Hurts more than a tombstone.
Where there’s boring towns, there’s bored kids, and where there’s bored kids, there’s rock 'n' roll. That’s one of the oldest maxims in music, and has been proven true time and time again. From The Specials' ska rebellion against the general crappiness of Coventry to the MC5’s put down of a decaying Detroit, idle kids are angry kids and angry kids make good music. It's simple cause-and-effect physics.
It has to be one of the root causes of Swanton Bombs' brilliance at any rate. Hailing from the bleak suburbs of Essex, this two-piece have been laying waste to stages all over London with a sound that is somewhere between free-spirited mood rock, yell pop and cigarette-voiced Britpop. To say they’re good is really a bit of an understatement.
The singer, Dom, is also Eugene McGuiness’s brother, which has to be worth some extra scene points or something.
A Swanton Bomb is a wrestling move right? Are you guys into wrestling?
Brendan (drums): Dominic (guitars) and I only chose the name because it's just a name that seemed to suit the sort of music we played, and it has a hint of nostalgia from when we watched wrestling as children. Always WWF, and not WWE (which is a complete different animal/ball game altogether). However we don’t watch wrestling now, or wildlife for that matter.
London is a good place to cut your teeth as a band, as there is such a community of artists/people to help you out. Have you found the indie scene in London to be an inspiration?
We’ve been playing gigs in London since we were the age of 16/17, but that was under different guises. Since we started Swanton Bombs (early 2008), we played more serious places, with our first being White Heat at Madame Jojo's. From that we have made friends with other promoters about London. One being Home.Under.Ground who still host us, and booked a mini-summer tour about London for us last summer.
As for the indie scene, we don’t really take note of that as we moved away from that genre after the release of our ‘Mammoth Skull' EP. We moved more towards rock, as well as switching to punk and blues, because we felt that was what we enjoyed doing most and how we perform best; rather than creating contrived ‘indie-by-numbers’ muck.
You seem to be a band with a point to prove. Is there a message in your music?
There’s no real message we want to get across. The music that we play stems purely from our interests and influences, whether that would be The Strokes, Randy Newman, Tom Waits, The Beatles etc. Everything that we do seems to focus more on live sounds as we feel that’s want we accomplish best; that is why we recorded ‘Mumbo, Jumbo and Murder’ live, doing 18 tracks in 4 days. We like people to enjoy the same music as we do.
What can we expect from you guys over the next few months?
Well we have a tour starting on 11th Feb, supporting Los Campesinos! We also have the wonderful Islet with us on that. After that we have a couple of gigs, and some festivals to play.
We also plan to record at the end of summer/autumn; we have a prolific work ethic that has already nearly got all of the songs for the next album ready. We still have a few creases to iron out, but the next couple of months should see us mainly doing our favourite past-time: playing live
Swanton Bomb will be playing Koko with Los Camoesinos! on the 25th of February,
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