Adam Franklin: Swervedriver, working with Alan Moulder

To anyone who didn't experience the early '90s alternative rock boom firsthand it must seem hard to believe there was a time when major labels gluttonously sought out and signed as much of the rock underground as possible. Actually it wasn't possible, and in their shortsighted rush to capitalize on the explosive success of the "Seattle sound" they created an unsustainable system, signing more artists than they could ever hope to support, let alone develop. Few bands swallowed up in this binge (and the inevitable implosion) distinguished themselves by making anything lasting. Oxford, England's Swervedriver were both the exception and the rule, creating brilliance in the face of near-mythical misfortune before eventually succumbing to it. Working with preeminent '90s producer Alan Moulder [ Tape Op #115 ] (My Bloody Valentine, The Jesus and Mary Chain, NIN) over a four-record run (Raise, Mezcal Head, Ejector Seat Reservation, 99th Dream), they created a unique sound that was both visceral and cerebral — a propulsive storm of sprawling, raw guitar symphonies and widescreen studio vistas that was The Stooges by way of Sonic Youth. Frontman Adam Franklin's songcraft anchored it all with literate lyrics wed to impeccable pop tunes in the manner of T.Rex and Elvis Costello. When the band slipped into a career coma around '98, Franklin plowed ahead under the name Toshack Highway. His twenty first century output has been both a progression from and summary of his previous band's work that has included delicate acoustic guitar explorations, Krautish electronica and intimate swatches of lo-fi bedroom demos. In 2005 Sanctuary Records released Juggernaut Rides, a Swervedriver retrospective and rarities collection. 2007 saw the release of Bolts of Melody, Franklin's first record under his own name.

Let's talk about Bolts of Melody. You've been sitting on this one a while, right?

Yeah. Around '98 Swervedriver toured with the band SIANspheric. Ley [Taylor] from the band called me up and mentioned doing some sort of release, which ended up being the split release [Magnetic Morning/Aspirin Age]. Ley and I hit it off really — he turned out to be a good guy to bounce ideas off of. At some point he said, "Why don't you come up here to Toronto to record?" His friend Dean Williams had a little cottage by a lake in a place called Hawkstone, Ontario, and we decided to go up there and record it. We did the drums in three days with Matt Durrant [SIANspheric] in a little studio in Toronto [Broadcast Lane]. Then we transferred it and went out into the wild by this lake and recorded on Cubase [for] about two weeks, drinking loads and jumping in the middle of the lake at night. It was just three of us out in the wild — a great way to record.

So when you were at the cottage, was Ley engineering?

Yeah, both of those guys were just cracking open the beers and then going into the other little bedroom on the side which is where everything was set up. There was a Focusrite Platinum OctoPre thing and a MOTU 2408 MKII.

Bolts has such a warm coloration and isn't fatiguing, which are things that I usually associate with tape, but was recorded entirely on hard disk. Was that coloration achieved in the mixing stage at all, or was it more the mics and pres you were using?

Yeah, it's both. Charlie [Francis, producer] is very much into the classic records. He grew up in the '80s, well aware of how hideous everything sounded. So he's definitely a man who's going to skirt that. It's like a lot of mediums, such as graphic design, where people are actually working to make things look handmade, with bits of pieces of tape over the top, or whatever. The advantages with digital are plain to see, but you've got to work against the robots and bring it back to the humans.

You mentioned that you tracked the drums at Broadcast Lane.

Yeah. There's a good guy there called Lurch [Chris Rudyk]. It's a cool little studio space. We basically just went in and recorded the drums with the needle in the red — not so much fuss with it — just getting a good sound setup and the two of us playing guitar and bass along with Matt. He's a really great drummer.

And then to the lake house — how did you feel about recording in that environment?

I think when you record out in the middle of nowhere it can go either of two ways. You can either just relax and get into this sort of headspace where you wake up in the morning and the only thing you've got to think about is maybe driving to the store to pick up some more beer and food, and then just get straight back to it. Or it can go the other way. I remember with Swervedriver's very first EP — the Son of Mustang Ford — we went out to a residential studio in Suffolk, south of London. It really mellowed us out way too much. We had the demo that got us signed to Creation [Records], which was recorded in a day and a half and had the energy and the hunger. Then we went out to this studio for a couple of weeks, took it back to London, and everyone at Creation and [Alan] McGee heard it and said, "What happened? It's really mellow." It didn't seem to have the rawness, really.

Your singing has changed over time and become more confident.

I think on the actual very first 4-track recording that I did of Swervedriver songs, because I was recording the vocals in my room, I was really not wanting everybody else in the house to hear me. So my vocal was much more laid back — much more like a J. Mascis kind of vocal. When we actually got in the studio, the girl that was engineering was saying, "I think you have to sing out more." I think I got led into doing something that I wouldn't normally have done, which I think is something that usually happens with bands that first get into the studio. You don't actually know how it all works. The first time we ever got in a studio was doing a Shake Appeal [Adam's earlier band] session when I was the bass player, and of course live I had the bass up to get a nice distortion. That engineer said, "Well, you know, you can't really have it that loud. This is studio recording." So we ended up turning it down and never really being that happy with how the bass sounded. Years later somebody comes along and says, "Well, of course you can do that. You can do whatever the fuck you want to do. That's the whole point." If any engineer tells you you can't do something... I think that's something an engineer should never really say. It's a tricky thing with vocals. In the end I'd be with Alan [Moulder], seated next to him at the desk. I didn't like going into the other room and standing up in front of a mic. I remember there's a line in "Harry and Maggie" from Mezcal Head, about the Houses of Parliament. I kept getting stuck on that line. I said, "There's something wrong with this." Alan said, "Well, you're pronouncing it wrong. Par-lee-a-ment?" Sometimes the best vocal tends to be the one you did when you were more relaxed. Sometimes we'd end up flying in the 4-track vocal and having to stretch it over what we played in the studio because it was a better sound. Have you heard that track "Syd's Eyes"? [Syd's Eyes 7"]

Yeah.

Well the vocal on that and some of the stuff I've done recently has been singing into a laptop on GarageBand. It wasn't until I tried to sing that I thought, "Can I just sing into it?" I'll go into the bathroom 'cause there's better acoustics. I remember taking it into Stratosphere Sound here in New York, and Arjun [Agerwala] the tape op saying, "That sounds really good, man." Then my friend T.J. Doherty, who came into mix it — he asked me about it. He said, "You're just singing into it? You're not using any mic at all?" You just put a bit of reverb on it. Sometimes you're just singing into an SM57 or 58 and it just sounds kind of flat. But with this sometimes it doesn't even matter if you're singing flat, because there's just a sort of spirit to the sound.

What was the genesis of the Mezcal Head album?

We used to have access to EMI's studio on Tottenham Court Road — we used to demo stuff down there with Marc Waterman. We decided to just go in and demo this new idea, "Duress", with a drum machine. So me and Jimmy [Hartridge] just went in with Marc, programmed the drums and got this whole thing going. We thought, "Well, there's definitely gas in the tank here." Around that time I was getting more into demoing the songs more completely on the 4- track. We didn't have a drummer so we thought, "We've got to have stuff to present with new ideas." I think there are demo cassette tapes of probably all the songs off Mezcal Head. I think that's when we first started really flying in sounds from the 4-track.

It's amazing how much you hear about bands doing that that you wouldn't think would be doing that — even U2. I guess you just get attached to those cool, accidental sounds.

That's definitely true. For Ejector Seat's "I Am Superman", that whole guitar line — we tried to rerecord it and it just wasn't sounding the same. We'd forget the configuration of the pedals. I guess you should write it all down when you're [demoing]. But of course you don't, and then when you try to recreate it a month later...

Even if you get something similar, it's just never the same.

Yeah. It doesn't have the same kind of vibe. Alan said, "Yeah. It doesn't sound the same. We can't fly in the demos 'cause it's at a different tempo, slightly. I've got an idea." He assigned every single little guitar line to a control on the keyboard. I think it took up every single key on the keyboard.

How did you get involved with Alan?

I was at some show and was at the bar and somebody appeared next to me and said, "Aren't you the guy from Swervedriver?" It was Alan Moulder. He said, "I'd love to mix you guys."

Moulder had made his name doing stuff like Curve and My Bloody Valentine?

Yeah. He was working in studios with Flood, and Flood was doing production and he was the tape op. I guess that's probably how he started working with The [Jesus and] Mary Chain. I think Flood was off doing other stuff and they said, "We'll use Alan." I'm not sure when he first did My Bloody Valentine — it might have been around '89. I guess Curve would have been a little later, maybe around '92.

How was Alan involved as a producer?

Well, he's hearing the demos and then he's there at the start, really figuring out how to record things. The recording thing is his forte, but then the other aspect of him is just the mixing. He's the king of the frequencies. He's certainly great at getting good sounds on drums and guitars, but the moment I really first thought, "Wow, this is amazing," was when everything was finally done, all the tracks are down and he goes, "Okay, guys. Take an hour break, then come back and I'll have a mix and you can see if I'm going in the right direction." So we go away and then come back and he presses play and we're all just like, "What the fuck? How the hell did he get it to sound like that?" With a band like Swervedriver there are probably at least two guitar lines each going on. But he's finding the right places to place them. I think that's why Raise sounds kind of lumpy. Mezcal Head is totally in your face. I think now, to my taste, it's probably too in your face, in a way. At least with some tracks. But I'll say that something like "Duel" is the most effective distillation of Swervedriver. If somebody said to me, "What's Swervedriver like?" that'd be the song I would play them.

So it sounds like you had a good thing going there with Alan.

Yeah, definitely a relaxed vibe with Mr. Moulder. Also at that point we thought that this band might sell lots of records. The first album, Raise, came out a week after Nevermind. With Swervedriver on the one hand being perceived to be in the shoegazing camp in the UK, in the U.S. we were opening for Soundgarden, playing with Smashing Pumpkins and being pushed more in that grungy direction. At that point people weren't putting up the stops. They were thinking this could be a huge album. It was fun to be in the studio and just order in an amp. Alan was like the fourth member of the band to the degree that when we had to make a video for "Duel" and we still didn't have a bass player, we asked Alan to be in the video. He was too embarrassed to do that!

There seems to be a consensus that the next record, Ejector Seat Reservation, is the Swervedriver masterpiece.

We knew more what we wanted to do, what kind of sound we wanted to get. We definitely wanted to move away from the previous sound really. One thing we were against was the snare samples that Alan had been putting on all of Jez [Hindmarsh]'s snare hits on Mezcal Head. We wanted more of a sort of clattery thing — rawer, less polished. Around that time we had moved our stuff, like Jez's desk and the 16-track, to the new rehearsal space. We'd go in there most hours of the day. The desk was actually upstairs and the playing room was downstairs. It'd be me upstairs and Jez downstairs, and I'd talk down to him and say "Ready? I'm pressing record." That was the way we got half of the drum tracks on the album, from the original demos.

You're kidding me. Those drum sounds are amazing.

Yeah, yeah. I don't remember which ones. Certainly "How Does It Feel To Look Like Candy" and "Bubbling Up". We just got to the studio proper and thought, "Do we really want to redo this?" Because it had a great feel. We knew there would be no way of actually getting that again.

Today for a musician, using the home studio is such a common part of the process.

I guess it was a sort of evolution in the sense of getting over the initial things where you enter a studio and it can feel like the bridge on the Starship Enterprise. When I first started writing songs I was picking up a guitar and recording them to tape recorders. I guess I've always come from some kind of home recording thing, and it's been nice to put it back in that element, because it matches the thing that you know — the safe thing of recording something in your room and it sounds nice, to the transition to the big studio thing and realizing that you can mix those things together and it works as well. There are loads of my 4-track things on Ejector Seat — like the end of the title track, there's that guitar sound that's cracking up. I was playing through one of those Marshall amps that you can strap on your belt, and the battery was running down and it was breaking up. We said, "Well, that's got to be on there." We just had the freedom to fly anything in. I mean, the first track ["Single Finger Salute"] for me was a kind of joy, because basically that track is my 4-track recording with a string quartet added to it and some horns.

When you finished Ejector Seat you must have been extremely proud and optimistic. And then Creation dropped you.

Yeah and it was a big bummer to have it pulled. First A&M [Swervedriver's American label] pulled out. I think the deal was they had three advances [owed to the band] and they paid two and after the second one decided they didn't want to do the album. Then there was a domino effect of Creation saying, "Oh, shit. We're not getting the funding now from A&M."

So how did the purchasing of your studio come about. Advance money?

Yeah, advance money [from a later deal with Geffen Records]. They said, "Well, what do you guys want?" We said, "Well, we kind of have the makings of a studio here." We had just moved to a new space. We had bits and pieces that Jez had and we were in a studio space called The Fortress [which] had just moved to a new premises and we were amongst the first people in there. So we ended up getting a good space in which to build a live room, a storage space for all the reels of tape, a place for our gear and a listening room. We figured at the time, "Well, if nothing else happens, at least we've got our own studio."

What happened to that studio?

In the end we were kind of sick of the place. It was kind of the hangover from the whole '95 thing, Ejector Seat and the drugs that were around then that seemed kind of cool at the time. But they were still hanging around two years later and suddenly it wasn't a good thing. It seemed like at that studio space you were more likely to have a conversation with someone about the price of cocaine, rather than what music is good. The band Ash wanted their own studio space, and we were going to sell the space to Ash, but then the lease on the building just ran out. The guy who owned the building wanted to turn it into a parking lot or build condos, or something. We were given a month to get out. It was insane. It's bad enough if you're living in your apartment and you're given a month to get out, but when it's a studio space — and there are a whole bunch of studios in this complex, loads of programming suites and other people's studio spaces. The studio is dead really. The Trident desk we had, we had to have somebody having it up and running in order to sell it and that person selling it went bankrupt, and the desk got repossessed as part of his debt.

Oh my God.

It was a total fuck up basically. So, if somebody's going to build a studio space, if you're renting a space, I wouldn't recommend spending too much time building rooms within rooms, because chances are you might get asked to vacate the premises at any time. But to be honest, at that point we were already fairly through with it really. I guess we had just done the last stretch of touring. We didn't feel like we were in control of our destiny. I think 99th Dream was the least satisfactory of our four albums...

I think that this album gets a little neglected in comparison to Mezcal Head and Ejector Seat.

Since I have been doing these solo shows I realized that I have actually played a fair amount of the 99th Dream songs. I guess they are actually good songs. I think that we just got a little burnt out. We'd finish the mix at Konk [Studios] and then go home with this tape thinking, "Oh, man, it's just not happening." I don't know what exactly it was. At that point I would have had something more electronic going on. But I think that for me, I hear the struggle more than anything else. It's taken a long time to hear the songs.

So eventually Zero Hour put out the record. Then you were making another album for Zero Hour, which became the Toshack Highway album?

Not exactly. I just suddenly became interested in the way that keyboards worked, the way you could make chords differently than on guitar. None of them were really sounding like it was going to make sense as Swervedriver. I went to Zero Hour and said, "I'm going to do this side project," and Zero Hour said that they were going to fund it. It wasn't as big a budget as it would have been for a Swervedriver thing, obviously, but me and Charlie [Francis] warmed to working within the budget. Halfway through doing that album I was on tour in Europe and got the word that Zero Hour had gone bust.

How do you keep the inspiration?

I remember me and Paddy [Pulzer] and Jimmy, when we first moved up to London from Oxford were involved in a squatting scene in London because it was a way to get cheap housing. We couldn't afford to rent places. So you get to know people and they'll say, "There's an empty apartment on such and such street. You might want to break in to there." We were in one of these places and were cooking our beans and toast and talking about hoping that somebody would sign us and I remember telling those guys, "Any label that picks us up is going to get a good signing because we're never going to run out of songs." I guess the inspiration is still there somewhere.