PHILADELPHIA, PA | Seeing Swansea Sound at Johnny Brenda’s in Philadelphia on Sunday, June 9 was like the British Invasion all over again. True, one band hardly constitutes an invasion, but when you consider that Swansea Sound’s members are veterans of a veritable Who’s Who of glorious bands from that nation’s storied twee (and not so twee) indie pop past, it was like having an entire British Invasion on one stage at the same time. Heavenly! The Pooh Sticks! Talulah Gosh! The Dentists! Herman’s Hermits! Hey, how did they get in there?
Small wonder the crowd was giddy (I know I was). But it wouldn’t have mattered as much if Swansea Sound was simply attempting to recapture the past, an animate jukebox playing their previous bands’ greatest hits. No, they’re a fabulous new contender in the Great British Pop Sweepstakes, and garnering critical huzzahs galore for their two full-length LPs and an assortment of singles, all of which are catchy, whiplash smart, and guaranteed to light up the hedonic hotspots in your brain until it resembles a high-end pachinko machine. You’re familiar with the Talking Heads’ “Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town”? Well it was like that, without that annoying David Byrne fellow!
There were no screaming 13-year-old girls in the crowd at Johnny Brenda’s in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philly that Sunday night, but if there were any justice in the world (and this was 1964) Swansea Sound’s next stop would have been The Ed Sullivan Show. People were beaming! No one was crying! The British had arrived to save us from Vampire Weekend! But the night wasn’t an all-Brit affair; Swansea Sound were making the rounds with Jeanines, a wonderful three-piece pop group every bit as Brooklyn as a Sunday afternoon Dodgers double-header at Ebbets Field in 1954.
So yes, there were a lot of thrilled people in that club. Why, even the mope in the “Johnny Fuckin Marr” t-shirt, who seemed to be pretending he was holding up the bar in CBGB circa 1977 after being turned down by the Ramones because his haircut failed the audition, was excited, although he was doing his faux Lower East Side best to hide the fact. But he finally surrendered when Jeanines took the stage and delivered on a thrilling set of short, sharp, and melodic pop punk songs with the occasional twee edge, which is hardly surprising given they cite Marine Research and the Pastels as influences.
There’s nothing quite like having a band you’ve never heard of blow you away. It’s like you’ve been let in on a closely held secret! And for the record (and future reference, I see a big future for the trio) Jeanines are singer/ guitarist/ songwriter Alicia Jeanine, drummer Jed Smith, and bassist Maggie Gaster. Loved their deadpan between-song patter; Alicia tended to provide ironic second thoughts on every amusing aside that came out of her mouth, while Smith is a natural born comedian. (Swansea Sound’s Hue Williams during their set: “I asked Jed why he doesn’t do stand-up and he replied, ‘Funny people’ don’t do stand up.’ Which makes perfect sense in an odd sort of way. They’re too happy.”)
A quick word on the pedigrees of Swansea Sound’s cast of characters. Vocalist Hue Williams, a naturally reticent and very kind bloke who comes alive (like Peter Frampton!) on stage, was frontman of Wales’ the Pooh Sticks, who should have been bigger than Jesus. Amelia Fletcher was a frequent Pooh Sticks co-conspirator, but she made her bones in anorak pop legends Talulah Gosh and Heavenly. To say nothing, as Hue noted in his band introduction, “Every other indie pop band there ever was,” including Marine Research, Centenary Wires, and Tender Trap. Very friendly bassist and band songwriter extraordinaire Rob Pursey’s been with Fletcher from the get-go. Guitarist Bob Collins is a refugee from The Dentists. And drummer Ian Button is a veteran of both Death in Vegas and Thrashing Doves. In short they’re a veritable supergroup! Like Mike and the Mechanics or the Power Station, except they don’t suck!
I’ll tell you what I love about Swansea Sound. Bands like the Pooh Sticks and Heavenly may have had their heyday in the late eighties and early to mid-nineties (although Heavenly is still a going concern and good for us), but there’s no living in the past for these folks. Everyone in the crowd loved those bands, but Swansea Sound are no wretched nostalgia act. Quite the opposite—Swansea Sound is making new music of an impressively high caliber. I’m talking real top-shelf stuff. This is no crew of jaded vets wearily cashing in on old glories.
Why, from the moment they hit stage they played with all the joy and enthusiasm of a group playing their very first show with their very first band. Fletcher was particularly animated; when she wasn’t doing this great little dance while banging on the tambourine, playing a tiny keyboard or a guitar that was at least three times too large for her or acting out little scenes in her duets with Williams, she was lunging toward the microphone to provide el perfecto backing vocals with a gusto that was anything but twee. And Hue was Hue, amiable, magnetic, a real showman. Meanwhile, big Bob Collins was busy savaging a guitar that looked three times too small for him, which made me think he and Amelia got their six-string razors mixed up!
Swansea Sound opened with “Rock N Roll Void,” making clear from the get-go that they’re not some twee indie pop act–they’re a stealth punk band! “Rock N Roll Void” wasn’t a song, it was a diamond bullet straight to the Ajna chakra, granting me instant access to ultimate reality! That or someone slipped something into my Diet Coke. And the song had guitar crunch galore thanks to Collins, who apparently at some point served an apprenticeship with AC/DC. And talk about punk—the first words out of Williams’ mouth were “Went to the Ramones/ When I was thirteen/ They were the coolest thing/ I had ever seen.”
Next up was the sly “I Made a Work of Art,” a herky-jerky hard-hitter and probably the only rock song ever written about non-fungible tokens. (Sound dry? It isn’t.) Fletcher’s backing vocals gave it pop appeal, Collins sculpted little blocks of fine art with his guitar, while Williams, who on one hand kept repeating he wasn’t going to share his fabulous work of art with anyone, kept pointing to a phantom sucker in the nosebleed seats of the balcony and singing “It’s just for you/ You’re the only one/ I’d sell it to/ You’re the paragon.” Or to put it more honestly, the only poor sap who’d pay money for it!
What “Seven in the Car” lacked in speed (how fast can a car go when it’s that overloaded?) it made up for in rock bottom assault and battery. It’s a nostalgic look back at the days when fun in a small town was piling into your best mate’s sister’s Vauxhall Astra (what a squeeze!) to go see a cool new group at the only club in town, where on Tuesdays and Saturdays (I’m guessing here) you can see the region’s best Cliff Richards tribute band! When Williams and Fletcher weren’t enthusiastically swapping lead vocals they were singing in tandem about how they go to see The Rosehips (I had to look them up) every year.
“Keep Your Head On” was a tasty little vignette—Williams and Fletcher are in an empty adult education classroom for an evening class on modern politics, the tutor seems to be a no-show, and both seduction and fears about a future dystopia are in the air. The back and forth between the two was quite funny, and that title seems to refer to both rushing into the sack and never losing sight of the fact that the powers that be “will do anything to gaslight you.” Very adult educational, and catchy to boot, with a fetching melody counter-balanced by a hammering chorus that drives the point home.
“Je Ne Sais Quoi” was a driving little blur from the band’s 2021 debut Live at the Rum Puncheon (which wasn’t recorded live at the Rum Puncheon!) about romance gone awry. It too takes advantage of one of the band’s greatest strengths–Pursey’s knack for writing conversational duets. I’m thinking he listens to lots of George Jones and Tammy Wynette in his off-hours. On this one Fletcher’s bottom line was brutally simple: his “thoughts come from between his legs.” Meanwhile, a desperate to make it work Williams swore that if she’d just stay he’d “really try to find the words that prove I love you for your mind.” It was over in a flash, but it hit home. Not on me—I’m one of those enlightened sorts who gets turned on by IQ scores. Every other sod in the madding crowd, on the other hand, looked like he was posing for a mug shot.
“Markin’ It Down” opened as a nice shuffle, and—as Hue and Amelia explained before the song—was another little vignette, with Fletcher playing the clerk of a secondhand record store and Williams a customer who’s doing his best to appear hip. He’s in a band, he wants Fletcher to know, singing, “We do all our own material/Except one track by Sonic Youth.” To which she amusingly replied “We just got a load of their old CDs in/No one really likes it in truth,” at which point I cheered! And I cheered again when the band broke into a maybe three-second parody of the patented Sonic Youth sound and Fletcher cried “Sonic Youth just broke our guitar!” And I cheered yet a third time when Fletcher did a spot-on imitation of Mark E. Smith, although the Mark E. Smith cheer may have actually come first. A show highlight for sure, and as informative as a copy of NME—not only do I now know who Yard Act are, I can’t stop listening to “We Make Hits”!
The ironically titled “Paradise” had a deceptively chipper New Wave power pop feel, complete with some Gary Numan-like keyboards and Fletcher singing “Ooh woo woo woo!” behind Williams, who sang such upbeat lyrics as “Paradise got digitized/ Lithium and cyanide/ Servers hum and miners die.” This is a band with a social conscience for people (such as yours truly) who are normally put off by bands with social consciences, which is a real testimony to Pursey’s songwriting genius! He even makes callow me care! “Pack the Van” was winsome pop and oh so dreamy—you could practically feel “the sea spray stiffen your hair.” All about moving forward into adulthood, this one, but with the awareness that you’re leaving some very important part of your heart behind. Williams (with some nice backing from Fletcher) may have been singing about “songs of tomorrow,” but with an almost heartbreaking sense of saying farewell forever to today. “Keep hold of that image,” he sang, “Cos it may be the last time/ You’re ever there.”
Next up was Swansea Sound’s semi-tongue-in-cheek salute to Williams’ old band The Pooh Sticks, entitled simply (why be coy?) “The Pooh Sticks.” A short and furious blast of glorious sound, “The Pooh Sticks” is Pure Pop for Yesterday’s People and as chewy chewy chewy as your best bubblegum classics, and it made me as happy as anything they played all night. The chemistry between Williams and Fletcher was simply marvelous, with Fletcher throwing in an “Oh really?” (amongst other things) behind Hue while Collins’ guitar did an amazing impression of a chainsaw going through the Oxford English Dictionary while Pursey and Button lashed the song across the finish line. And the chorus couldn’t have been more direct, although it was delivered with a nod and a wink: “At Reading Festival/ They were the best of all/ Indie bands/ Indie bands.” Very giddy-making, as the Brits would say, that is if there’s a single Brit out there who actually says things like that. A character from an Evelyn Waugh novel, perhaps?
Williams prefaced “I Don’t Like Men in Uniform” by saying it was about a dog named Kenny, recently deceased unfortunately, which really lowered the boom on the good vibes I was feeling after “The Pooh Sticks.” A very vituperative affair, this one—Kenny was a mutt with serious anger management issues, and could probably have benefitted from therapy. Although it was plain that the subject of the song was twofold—we were also dealing with some species of lager lout whose lifelong response to mistreatment at the hands of men “in pointed hats” was ultraviolence, but who’d grown tired (you can’t stay a young cur forever) of biting the hand that doesn’t feed. But that doesn’t matter as much as the performance—the song started with Williams singing over a simple backbeat before kicking into furious punk overdrive. The preternaturally cool Williams (it’s like he’s wearing a pair of those Velvet Underground wraparound sunglasses but he isn’t!) spit his words out, while the perennially sunny Fletcher practically bit the head off the microphone as she snarled “incisors down!”
Oh, and did I fail to mention that when Williams made the band introductions he basically confessed that it was something he never did when he was with The Pooh Sticks because he was the lead singer of a cool rock band and far too self-absorbed? Or how when Williams, while making note of the fact that the band would be stateside again in October to play a few shows on the West Coast, said “I think that’s what you Americans call the Pacific North” not a single person corrected him by shouting “Northwest!” because it was just so doggone endearing?
“Far Far Away” was a sweet slice of four-on-the-floor power pop requiring some very subtle singing, which took Williams out of his comfort zone but he pulled it off with honors! Real aplomb even! As did Fletcher, although no surprise there; her voice seems custom built to navigate romantic songs like this one, as anyone who’s ever listened to Heavenly or Talulah Gosh (and you should really listen to both) will gushingly tell you.
Closer “Twentieth Century” was a real basher and sideways tribute to The Jam’s Paul Weller. No time to parse the finer details here, but suffice it to say the good folks in Swansea Sound mix their very real admiration for the man with a good bit of irony, especially as it relates to his revolutionary commitment and whether it means a damn thing to his contemporary audiences or is just some atavistic throwback to a quainter time. It used to, no doubt, back when The Clash were dressing like GI Joe, but Williams’ “Are you still listening?/ I’m still on the scene” had more than a hint of desperation, and that “Come together/ Fight the powers that be” was both irony-laden and undercut by the lines “We’re the sound of the Twentieth Century.” Yes, and the Twentieth Century died a quiet death with friends and family at its bedside a long, long time ago, and as Fletcher and Pursey themselves told me a while back, the rearguard types who frequent Weller’s shows nowadays aren’t there for his take on politics.
As the band left the stage Fletcher said something to the effect of “Don’t worry, we’ll be back in fifteen seconds” (I’m paraphrasing here, my memory’s for shit). But in reality they were back in eight to shut things down with the anthemic and sarcasm-drenched “Corporate Indie Band.” It was a rocker, of course, with cereal loads of tasty guitar crunch, and you could stomp your foot to it (as I was, up in the gallery). And talk about melodic—like the Raspberries, who weren’t an indie band but would have (like the bands in “Corporate Indie Band”) happily sold every last one of their songs to the Pepto-Bismol people in a heartburn!
The first stanza said it all (“We had a plan/ To form a corporate indie band/ Angst on demand/ All our emotion secondhand”) but the rest was every bit as cutting and funny, and it made for the perfect closer by a principled indie band that wants nothing to do with platforms like Spotify and won’t be selling its songs to the manufacturers of erectile dysfunction pills but possesses the uncommon good sense to be witty about it. The rock world needs more wit. Especially when it comes to addressing the issues that really matter. By all means rage against the machine, but don’t be a boring scold about it.
It was a great night of rock and roll for adult and inner child both, such a great night in fact that I found myself driving 100 mph (no lectures please) down I-95 most of the way home, and I couldn’t get Hue’s singing about The Kinks being the first band he remembered hearing out of my head because they were my first band (“Apeman”!) too! And that’s what so great about Swansea Sound—they perfectly capture that sense of rock music as a shared language that brings me and you and The Pooh Sticks and Paul Weller and Kenny the dog (may he rest in peace) and Sonic Youth even together. The songs we all have in our heads may all too often be sadly compromised commodities of the musical-industrial complex but the moment we stop singing along we’re lost. That was my takeaway from their show, anyway. Goodnight Johnny Fuckin Marr, wherever you are.
IMAGES COURTESY OF LIEVE MONNENS.
