‘A lot of late 70s bands wore grey. But we were determined to have fun’: the return of the mega-influential Swell Maps after 46 years | Punk

Snicely Maps had been a punk band, however solely as a result of that phrase meant one thing completely different after they began making information in 1977. It didn’t imply bands known as Knuckleheadz or Gimp Fist; it meant unfettered freedom, curiosity reasonably than rage. Theirs was a music that wandered off in sudden instructions, the place songs barely hung collectively earlier than falling aside, punctuated by peculiar sounds made by no matter occurred to be round. It was psychedelia and it was prog and it was krautrock, each bit as a lot because it was punk. Most of all, it was DIY.

So Swell Maps’ descendants weren’t the sort to get sleeve tattoos and don leather-based. They, like Swell Maps, had been nerds. Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore described them as “part of my upbringing”. Stephen Malkmus famous that Pavement shaped, roughly, as a tribute to Swell Maps and their kindred spirits Desperate Bicycles. Now add all of the bands who’ve tried or nonetheless attempt to sound like Pavement or Sonic Youth, bands who might by no means have heard of Swell Maps. That’s the way you map the scope of their affect.

“We took what we were doing very seriously, but we were determined to have a bit of fun doing it,” says 69-year-old Jowe Head, who has convened a gaggle of sympathetic musicians as Swell Maps for a brand new album, Swell Maps C21, the primary newly recorded materials since 1980’s Jane from Occupied Europe. “We had a saying: ‘serious fun’. A lot of the bands around at the time – some of the ones on the Rough Trade scene – were very dour and frowning all the time, wearing grey. We weren’t like that.”

Hence being known as Jowe Head. His actual identify is Stephen Bird, however all of Swell Maps took pseudonyms as punk exploded, although they had been impressed not by the Damned however by the none-more-hippy band Gong. The brothers Adrian and Kevin Godfrey grew to become, respectively, Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks. They and Head had been the fixed trio, however three different members wrote or recorded or performed dwell: Phones Sportsman (David Barrington), Biggles Books (Richard Scaldwell) and Golden Cockrill (John Cockrill). And if Nikki Sudden ended up being probably the most rock’n’roll of the pseudonyms, thank goodness Head and Soundtracks didn’t undertake his options for them: Bondage Pelican and Cleavage Frogdog.

“I was at school with Adrian,” Head says. “This is the early 70s, in our early teens. We used to meet up and do a bit of travelling together – cycle down to the south coast from the Midlands.” They went to gigs collectively, to see Mott the Hoople, Led Zeppelin and extra. But whereas Adrian adored T Rex and the Stones, Head was stepping into prog rock, a style he shared with Kevin. The three of them, joined by the others, began making music in one another’s bedrooms. The Faust Tapes – the budget-priced sound collage album by the German band Faust – confirmed them the probabilities of urgent file and play, even when they had been simply youngsters in Solihull. Then punk arrived: “A catalyst for people with fresh ideas, because the hippy scene was fading out,” Head says.

Emboldened by Buzzcocks releasing Spiral Scratch, Swell Maps employed a studio and recorded their 1977 debut single Read About Seymour. “Adrian, or Nikki as he had started calling himself, turned up with this song, and it sounded like ska or reggae, and he said it was about the king of the mods in the early 1960s.” They had been now additionally capable of play gigs, finally. “We weren’t ready before 77,” Head continues. “And it wasn’t until punk that a few venues became more accessible – you didn’t have to send them a demo tape or do cover versions. We could sneak on to a punk night, even though we didn’t look like punks or sound like punks. We were trying to do something a bit different to the Sex Pistols or the Damned or the Clash.”

Things regarded shiny: John Peel championed Swell Maps from the off on the BBC, and Rough Trade picked up their debut album A Trip to Marineville for launch in 1979. Sudden then went to London, anticipating his bandmates to hitch him there and go full-time. Instead, Head and Soundtracks went to artwork faculty – the previous in Manchester, the latter in Portsmouth – and the band careened to a halt after a disastrous Italian tour in spring 1980.

Before that, Head had been very badly crushed by some skinheads he had sprayed with a waterpistol. He wanted surgical procedure and convalescence, and although the band cancelled gigs, the Italian tour got here too quickly. “It was a terrifying incident, and I was unwell for a considerable period, more than I like to admit,” Head says. “I felt guilty because I’d done something dumb that rebounded on the band, and I was in denial about my condition. In those days there was no term for PTSD, but I was very shaken up, to put it mildly. I had a scar, too, which wasn’t healing, and kept opening up on that tour. That was problematic. Maybe we could have had a break from it for a couple of months, but no, we decided to dramatically split up.”

Rather than align themselves with the massive punk and post-punk acts, Swell Maps had discovered kin with the scrappier, stranger likes of Alternative TV, the Pop Group and PragVEC, and Scritti Politti, with whom they’d toured the Low Countries in a van. Especially, they discovered a bond with the Television Personalities (TVPs) and their chief and fixed, Dan Treacy. This core of individuals related to the 2 bands – Sudden, Soundtracks, Head, Treacy, TVPs co-founder Ed Ball and Joe Foster – would go on to be the backbone of Creation Records via the Eighties, and inadvertent father figures to a complete load of jangling indiepop bands.

Head himself spent a decade with the TVPs after Swell Maps break up up, becoming a member of in time for one in every of pop’s most jarring errors of judgment, when in 1984 they had been invited – as aficionados of Pink Floyd co-founder Syd Barrett – to open Floyd guitarist David Gilmour’s solo UK tour. On the opening night time, Treacy launched the tune I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives by confirming that sure, he did. And he then learn out the deal with on stage. “Dan got a bit carried away,” Head says. “We were in a mischievous mood that night, and Dan the most mischievous of all. We were trying to be a bit satirical. I think we did an extended version of [Pink Floyd’s] Interstellar Overdrive and I had some confetti, and I was throwing that up in the air. They made me go back and sweep the stage after, and then we were bundled off the tour.”

The new Swell Maps lineup consists of members who performed in latterday variations of TVPs, together with the guitarist Lee McFadden. “Television Personalities and Swell Maps had the same thing,” McFadden says. “The TVPs would have people come up to us after the gig and saying. ‘Why didn’t you sound like the record?’ And it’s because we never could.” For each bands, spirit and creativeness would at all times be extra necessary than execution.

Epic Soundtracks died in 1997, adopted by Nikki Sudden in 2006, leaving Head because the band’s archivist. He went via the outdated tapes to place out compilations and persuaded Mute to launch an album of the band’s Peel classes, and in 2022 put out a ebook concerning the band. To mark it he persuaded a gaggle of likeminded musicians to hitch him to have fun the music of Swell Maps, and from that grew this new file.

It is break up between outdated, rediscovered or unfinished songs, and new ones; Phones Sportsman and Golden Cockrill have each contributed, as has one other acclaimed musician impressed by Swell Maps, Luke Haines. And, now the band have ballooned in dimension, “I am determined that we still stretch the boundaries of what we can do,” Head says. He ponders the band’s nonexistent run of chart success and broadcasts, brightly: “Here come the hits!”