SWELL MAPS

+ Normal Service 

Doors 8:00pm - 11.00 pm

£20.00

In the mid-1970s, a collective of six English teenagers started creating musictogether in their suburban home-town of Solihull. This project evolved tobecome Swell Maps, around a core of three musicians: Jowe Head (bass,guitars & vocals), his school-friend the late Nikki Sudden (guitar & vocals),and Nikki’s brother, the late Epic Soundtracks (drums & keyboards). Theyrecorded their debut single, “Read About Seymour” in 1977, and released iton their own label, Rather Records. Swell Maps were one of the first punk bands to set up an “independent” record label. They are also known as one of the pioneers of “Alternative Rock”, mixing punk with experimental sounds.Swell Maps proceeded to release four singles and two albums in a brief buteventful career, in partnership with Rough Trade Records. They topped the UK independent charts, and influenced various bands such as Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Stereolab, and Blur. The original line-up split in 1980, but those two
original studio albums, “A Trip to Marineville” and “Jane From Occupied Europe”, are still attracting a new generation of enthusiastic listeners.

In 2021, Jowe Head organised performances with ten musicians to performSwell Maps music over two concerts on consecutive nights at Cafe Oto, inHackney, east London. They performed a diverse selection of Maps material,some of which had never been performed live before. Many of these musicians also performed together again at Rough Trade in 2022, at thelaunch party for Jowe’s book on Swell Maps. More concerts followed at Glasgow, Edinburgh, Paris, Manchester, Leeds and Berlin, and more are
planned. This ongoing project has resulted in a new album, recorded in early 2025, titled “C21”, and released through Tiny Global Productions.

The material was composed by Jowe and other band members at varioustimes between 1979 and the present. For example, Jowe co-wrote two ofthem with Nikki Sudden, and two with Phones Sportsman. Swell Maps still offer memorable melodies and wild riffs with super hooks, while retaining radical ideas and eccentric musical shapes. There are contrasts of mood, including a new recording of Epic’s ballad “Jelly Babies”, his 1982 solo single.The current collective of musicians features: Jowe Head (vocals, guitar), a founder-member of Swell Maps.

David Callahan (vocals, guitar), from Wolfhounds and Moonshake.
Jeff Bloom (drums), from Television Personalities. Lee McFadden (bass), from Alternative TV. Lucie Rejchrtova (keyboards), formerly in Crazy World Of Arthur Brown.Chloe Herrington (melodica, electonica), formerly in Chrome Hoof. Luke Haines (vocals, guitar), formerly of Auteurs, Black Box Recorder.

Jowe Head: “We polarise opinion: some people love our music, somepeople cannot stand it! It seems that Swell Maps continue to be an influenceon many bands around the world. For example, I was amused to see a character in a Gorillaz video wearing a Swell Maps t-shirt.”

Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth): "As soon as that guitar comes slicing off that crackling vinyl groove you know you’re gonna rock. It’s the best of both worlds: fist-in-the-heart guitar burnin’ rock and ahead-of-its-time songsmith awareness ... The Swell Maps had a lot to do with my upbringing”.

Tim Gane (McCarthy & Stereolab): “When I first bought ‘A Trip to Marineville’, Imust have played it a hundred times, just to listen to every single second of it.”Scott Kannberg (Pavement: "Swell Maps was a big influence on our early records.They had these songs they fucked up somehow to make sound really dirty and low frequency, but they had these great songs underneath all this mess”. Luke Haines (The Auteurs, broadcaster) called Swell Maps “the British Velvet Underground.” He called their first album “astonishing”, and described the secondone thus: “even better than their debut, mysterious and genre-less, it’s a record I’ll always love to it’s enigmatic core.”

Alan McGee (Creation records): “Swell Maps inspired a lot of bands that became the vanguard of the independent scene 10 years later: Sonic Youth / Pastels / Mary Chain / Pavement, to name a few. Classic band and great people too!”

Ben Ayres (Cornershop, DJ): “’Let’s Build A Car’ is one of my favourite singles ofall time, it’s like nothing else. So powerful and breaks all the rules, yet it’s perfect, with a great melody too. ‘A Trip To Marineville’ was a really important album for me,as was ‘Jane From Occupied Europe’!

John Robb (The Membranes, journalist): “Swell Maps had an abrasive rawness that of course, we loved, but they had much more going on - they also had these amazing sound collages that you could get lost in. They were mysterious and they
had an other-worldliness and that made you love them even more.”
David Lance Callahan (Moonshake, Wolfhounds): “Swell Maps showed that people you can relate to could produce music of ambition, imagination and innovation. All of this was done with a liberating lack of inhibition and an overwhelming sense of fun – and music’s not music without that!”

Brian Turner (radio presenter and musician, New York City): “My Swell Maps discovery came five seconds into the intro of "Midget Submarines”, Avant-garage-gonzo-kraut-greatness, ambient experiments all punctuated by these incredible anthems of another universe that made complete sense and ignored everything
else.....this was a band that invented something.”

https://swellmaps.org

Age Restrictions: 18+