For many I-94 Barflies, Swervedriver , soon to hit Austraia for a seventh tour, are still a relatively new band. And the 1990s were not that long ago.
As you may know, Swervedriver is led by driving force, Adam Franklin (guitar and vocals); the band came to prominence from about 1990, after several previous bands had folded (including the very Stooges-heavy Shake Appeal). Swervedriver immediately got people's attention with a series of EPs featuring loud, feedback-y guitars courtesy Franklin and Jimmy Hartridge.
This approach to rock'n'roll usually creates what I think of as “chronic wet pants syndrome” with the movers and shakers in the record companies. In my limited experience, audiences, accustomed to lame, unadventurous slop, usually respond to feedback-soaked bands with hearty roars, too much alcohol and a blissful sense of being the top of their head being removed. In one previous interview, Franklin has described his glee at the sight of punters being "peeled off the back wall" in response to their live shows.
Around the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the UK music press were on the hunt for the Next Big Thing, sighting and naming mythical musical scenes - often where none existed. Similarly careless with people's lives, bands could find themselves tossed together in definitions which didn't always fit - no, not at all.
I won't mention the ridiculous designation that Swervedriver got shovelled into but suffice it to say, in my opinion it was and is a large pile of fresh, fruity and steaming. There were a lot of bands, indifferent and shit, which got caught up in the net of the desperate 1990s UK music press bollocks machine: Swervedriver were one of the few able to evade the confines of expectation and continue to produce music which is as gripping as it is understatedly spectacular.
As with most bands, Swervedriver have had several incarnations, and a couple of hiatuses, resulting in Franklin forming a new band, Toshack Highway (between 1999 and 2006), before forming his own band, Adam Franklin and Bolts of Melody (five albums to date), which he maintained between the reformed Swervedriver's tours and LPs.
Swervedriver are revisiting their debut LP “Raise” for their current tour, and if you're not familiar with it, it's loud, raucous, and everything you want from a modern rock'n'roll band. Purists will be glad they're touring with their two original blistering guitarists (Franklin and Hartridge) with drummer Mikey Jones and Mick Quinn (ex-Supergrass) on bass.
As a card-carrying senior fart, I can remember a world before punk. And the Internet. Thirty-odd years on from the proliferation of the world wide wubble, we can see that the starry-eyed idealism of 'you can get it on the internet' has long-vanished in a puff of greed, misinformation and general ignorance morphing into stupidity. Imagine my bemusement, readers, when I sat down to work out a few questions for Adam Franklin I discovered how hard it is to find properly archived interviews conducted back in the day.
Of course, since I'm as lazy as I'm sure you are or would aspire to be if you could be, this meant that I spent a weekend with Swervedriver's music and had come up with quite a few basic questions.
Confession: I drafted a lot more questions, but I figured the band would be deep in rehearsals as well as navigating normal life at home, so would not have time to respond to everything I'd come up with. However, I think Adam's responses should suffice to have you scampering to your wallet and the Interwebs to book your place when the band land in early September.
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I-94 Bar: Adam, thank you for being persuaded to do this interview with me. I wonder if I could start with the band name - what was the initial reason for it (would it be Ballard-related?), and I wonder how the meaning of it has changed for you over the years?
Adam Franklin: In our first interview with Melody Maker [with Paul Lester in November 1990] we were asked about the name and we told them it was American slang for “social deviant” - the journalist most likely knew we were spinning a yarn but published it anyway. In truth, we just wanted something that sounded kind of exciting and we liked the word 'swerve'. And then you got all your Curves and Verves, and Slowdive is kinda similar too. I do actually hate drivers that swerve across motorway lanes, but I enjoy a nice spin in the countryside.
I-94 Bar: What was your first instrument, and do you still have it?
Adam Franklin: It was a Kapok 3/4 size classical guitar - made in China. Me and my best friend Mark both had one around 1972. Mark continued playing his but at the time the only thing I ever mastered on mine was the intro to “Get It On” by T.Rex which sounded great on cat-gut strings.
I-94 Bar: What were the first bands or songs which really got your attention? Why?
Adam Franklin: “Metal Guru” by T.Rex and “Take Me Back Home” by Slade would be right up there. I was convinced that Bolan was chewing gum in time with the drums as part of the rhythm track - should try that out, actually! 1972 was a great year for the UK pop charts: “Rocket Man”, “Silver Machine”, “Lady Eleanor”, “Hold Your Head Up”, “Crazy Horses”, “Starman”, “All The Young Dudes”, “Me & My Arrow” - these all transport me straight back when I hear them.
I-94 Bar: What was the first music you heard which made you sit up and decide: I gotta make music?
Adam Franklin: I dunno if I ever had that revelation but I did start writing songs rather than learning to play proper chords. I used to record songs using two tape recorders to overdub, and I had the two lowest strings on a full size black Eros guitar tuned down to record “bass” and the top four strings were in a very basic tuning where I could play major and minor chords - not that I knew what they were called! So I guess that’s a bit unusual.
That would have been 1979; by 1980 I had started learning proper chords. 1979 was another great year for the UK singles chart - Blondie, Buzzcocks, Elvis Costello & the Attractions etc. I’d credit Bruce Thomas’s bass playing on "Armed Forces" for teaching me about guitar inversions.
I-94 Bar: The website I write for are old school Detroit-fanciers, so, for you in 2026: Iggy and the Stooges or the MC5?
Adam Franklin: Unfair question really! We loved “Shakin’ Street” just as much as “No Fun or “Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell”. I’m happy I got to see Iggy & the Stooges with both Ron Asheton and James Williamson (at Riker’s Island in New York, and Hammersmith Odeon respectively), and the DKT/MC5 show in New York with Wayne Kramer, Dennis Thompson and Mike Davis was super cool - those guys riffing on “The Human Being Lawnmower” was a wonderful eyes-closed moment.
I-94 Bar: I hope you don't mind me asking a bit more about the past, but - Shake Appeal. I bought the 7" at the time and there just didn't seem to be much known about them. How did you feel when you held the first record that you'd made - and how do you feel now...? Is it still special - why?
Adam Franklin: The “Gimme Fever” b/w “Mexico City SOS” 45 wasn’t bad, and it was certainly a thrill to be holding your own single. There is an earlier session that we have been talking about releasing which comes from a fleeting moment when, unusually, we were down to a four-piece and I had switched to bass, Ron Asheton-like, while Jimmy played all the guitar parts.
I-94 Bar: Clearly the 1980s were salad days - but how did the “I need to make music” thing start for you? How old were you? For context, my first gig was XTC, the second The Boys Next Door - soon to become The Birthday Party - in 1979, when I was 15.
Adam Franklin: Again, I don’t know about this “need to make music” thing - but I can tell you my first show was Adam & the Ants at Oxford New Theatre in December 1980, which was followed other gigs there over the years - the Stranglers, Echo & the Bunnymen and others.
Toyah played and a skinhead climbed up the curtain at the side. Even though it was a nice little theatre that would also host Little & Large shows and pantomime at Christmas, there was always a hint of danger at those rock shows, albeit possibly imagined - that skinhead had allegedly earlier been spotted wielding a machete in the toilets, which in hindsight was probably a little exaggerated!
Our friend Art once befriended Joy Division at the stage door when they opened for Buzzcocks and took them to the music store to get some guitar strings and Ian Curtis offered him a cigarette.
I-94 Bar: It looks to me like you and your friends were doing pretty much what we were up to during the 1980s - discovering the enormous and very varied US wave of music - could you tell us about the impact of discovering outfits like Husker Du, Dinosaur Jr and so on ..? How long did it take before you realised that you'd developed onwards from Shake Appeal? Did you realise at the time that you had found a new way of writing songs?
Adam Franklin: Loved the John Peel show at the start of the 1980s and I dug The Sound and Wah! Heat but I also became somewhat obsessed with music, specifically from 1966 and 1967, partly due to a BBC Radio 1 show called 25 Years of Rock which had the hits of the year playing alongside reportage recordings of news stories of the political and social events of the day. As well as investigating the back catalogues of all the big hitters - the Stones, Beatles, Kinks, Yardbirds etc - we also loved the “one single wonders” that resided on the “Nuggets” and “Pebbles” psychedelic compilation albums - the "Calico Wall", "TC Atlantic", "William Penn V" etc.
But back in 1985 with Live Aid and all that, it felt like the punk influence had slipped away from the charts and they were becoming less fun and it was time to delve deeper elsewhere. Some of my friends had discovered things like Black Flag and SST Records and that led us to Hüsker Dü’s "Zen Arcade" and REM and then a whole “US guitar underground” opened up with Sonic Youth at the top of the pile. In the UK there was the Mary Chain and the likes of Spacemen 3 - we went and saw the Spacemen play at Club Mankind in Hackney and all dropped acid which I suppose was a baptism of fire of sorts.
Stuart Sevastos photo.
I-94 Bar: “Raise” is one of those records which stay with us - but not every band decides to revisit their early songs. What is it about 'Raise' which draws you back? What do you enjoy most?
Adam Franklin: I’ve said this before but it feels like wall-to-wall riffs and high energy. We’re of course delighted that it has become a record that stays with people and that they wanna see us play it live this year.
I-94 Bar: I read an interesting interview with you in which you were asked what the world would have been like had Swervedriver never existed - your answer included "no Swervedriver means no quarter of a million from A&M that McGee needs to save Creation Records, means Oasis don’t get signed". Now look, to me that's an extraordinary thought! What would the world be like if you'd been signed by a different label, no-one signed Oasis, and ..? (We're definitely in P.K. Dick territory here.)
Adam Franklin: I remember that question! I wasn’t trying to be glib or clever with my response though, it was just an attempt to answer an existential question factually and if Swervedriver had never existed then that money, which apparently kept the label afloat, would not have been available. So Oasis could have been signed by Andy Ross to Food Records instead and become label mates with Blur, opened for them and they all might have been best buddies by 1995 - who knows?
In science fiction terms it’s Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder”, right? Where in the year 2055, time travel is a commercial enterprise and people are warned never to wander off of a designated path in the past because even the smallest actions can have massive consequences for the future. While on a Tyrannosaurus Rex hunt back in prehistoric times, the main character accidentally steps off the path and crushes a butterfly and on returning to the present day discovers small differences, such as words being spelled differently or colours being different, but also that a would-be dictator who had just lost a presidential election had in fact now been elected President.
[ED: Bradbury's “A Sound of Thunder” is a short story first published in 1952; it appears in the author's 1953 collection “The Golden Apples of the Su”'. If you've not read Bradbury but the story sounds familiar, it was used in the 'Treehouse of Horror V' episode of “The Simpsons” back in 1994, and apparently a bad film was made in 2005, followed by (I am told) a Game Boy video game.]
Swervedriver Australian Tour
SEPT
6 - Fremantle, Freo Social, with Lake Mammoth
10- Brisbane, The Triffid, with Chimers
11 - Sydney, Manning Bar, with Chimers and Brown Spirits
12 - Melbourne, Corner Hotel, with Brown Spirits and Chimers
14 - Melbourne, Northcote Social Club, with Fancy Weapon
15 - Adelaide, Lion Arts Factory, with Chimers
Tickets
