Read Online Rip It Up and Start Again by Simon Reynolds - Free Book Online
Authors: Simon Reynolds
Tags: Non-Fiction
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night in his one-room apartment and he didn’t want to wake his girlfriend.
More so than on the electronic squad, however, Desperate Bicycles’ biggest impact was on the noisy-guitar brigade. Teenagers growing up in Solihull—a middle class suburb on the edge of the Midlands industrial city Birmingham—Swell Maps were a gang of friends centered around two brothers who hated their given surname (Godfrey) so much they renamed themselves Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks. When “Smokescreen” came out, Swell Maps had actually existed for five years already as a sort of imaginary rock band, getting together to record albums on reel-to-reel tape recorders and turning them into cassettes complete with cover art and even inner-sleeve booklets.
“We would set up recording studios in the house when our parents went on holiday,” says Sudden. “But it wasn’t until Desperate Bicycles did their first single that we realized you could actually go book a professional studio and make a record. We thought only major labels could hire them, which seems ridiculous now! As soon as we grasped that anyone could do it, we immediately booked this place in Cambridge called Spaceward, which used to advertise in the back of Melody Maker and cost one hundred fifty pounds for a ten-hour session.”
Pooling their savings and borrowing more from the Godfreys’ parents, Swell Maps pressed two thousand copies of their debut, “Read About Seymour.” Released on the group’s own label, Rather, the single is often said to be about Seymour Stein, founder of the New Wave–friendly U.S. label Sire, who’d signed Talking Heads and the Ramones. Actually, the title refers to a totally different Seymour Stein, this one known as the “king of the mods” in 1960s England. The lyrics, though, were composed in cut-up fashion. Another song spliced its lyrics together by combining text from an Enid Blyton children’s story with words from a book about fighter pilots. Swell Maps were obsessed with war, but in a whimsical and boyishly innocuous way. “Then Poland,” “Midget Submarines,” and “Ammunition Train” drew on military history (especially the Spanish succession wars of the early eighteenth century) and the boys’ adventure story character Biggles, also a fighter pilot. The Maps also loved Gerry Anderson’s marionette TV shows of the sixties, Thunderbirds and Stingray . A Stingray episode provided the title for Swell Maps’ debut album, A Trip to Marineville . “I’d say our biggest influences were T. Rex, Can, and Gerry Anderson,” says Sudden. “Which isn’t a bad combination. We always wished we could use Barry Gray, the guy who did all the Thunderbirds themes, to do orchestrations of our tracks.”
Along with their pals the Television Personalities, Swell Maps invented a whole strand of postpunk that made a fetish of naïveté, characterized by weak vocals, shaky rhythms, rudimentary droning basslines, and fast-strummed discords. The DIY bands reveled in the noise-generating potential of the guitar, but they didn’t exactly rock and they certainly didn’t roll . For believers, much more than the “sped-up heavy metal” that was first-wave punk, this was the true realization of the here’s-three-chords-now-start-a-band ethos—except some of the groups didn’t even have three chords. “It took me two years to learn two chords,” Sudden told NME . “I can’t ever see ourselves becoming polished, note perfect and all that. We hardly ever rehearse—about once every six months.”
Fervent amateurists, Swell Maps believed bands got ruined when they depended on playing gigs and releasing records in order to make a living. One of the reasons the group split, shortly before the release of their second album Jane From Occupied Europe, was that they were becoming too successful, with a tour of America looming. Many of the groups in Swell Maps’ wake, though, went a step further and equated amateurism with amateurishness,
More so than on the electronic squad, however, Desperate Bicycles’ biggest impact was on the noisy-guitar brigade. Teenagers growing up in Solihull—a middle class suburb on the edge of the Midlands industrial city Birmingham—Swell Maps were a gang of friends centered around two brothers who hated their given surname (Godfrey) so much they renamed themselves Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks. When “Smokescreen” came out, Swell Maps had actually existed for five years already as a sort of imaginary rock band, getting together to record albums on reel-to-reel tape recorders and turning them into cassettes complete with cover art and even inner-sleeve booklets.
“We would set up recording studios in the house when our parents went on holiday,” says Sudden. “But it wasn’t until Desperate Bicycles did their first single that we realized you could actually go book a professional studio and make a record. We thought only major labels could hire them, which seems ridiculous now! As soon as we grasped that anyone could do it, we immediately booked this place in Cambridge called Spaceward, which used to advertise in the back of Melody Maker and cost one hundred fifty pounds for a ten-hour session.”
Pooling their savings and borrowing more from the Godfreys’ parents, Swell Maps pressed two thousand copies of their debut, “Read About Seymour.” Released on the group’s own label, Rather, the single is often said to be about Seymour Stein, founder of the New Wave–friendly U.S. label Sire, who’d signed Talking Heads and the Ramones. Actually, the title refers to a totally different Seymour Stein, this one known as the “king of the mods” in 1960s England. The lyrics, though, were composed in cut-up fashion. Another song spliced its lyrics together by combining text from an Enid Blyton children’s story with words from a book about fighter pilots. Swell Maps were obsessed with war, but in a whimsical and boyishly innocuous way. “Then Poland,” “Midget Submarines,” and “Ammunition Train” drew on military history (especially the Spanish succession wars of the early eighteenth century) and the boys’ adventure story character Biggles, also a fighter pilot. The Maps also loved Gerry Anderson’s marionette TV shows of the sixties, Thunderbirds and Stingray . A Stingray episode provided the title for Swell Maps’ debut album, A Trip to Marineville . “I’d say our biggest influences were T. Rex, Can, and Gerry Anderson,” says Sudden. “Which isn’t a bad combination. We always wished we could use Barry Gray, the guy who did all the Thunderbirds themes, to do orchestrations of our tracks.”
Along with their pals the Television Personalities, Swell Maps invented a whole strand of postpunk that made a fetish of naïveté, characterized by weak vocals, shaky rhythms, rudimentary droning basslines, and fast-strummed discords. The DIY bands reveled in the noise-generating potential of the guitar, but they didn’t exactly rock and they certainly didn’t roll . For believers, much more than the “sped-up heavy metal” that was first-wave punk, this was the true realization of the here’s-three-chords-now-start-a-band ethos—except some of the groups didn’t even have three chords. “It took me two years to learn two chords,” Sudden told NME . “I can’t ever see ourselves becoming polished, note perfect and all that. We hardly ever rehearse—about once every six months.”
Fervent amateurists, Swell Maps believed bands got ruined when they depended on playing gigs and releasing records in order to make a living. One of the reasons the group split, shortly before the release of their second album Jane From Occupied Europe, was that they were becoming too successful, with a tour of America looming. Many of the groups in Swell Maps’ wake, though, went a step further and equated amateurism with amateurishness,
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