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The Weekly interview: Swervedriver frontman Adam Franklin

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Franklin, right, and Swervedriver will play their first Vegas show on Thursday … probably.
Photo: Giles Borg

This one almost didn’t happen, twice. Swervedriver canceled a March Vegas date, then scheduled a new one for September, only to see the venue it had booked, the Bunkhouse, shut down. Fortunately for fans of the shoegazey British band, Backstage Bar & Billiards picked up the show, which will go on—fingers crossed—Downtown on September 24. We caught up with singer/guitarist Adam Franklin by phone in a hotel in Birmingham, Alabama, to discuss.

You guys haven’t played Vegas before, have you? It’s one place I’ve never been to, of all the main cities in the States. My mom’s been there. Apparently she put a bunch of money in a coin machine and loads came out. It’ll be interesting. I’m quite curious.

Are you aware of all the booking twists and turns associated with the Vegas show? My friend Mel lives there, and he was a bit disappointed because it looked like it was gonna get canceled. But I guess it’s been rearranged for somewhere else. Hopefully there’ll be no typhoons or tornados or acts of God that will kibosh it yet.

I caught you at Coachella ’08, which was your first show since 1998, correct? Yes, that was our first show in 10 years. When we got back together we booked a cheap rehearsal room in London and figured if we could get it to sound good there it would sound good [at the festival]. And then somebody called out a song, like “Sandblasted,” so we tried that. And it was just muscle memory, just bang, straight there again.

The band had never technically broken up, but did you think of it as an active project during those 10 off? It felt like past tense, really. There was no [breakup] statement or anything—it just drifted a little bit; we finished up a tour and sold our studio space and I moved to the United States—but then at some point there was a groundswell or re-interest in this style of music, I suppose, and eventually the time came and everybody was up for it.

Your March album, I Wasn’t Born to Lose You is Swervedriver’s first in 17 years. Why was the time right to do that now as opposed to when you first reunited? We were offered to play [1991 album] Raise from start to finish, and that was quite fun, because there were a couple of tunes on there that hadn’t been played since 1991 and one or two things that had never been played. But it was either [guitarist] Jimmy [Hartridge] or [bassist] Steve [George] who said, “If we’re gonna do all this old stuff, let’s write some new material, to make it a fresher thing again."

We wanted to come back with something that would make fans happy the band’s back, rather than something completely left-field, but at the same time I feel it still pushes out in a few directions that weren’t there previously, because music or bands that inspired us in the interim didn’t exist in 1998. And we wanted something that felt well-rounded. Swervedriver is supposedly this band that straddles the U.S. alternative sound and the U.K. shoegaze sound, and I feel like we’ve expressed both of those sides a bit. The last track on the album [“I Wonder?”] sounds like a Creation Records release, whereas “Red Queen Arms Race” is more of a stoner-rock thing, and we feel like it all holds together well. And it’s been received exactly as we would have hoped, from the fans and the critics—the Swervedriver sound with an extra twist.

Who are some artists who have influenced you musically since the band’s first go-round? Scott Walker. I didn’t really start listening to him until a few years ago, and then I got really immersed in his back catalog. And although on the surface you wouldn’t say there’s much of a Scott Walker influence on this Swervedriver album, there kind of is, in a more subtle way, with melodies and sound textures and things. Or Broadcast, who were doing their first album as we [originally] finished up. You wouldn’t necessarily say the new album shows a Broadcast influence, but it is there in a way, with more abstract, experimental things going on further back in the mix.

You mentioned “Red Queen Arms Race” sounding stoner-rockish. Were there any specific influences there? It’s very much Dead Meadow influenced. I discovered them a few years ago, and what they’re doing kind of goes back to what we were doing before Swervedriver, when we were called Shake Appeal and we had a song called ”In a Red Room,” with lots of big, slow, drawn-out, wah-wah solos. So in a way it’s influenced by the stoner-rock that’s emerged in between, but it also harkens back to some of the stuff we loved very early on. We always liked a bit of early Sabbath.

What have your 2015 shows been like? We wanted to play the new album obviously, and over the course of the year we have played all those songs at least once. And we wanted to give people kind of the hits of the old material, so it’s like the bigger songs plus the new songs, and they seem to mingle together quite well.

How do you feel the old material holds up? I think a lot of the songs hold together, because it wasn’t like we were a bunch of kids writing songs about teenage love, which would be a bit weird coming back in your 40s. The songs already had what somebody described as a world weariness, a wanderlust but also a bit of weariness, and now that weariness has probably been rubber-stamped because we’ve been through the ringer a bit (laughs). When we did Raise in its entirety there were a couple of songs there where I thought, the words on this aren’t very good. But the music holds up. And the last time we played at the 40 Watt Club in Athens [Georgia], the owner came up and said, “I’ve gotta say I’ve seen a lot of bands come through town that have reformed, and a lot of them are quite disappointing—they’ve lost whatever spark they had—but as soon as you started playing, everyone was caught up in that maelstrom of sound again.

”Maelstrom of sound” is a good way to describe what I experienced at Coachella, especially the interplay between the two guitars. Has that chemistry always been there? It was an organic type of thing, really. Jimmy and I played together in Shake Appeal before Swervedriver, and over time it’s almost like there’s a sixth sense at play. I guess that’s always been the signature part of the sound—the guitars have always been the constant.

Before we go, anything you’ve been listening to lately that you’d like to recommend to our readers?

Thee Oh Sees, “Sticky Hulks”

Kirchin/Coleman/Nathan [The London Studio Group] – “Four Against Seven”

John Fahey – “Dance of the Inhabitants of the Palace of King Philip XIV of Spain”

Miracle Falls – “Mistakes”

Peaches – “Dick in the Air”

Swervedriver with Gateway Drugs. September 24, 8 p.m., $10-$15. Backstage Bar & Billiards, 702-382-2227.

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