DESPITE having one of the coolest band names in rock and a devastating arsenal of lazy melodiespacked psychedelic guitar pop at their disposal, Swervedriver never quite got their dues 'back in the day'. Although they roared into music scene consciousness in 1990 with a series of critically lauded EPs on Creation Records backed by blistering live shows, the Oxford band somehow always seemed to exist in the shadow of their Creation bedfellows Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine and Ride.
The be-dreadlocked 'Swervies' looked and sounded just a little too Rock, too American even, to fit the indie schmindie aesthetic of the taste-making English music weeklies.
Where Ride soared and swooned, Swervedriver scorched and skidded, and they eschewed the more experimental bent of the Valentines by largely staying true to their Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth and Stooges influences, keeping The Riff front and centre in their swirling cosmic din - a simpatico soundtrack for blasting down deserted desert highways to infinity and beyond.
The Swervies grew and mutated their rip-roaring effects-enhanced rock sound across four LPs between 1991's Raise and 1998's swansong, 99th Dream, surviving unexpected line-up changes and label collapses to build solid followings across Europe, the US (despite third album Ejector Seat Reservation never being released there), Australia and Japan.
Now, Swervedriver are back. They actually reunited as a live act in 2008 but it took until last year for the core Swervies trio of Adam Franklin (guitar/vocals), Jimmy Hartridge (guitar) and Steve George (bass) to get around to recording new material. I Wasn't Born To Lose You is their first LP in nearly 20 years and Noise Annoys can assure you all that it's one of the best albums Swervedriver have ever made, right up there with 1993's Mezcal Head and Ejector Seat from '95.
It covers all the sonic bases from scuzzy noisefeasts (Red Queen Arms Race, Last Rites) to blissedout roadtrip soundtracks (English Subtitles, Autodidact - featuring perhaps the definitive Swervedriver lyric "gas stations as churches", For A Day Like Tomorrow) and proper space travel rock and roll (Everso, Lone Star, I Wonder). I spoke to Adam Franklin about all things Swervies a couple of weeks ago, just prior to a run of US tour dates which preface their return to UK venues this summer.
Hi Adam, you've managed to record one of the best albums of your career with I Wasn't Born To Lose
You. How do you feel about it?
People seem to be getting quite excited about it and I think we all kind of feel the same way, actually.
I suppose, historically, bands don't necessarily come up with their best album 20 years after their inception but somehow our sound seems to make more sense today, really. People are saying to me at the moment that they weren't really aware of us first time around but that they're really digging the new record, so that kind of bodes well.
Swervedriver have always enjoyed a faithful following in the US and Australia. Does the cinematic scope of the sound and your lyrical references to motion and momentum help the music to translate better in those wide-open spaces?
People have always said our songs somehow kind of reflect that kind of 'road trippy' landscape. I'm not really sure where that came from initially, because when we first started writing the Swervedriver songs back in 1989 we hadn't even been to any of those places. We did drive around the Oxfordshire countryside listening to music a lot though, so I think that's probably why a lot of the early songs had those kind of references to motion all the time.
When we first toured in America, it used to blow our minds that people would drive 400 miles to come to see us, because obviously no-one does that here. I moved over there from when we first went on hiatus actually. For me, my favourite place is New York because it's kind of similar to London. I can't imagine living in Arizona or somewhere and even LA is quite daunting because you have to drive to get anywhere.
One of the stand-out songs on the new album is Red Queen Arms Race, which has kind of a heavy stoner blues, Stooges kind of vibe. Was that a deliberate attempt to reconnect with one of the band's key inspirations?
Exactly. When we started writing songs for the album we figured that if it was going to be a new Swervedriver record we should really go back to what was influencing and inspiring us right at the start. So I started listening to the Stooges and re-reading Crash by JG Ballard, which was one of the books that was informing my lyrics
a bit. With Red Queen Arms Race, it's kind of reminiscent of Laze It Up from the Rave Down EP, and it has those kind of heavy wah-wah guitars that we used in our preSwervedriver band Shake Appeal.
You've endured quite a few Spinal Tap-esque incidents over the years, starting with the infamous 'Swervies sandwich' incident on the first US tour when drummer
Graham Bonner nipped out for some lunch and never returned. How did you cope? That was a pretty mental tour. Graham left but we managed to not miss one show by having a couple of replacement drummers, then we fired one of our management for some mad reason - word was getting back to the UK that the band was falling apart.
Graham had a girlfriend from San Francisco that he was missing. We were on the tour bus all the time and he just started to get incredibly
claustrophobic.
In the end we left him enough money to get out to SF, where he was stopped on the street by this guy in a VW camper. The guy goes "hey, you're Graham from Swervedriver - we want you in our band, jump in." It was Anton Newcombe from Brian Jonestown Massacre and Graham ended up playing on their first LP.
Years later I was introduced to Kirk from Metallica at a Suede gig in London. He says to me, "oh yeah, your ex-drummer joined Brian Jonestown Massacre." It was surreal. But happily, I don't think there are any more implosions on the cards at the moment.
Do you feel vindicated that Swervedriver have been able to come back so strongly long after the UK music press wrote you off? Kind of. At the time the press wanted to move on to the next big thing to sell more music papers, so suddenly they were like "oh this stuff is s**t, Britpop is ace" and the fashionable types go along with it.
I don't imagine there's going to be a massive Britpop resurgence any time soon, so perhaps we have been vindicated after all.
* I Wasn't Born To Lose You is out now on Cherry Red.