on the scene generally. I’ve put a lot into this book and I hope it’s an effective portrayal of how we emerged from our background and developed what we did. It’s an unusual book, I think. I’ve already had three offers to publish it, so it’s definitely going ahead. And, as I said earlier, it’s been suggested that we have a 7” record with the first edition of the book, so I think we’re going to do that. Fortunately, after I’d completed ‘Mayday Signals’, I found some more tracks at the end of a cassette that hadn’t been labelled… a lot of the home recordings weren’t adequately catalogued! But they were terrific and I thought, wow, I’ve got to release these! So I edited them to use on one side of the record and there’ll be a couple of other things on the other side and I think it’ll be a nice little thing to accompany the book. Anyway, I’ve finished the proof-readings, so I’m hoping it’ll go into production in the next few months… I also hope it’ll work well as a reference book to things that were happening at that time, rather than just a personal memoir. I’ve tried to achieve a balance of the two things.’
And you’ve also re-scheduled some live shows, performing Swell Maps material, which had previously been planned before the first lock-down…
‘Yes, and I’m hoping the book will now be ready to coincide with the new dates (3/4 December 2021.) I’m going to be the ‘musical director’ for two nights of live Swell Maps music. I’m planning entirely different sets for each night… the first night will be for the ‘A Trip to Marineville’ era and the second will be for the ‘Jane From Occupied Europe’ era… approximately. It won’t be that simple as it’ll depend on who’s available for each night, really. But I’m hoping to focus on the earlier material on the first night and the later material on the second. Guests will include Dave Callahan from The Wolfhounds, Gina Birch from The Raincoats, Luke Haines from The Auteurs, Jeff Bloom from the Television Personalities, and Chloe Herrington from Chrome Hoof will be playing some saxophone. So I’ve got a pool of people to work with and I’ve also asked some of the other former Swell Maps members to join in… John Cockrill says he hasn’t played at all for a while, so he won’t play guitar but he might come down and play bass!’
Is this going to be just a one-off, or would you like to do anything else after these dates?
‘Oh, I really don’t know… At the moment, I just want to have a celebration of Swell Maps and their music. It’s not necessarily something that could be repeated… Since I can draw on a wide cast of people, I wanted it to be an ambitious musical presentation, celebrating the ideas that we had. If I’m honest, the concerts we played when we were in existence could be a bit frustrating, because we were restricted by practical reasons. We just played guitars, really, while the albums were a lot more ambitious than that and had a wider range of sounds and textures. So I’m hoping to be able to feature more of that and more variety of dynamics and sonic colouration. I’m very excited by these shows because, for me, when the band was still together and playing live, we were never able to make it more ambitious. We were very limited in what we could perform onstage and that was a bit frustrating. Perhaps if we had access to more resources, we could have been a bit more ambitious, so that’s what I’m going to try to do for these shows… I’m trying to honour the people and their ideas, and bring them to fruition, to highlight what we managed to produce. It’s not going to be just a tribute to what we did before, it’ll be something that’s trying to move forward from there. I don’t think we could reproduce those records, anyway, so it’s going to sound a bit different. I don’t want the people I’m inviting to copy anything, because that’s not the point. I want them to add something to it and develop it a bit, so it’ll be in the same spirit. That’s the important thing.’
You’ve worked on and produced a lot of artwork in recent years… to what extent do you feel that your artwork corresponds with your musical projects?
‘Well, for me and Epic, when we went to do Foundation Art Studies at Solihull Technical College, it was almost an extension of what we were doing musically. Music was our first-love, but the visual art thing was an extension of that. We could see all sorts of connections between the two… for instance, album cover designs. Personally, I’d often be painting while I listened to music, or typing-out lyrics while I was making collages for a free, giveaway book we did around the first album. All these things were further extensions. The two things just seemed to go together really well… It’s a shame that we didn’t have the facilities to do more film-making, because that would have been another connection between the two things. I’ve actually been trying to remedy that more recently, by putting together little films for songs like ‘Vertical Slum’…’
You artwork is pretty varied, which also ties in with the range of musical expressions you’ve made over the years…
‘Yes, I’ll do abstract paintings, figurative paintings… I’ll also do reliefs using found objects and I’ll make free-standing sculptures using found-objects… but I would say it’s all an extension of what I do with music. I’ll use found-objects within my music, sometimes, the same as I do with art. It’s a case of using different materials, but with the same ideas.’
Perhaps like some of the Swell Maps recordings, where you’d leave snippets of conversation between the tracks…
‘Yeah, that’s right. Those clips were found objects that most bands would want to edit-out of the final mix, but we’d focus on them. They were all very important components of what we were doing and we felt they were interesting materials which we could find a way of using.’
‘Oh, I really don’t know… At the moment, I just want to have a celebration of Swell Maps and their music. It’s not necessarily something that could be repeated… Since I can draw on a wide cast of people, I wanted it to be an ambitious musical presentation, celebrating the ideas that we had. If I’m honest, the concerts we played when we were in existence could be a bit frustrating, because we were restricted by practical reasons. We just played guitars, really, while the albums were a lot more ambitious than that and had a wider range of sounds and textures. So I’m hoping to be able to feature more of that and more variety of dynamics and sonic colouration. I’m very excited by these shows because, for me, when the band was still together and playing live, we were never able to make it more ambitious. We were very limited in what we could perform onstage and that was a bit frustrating. Perhaps if we had access to more resources, we could have been a bit more ambitious, so that’s what I’m going to try to do for these shows… I’m trying to honour the people and their ideas, and bring them to fruition, to highlight what we managed to produce. It’s not going to be just a tribute to what we did before, it’ll be something that’s trying to move forward from there. I don’t think we could reproduce those records, anyway, so it’s going to sound a bit different. I don’t want the people I’m inviting to copy anything, because that’s not the point. I want them to add something to it and develop it a bit, so it’ll be in the same spirit. That’s the important thing.’
You’ve worked on and produced a lot of artwork in recent years… to what extent do you feel that your artwork corresponds with your musical projects?
‘Well, for me and Epic, when we went to do Foundation Art Studies at Solihull Technical College, it was almost an extension of what we were doing musically. Music was our first-love, but the visual art thing was an extension of that. We could see all sorts of connections between the two… for instance, album cover designs. Personally, I’d often be painting while I listened to music, or typing-out lyrics while I was making collages for a free, giveaway book we did around the first album. All these things were further extensions. The two things just seemed to go together really well… It’s a shame that we didn’t have the facilities to do more film-making, because that would have been another connection between the two things. I’ve actually been trying to remedy that more recently, by putting together little films for songs like ‘Vertical Slum’…’
You artwork is pretty varied, which also ties in with the range of musical expressions you’ve made over the years…
‘Yes, I’ll do abstract paintings, figurative paintings… I’ll also do reliefs using found objects and I’ll make free-standing sculptures using found-objects… but I would say it’s all an extension of what I do with music. I’ll use found-objects within my music, sometimes, the same as I do with art. It’s a case of using different materials, but with the same ideas.’
Perhaps like some of the Swell Maps recordings, where you’d leave snippets of conversation between the tracks…
‘Yeah, that’s right. Those clips were found objects that most bands would want to edit-out of the final mix, but we’d focus on them. They were all very important components of what we were doing and we felt they were interesting materials which we could find a way of using.’
Looking back, you’ve produced a pretty large amount of work, both musically and in the visual arts, although in mainstream terms you haven’t achieved popular success. What is it that has kept you motivated during all this time?
‘Well, right from the start with Swell Maps, it was a gamble. Our first priority was just to make something that we were satisfied with, creatively. If you’ve got four people collaborating together it can make things more difficult, but I think what we did was a pretty successful collaboration in creative terms. We had the same goal and together we managed to make something that we were all satisfied with. That is such a thrill and it’s difficult for me to communicate with people sometimes, why it’s such a thrill and why it’s so satisfying. Producing something that’s creatively-satisfying has become deeply engrained in me and the other people I know and work with closely. It’s like a shared passion and it’s something that becomes a guiding force in life. It’s something that I can try to explain to people and while some of them get it, I know some of them won’t. Right from when I was a child, my creative urges were something that kept me interested in life and something which motivated me to persevere, if you like, when nothing else seemed to make any sense. I feel lucky that I’ve had that motivation since I was a very young child, even if I was just scribbling on the walls and making horrible noises. I always seemed to have something that I couldn’t express in any other way and I feel sorry for people who don’t feel similarly motivated, because I think they become frustrated. This is something I feel very strongly about… I think everybody has a creative spark in them and some people get frustrated because they can’t find a way of expressing it. It’s something that’s quite crucial in my mind. I suppose I’m lucky, because I’ll have times when I won’t feel motivated to work with music or sound, but I’ll be able to go and work on some painting. But while I’m painting, I’ll be thinking about music and I’ll think of something that I want to try with sound. So I’ll put my paint brush aside and go back to music… Then, while I’m working on music, I may have an idea of something I can work on visually. To me, visual art and musical art are always inextricably linked and always feeding-off each other. I don’t want to criticise anybody, but I don’t understand a lot of what other people do and it’s almost like a different universe to me, but I’ve never felt that I was in competition with anybody and I think that’s important. I’ll often hear about other bands, performers or artists and the way they act is like a fucking competition, I’ve got no time for that… I’ve always thought that one of the points about making music is to escape from the competitive world. I don’t appreciate the way that so much music and visual art becomes commodified. That world is a depressing place and I want to keep away from it.’
‘Well, right from the start with Swell Maps, it was a gamble. Our first priority was just to make something that we were satisfied with, creatively. If you’ve got four people collaborating together it can make things more difficult, but I think what we did was a pretty successful collaboration in creative terms. We had the same goal and together we managed to make something that we were all satisfied with. That is such a thrill and it’s difficult for me to communicate with people sometimes, why it’s such a thrill and why it’s so satisfying. Producing something that’s creatively-satisfying has become deeply engrained in me and the other people I know and work with closely. It’s like a shared passion and it’s something that becomes a guiding force in life. It’s something that I can try to explain to people and while some of them get it, I know some of them won’t. Right from when I was a child, my creative urges were something that kept me interested in life and something which motivated me to persevere, if you like, when nothing else seemed to make any sense. I feel lucky that I’ve had that motivation since I was a very young child, even if I was just scribbling on the walls and making horrible noises. I always seemed to have something that I couldn’t express in any other way and I feel sorry for people who don’t feel similarly motivated, because I think they become frustrated. This is something I feel very strongly about… I think everybody has a creative spark in them and some people get frustrated because they can’t find a way of expressing it. It’s something that’s quite crucial in my mind. I suppose I’m lucky, because I’ll have times when I won’t feel motivated to work with music or sound, but I’ll be able to go and work on some painting. But while I’m painting, I’ll be thinking about music and I’ll think of something that I want to try with sound. So I’ll put my paint brush aside and go back to music… Then, while I’m working on music, I may have an idea of something I can work on visually. To me, visual art and musical art are always inextricably linked and always feeding-off each other. I don’t want to criticise anybody, but I don’t understand a lot of what other people do and it’s almost like a different universe to me, but I’ve never felt that I was in competition with anybody and I think that’s important. I’ll often hear about other bands, performers or artists and the way they act is like a fucking competition, I’ve got no time for that… I’ve always thought that one of the points about making music is to escape from the competitive world. I don’t appreciate the way that so much music and visual art becomes commodified. That world is a depressing place and I want to keep away from it.’
There are no official Swell Maps websites at present, although a quick search of the internet will find various fan-sites and plenty of other information. However, the best resource for up to date news is probably Jowe Heads’ own facebook page, where you’ll find details of new releases and events…
Additionally, you can find details about the upcoming ‘Swell Maps Sessions’ here…
…and details of the ‘Mayday Signals’ album can be found here…