Swell Maps - Bedroom Freak-Punk

It's a Sunday afternoon in the winter of 1971, when an ordinary conversation between two brothers sitting on the couch leads to a flash of revelation on the road to Damascus. We're in Solihull, six miles from the centre of Birmingham. Adrian Nicholas Godfrey and his little brother Kevin are watching Marc Bolan on television, performing at the Top Of The Pops studios with T-Rex: despite being only twelve and fifteen years old, upon hearing “Jeepster” they decide that it's time for them to enter the world of rock. And once they decide, they waste no time. Just two days later, Adrian and his friend David Barrington buy their first guitars, and in 1972 they form a band together with young Kevin, who chooses to play drums, except that he obviously doesn't have the money to buy any. No matter, of course, since the imagination typical of youth comes to his rescue: he makes do, in fact, with whatever percussive object he can find in front of him, be it biscuit tins, plastic tubes or simple coffee pots. It's in this way that Xerox are born, though they quickly change their name, fearful – and naive enough – to think that a photocopier giant might come after them over copyright issues.

Like many teenage ideas, the band remains – indeed – just the sketch of a dream bigger than themselves. Rather than sit down to study chords, the two Godfrey brothers and Barrington hang around gigs and record shops, weaving their own network of contacts. When they approach their first recordings, the results are predictably disastrous. With no musical grounding whatsoever and unable to play even a single cover, they clumsily try to put together a repertoire of their own songs: too bad that young Nikki Sudden initially even thought his electric guitar had to be plugged into a wall socket rather than an amplifier!

The result of these first experiments is a deafening racket, forcing the parents to buy themselves a pair of headphones to avoid a persistent migraine. It will take several years before Swell Maps reach their definitive form, but the band's ethic, their way of playing free from constraints and schooled patterns, will remain a constant in the group's music.

Meanwhile, their acquaintance with three other friends from the same school – Richard Earl, John Cockrill and Stephen Bird – leads the band to take shape as a sextet. In the end David and John will remain in Swell Maps as part-time members, never playing live, but taking part in a series of side projects that effectively mark the birth of a genuine scene in Solihull: from Civile Service to Cirkus, by way of Incredible Hulk, Teenhearts and Sacred Mushrooms.

Swell Maps thus emerge in that no man's land that opened up between the dying embers of the punk cyclone and the first tremors of new wave, yet they have little in common with either movement. While it's undeniable that the salient traits of their output – total instrumental ineptitude, low-fidelity recording, independence from any conventional circuit – are fixed points shared by many other spontaneous sprouts of the era, the spirit animating them is about as far as can be from the nihilism of their contemporaries; if anything, they seem to hark back to the ramshackle Dada of Britain's great mad hatters (Twink, Hapshash & The Coloured Coat) or to the most sun-scorched American freaks (from Red Crayola to the Godz). A key role is played by their wide-ranging interests: from childhood TV shows to European history, by way of T-Rex, kraut-rock and the Dada poetry of Kurt Schwitters. Historical circumstance, however, proves decisive to their emergence: it's no coincidence that, despite having been active since 1972, their debut single only saw the light of day in '77, by which time DIY ethics had already granted artistic and sociological legitimacy to their naïveté. Even here, though, the discontinuity with their surroundings is evident: while for Fall, Alternative TV, Desperate Bicycles and other underground agitators, playing badly and recording worse meant first and foremost rejecting outright any market logic, for them it's instead an instinctive reflex, with no intention whatsoever of destabilizing anything. It's also pointless to look for any kind of therapeutic intent in their aimless ruckus: carefree and at ease within chaos that others would prefer to contain, their (non)songs can barely even be likened to the spectral nursery rhymes of outsiders Jandek and Daniel Johnston.

During the recording of their first singles, Adrian Nicholas Godfrey (guitar, vocals) decides he needs a name that evokes the great artists of 1950s rock'n'roll, and chooses to become Nikki Sudden. The other members of the band follow suit: first and foremost his younger brother Kevin (drums, percussion, keyboards), who becomes Epic Soundtracks, fusing into a single moniker his passion for Epic Records and for Can's "Soundtracks". David Barrington instead brings his love of sport to the fore (Phones Sportsman), while John Cockrill (backing vocals, bass) is nicknamed "Golden" in memory of a teenage anecdote. Likewise, Richard Earl (guitars) becomes Biggles Books/Dikki Mint and Steve Bird is christened Jowe Head (bass, sax, guitar).

The blood bond between Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks could hardly fail to spill over into the music they produce: a raucous bedroom game between two slightly mad little brothers, something akin to the messy little scenes painted in those same years on the other side of the Atlantic by Half Japanese (also brothers, as it happens), and which, at least ideologically, can be traced back to the naive art brut of the Shaggs, the first unwitting champions of domestic amateurism as an aesthetic paradigm. The influence of this attitude on the slackers of the following two decades would prove just as pivotal as Nikki and Epic's own total lack of interest in the matter, being lazy classic-rock enthusiasts with little inclination to rewrite History: the accolades that piled up over the years can have brought them, at most, a mild chuckle. The revolution wrought by Swell Maps would remain one of the many quiet revolutions that, unmoored from any scene or context, helped redefine the boundaries of alternative music.

Their birth certificate already hints at how blatantly out of time and place they were: what could be more anomalous in a city like Birmingham, England's answer to Detroit, which in different eras produced, just to name three names at random, Moody Blues, Black Sabbath and Duran Duran? A place where bold flavours and bright colours hold sway, whereas our heroes are about as murky and indefinable as one could possibly fashion out of rock instrumentation?

Swell Maps were officially born on 28 April 1977 (which, as it happens, was once again a Sunday). The circumstances leading to the recording of their first single are first and foremost tied to the influence of Desperate Bicycles, who were at the time teaching thousands of teenagers the importance of Do-it-yourself. The Maps believed in it so wholeheartedly that their first single, "Read About Seymour" (1977), even bore the name of the band's own label, Rather Records, whose logo was designed by Epic himself.

The band's name too (trans. maps of wave motion) came from an idea of young Godfrey, who was quoting a line of dialogue from a puppet TV show called "Stingray", created by Britain's Gerry Anderson. The original exclamation can be heard at the start of their debut album A Trip To Marineville, which also borrows its title from a mini-LP released by Century 21 devoted to that very famous TV show.

⟦Q1⟧

(Jowe Head)

"Read About Seymour" refers to the mod Seymour Stein, about whom Marc Bolan had written a series of articles for Record Mirror. On the "Read About Seymour" 7" one can hear three short, still-rough tracks that nonetheless already hint at their quirky vocabulary: while "Ripped & Torn" could pass for the 13th Floor Elevators a decade on and "Black Velvet" winks at the squarer side of T-Rex, it's the title track above all that hints at their next moves, a spell cast somewhere between slowed-down punk and sped-up reggae, which at its peak derails into a noise-rock sabbath, a trick that would become a genuine trademark. But it's with "Dresden Style", released the following year, that the formula takes on a sharper definition: two "real" songs (the strung-out New York Dolls of the title track and "Ammunition Train", perhaps the most genuinely punk track in their catalogue) sit alongside two pieces that resist easy classification (an untitled spoken-ambient interlude and, above all, "Full Moon", a lysergic a cappella piece perhaps inspired by the Grateful Dead's "What's Become Of The Baby"). It is precisely this alternation between crooked little songs and bursts of pure madness that would become their favoured modus operandi. The record also marks their entry into the roster of the fledgling Rough Trade, which would soon explode as the most vital engine of British alternative rock.

Even more ambitious are the two singles from 1979: "Real Shocks/English Verse/Monologues" widens the arrangement spectrum by bringing in new instruments (acoustic guitar, piano, harmonica), while "Let's Build A Car" offers an even dirtier take on their already abrasive sound, caught between the suffocating fuzz à la Chrome of the title track and the cacophonous industrial nightmare of "Big Maz In The Country", which makes clear once and for all just how vast – albeit unwieldy – the vocabulary of these thoroughly out-of-step rockers could be. Rough Trade's involvement brought a modest wave of interest around the band, culminating in an invitation onto John Peel's Radio 1 show. This allowed Swell Maps to sell out all their singles and to self-finance their first album A Trip To Marineville (1979), where their approach to songwriting borrows heavily from the Teutonic jams of early Can, but also from the purely punk ethic of acts like Flipper, Wire and Buzzcocks.

The album cover is already a clue to what listeners should expect from the outset: the sense of panic of someone trying to flee a burning building connects, in a way, to the desperate sounds that pervade the entire record. The result is a chaotic ode to total freedom that bears little resemblance either to pre-Woodstock utopias or to Zappa-esque iconoclasm, unusually long for a "punk" band (18 songs for almost an hour of music), able to seamlessly blend frenzied garage raids with kraut-noise murk. The crazy thing is that, amid all that racket, lies a work with a precise structure of its own, ideally split into two halves: a first part more willing to compromise with song form, where the ethic of the punk ditty prevails, and a second where experimentation takes over and everything dissolves into chaos, with a few drunken pirouettes in between trying to reconcile the two approaches (like the pummelling "Harmony In Your Bathroom", Jowe Head's crazed tale of "shampoo and murder").

Epic Soundtracks' obsession with kraut-rock rhythms is plain to hear on songs like "Gunboats" and "Full Moon In My Pocket", which already hint at the even more anarchic territory Swell Maps would explore on their second album. Elsewhere, it's the keyboards that make the difference, as on "HS Art", a traditional rock'n'roll number where the sheer amount of distortion and the alienating piano interlude serve to underline the phrase repeated to the point of annihilation by Nikki Sudden's irreverent voice ("Do you believe in art?"). The same trick of deconstructing a formula, whether pop or rock, is deployed masterfully on "Another Song", which from its title alone sardonically declares its intent to tear down the canons of song form, with results not unlike those of Buzzcocks or Damned.

Their gradual descent from post-punk into all-out experimentation peaks in the war-torn noise of "Adventures Into Basketry", 8 minutes worthy of Pere Ubu on "Sentimental Journey", but Sudden & co.'s elusiveness is best captured by the many incomplete sketches scattered throughout the record: the ramshackle piano playing of "Don't Throw Ashtrays At Me!", the Barrett-esque watercolour of "My Lil' Shoppes 'Round The Corner", the no-wave edges of "Doctor At A Cake" and the unhinged bacchanal of "Bridge Head Pt. 9". Between the brain-fried space-rock of "Loin Of The Surf" and a "Midget Submarine" that even anticipates the sound of Mission Of Burma, it sometimes becomes genuinely hard to tell whether our heroes were too far behind the times or too far ahead of them. The overall effect is that of a grainy home movie projected at the wrong speed, in which pretty much anything could happen – and, as it turns out, does. A plausible artistic reference point might be Jackson Pollock's action painting, but the truth is that comparisons simply don't fit the Maps. Even the New Musical Express took note, placing the album at number 36 in its year-end list.

Upon its release, A Trip To Marineville sold around 30,000 copies, landing at number 1 on the independent charts. Despite the decent success, the band's life carries on between part-time jobs in different cities and the awareness that it wouldn't last long. What really breaks the fragile equilibrium is a brawl involving Richard Barrington, Nikki Sudden and Jowe Head. It's the latter who suffers the most serious consequences of the assault by a group of skinheads, which costs him a punctured lung and a long hospital stay. The spirit with which Swell Maps approach their second album is therefore that of a band who knows it's nearing its end. Even the title of the record — Jane From Occupied Europe — alludes to an unreleased Epic Soundtracks song about a girl who spends the years of the Second World War hidden in a cupboard, with lyrics that likewise reflect Nikki and Epic's love for 20th-century history, especially wartime events.

Darker than its predecessor, Jane From Occupied Europe (1980) brilliantly captures the paranoid loneliness that haunts modern man, ever more alienated by his own lifestyle. The tracklist is made up of songs that constantly wander in search of a melody, without ever quite settling on a definitive one. As with the first album, the list of instrumentation — besides Epic on drums and piano and his older brother on guitar and vocals — sees the rest of the members swapping instruments to build a granite-solid wall of sound, out of guitars, basses, toys, vacuum cleaners and even balloons.

Overall, the second album features more instrumental tracks, a wider range of instruments and a decidedly more structured style, where their reluctance to commit to any one genre and the band's internal misunderstandings give birth to an unprecedented approach to punk.

Fewer songs, then, and more experimentation: most of the tracks resemble barely scribbled sketches rather than pieces with a beginning, a development and an end, often veering into pure cacophony ⟦Q1⟧ The mood cools down considerably with “Cake Shop” and “Big Empty Field”, with its shadowy dark pulsations. The few recognizable moments can only be described by approximation: Magazine reinterpreted by the Contortions on “Let's Buy A Bridge”, the kraut charge of “Secret Island” which wouldn't have been out of place in the catalog of MX-80 Sound, the post-rock ante litteram of “Collision With A Frogman”, where you seem to hear the future Blind Idiot God; elsewhere it feels like being in the presence of a less inhuman This Heat, or a more relaxed Fall. Amid so much madness, there's still room for unexpected flashes of tenderness, as in the poignant piano outro of “Raining In My Room”, the closing theme on the band's adventure but also a prelude to the languid ballads of Soundtracks' solo career.

If A Trip To Marineville pushes punk instinct to its extreme consequences, freeing it from the shackles of classic rock, Jane From Occupied Europe is the reinterpretation of 20th-century avant-garde by a bunch of hooligans; more concise but also more fragmented than its predecessor, it's a snapshot of a band at the peak of its hysterical creativity. One might wonder what could possibly follow such a radical work, but the alchemy of Swell Maps was evidently too unstable to last long.

Jane From Occupied Europe comes out on the same day as "Closer" by Joy Division. If Ian Curtis takes his own life that same year, a similar fate befalls Swell Maps, who decide of their own accord to put an end to their creation. Regarding the split, Epic Soundtracks would simply write: "We grew up together but then we grew apart".

In the years following the split, several anthologies arrived attempting to bring order to the band's catalog, often only succeeding in amplifying the confusion. Here are a few worth noting: Whatever Happens Next… (1981), a precious mosaic of unreleased material and alternate versions; Collision Time (1982), which collects the early singles alongside excerpts from the two albums and some outtakes; International Rescue (1999), perhaps the best, compiled by Nikki Sudden himself; Wastrels And Whippersnappers (2006), a collection of demos, the last release with Sudden still alive.

After the split, Sudden and Soundtracks launch their respective solo careers (the latter also keeping busy with Crime & The City Solution and These Immortal Souls). Jowe Head records the single "Rain, Rain, Rain" with Soundtracks before joining Television Personalities, who, curiously, in their 1978 anthem "Part Time Punks" (a hilarious jab at certain Sunday-alternative types) had namechecked Swell Maps themselves. On top of this, he also records a few solo albums and collaborates with various bands, including Palookas, Househunters and Long Decline.

After releasing The Egg Store Ilk (1981), Richard Earl instead decides to retire from the music world for good and today makes a living restoring vintage cars. David Barrington follows suit shortly after, embarking on a rather curious career as a marine micropaleontologist.

Listening to Beat Happening, Guided By Voices, Pavement, Sebadoh and all the other heroes of 90s lo-fi, there's no doubt about it: at the root of that lazily off-key attitude, there can only be them, Swell Maps.

Epic Soundtracks

The Godfrey brothers' solo work reveals that the group's surreal theatrics concealed two first-rate songwriters, with unexpected roots in the purest, most uncontaminated rock classicism. While Nikki is a rocker pure at heart, filtering the brashness of the Rolling Stones through Johnny Thunders' sarcastic smirk, Epic is a delicate, melancholy songwriter, striking poses like an existentialist dandy. But it would be unfair to flatten him down to that indelible label: Kevin Godfrey also proves to be a talented multi-instrumentalist and a tireless session man, with a history of collaborations and guest appearances so tangled it's hard to keep track, as well as an eccentric character capable of commercially registering his own stage name (forcing Epic Records to rename its soundtrack division "Soundtrax", to avoid legal disputes!). He is the first to go solo, with the 7'' "Popular Classical" (1981), on which he plays most of the instruments. It contains only three tracks and, following on from the band's previous work, pairs melody with noise. It's a record that would presumably have gone unnoticed were it not for the participation of none other than Robert Wyatt (who, for the first and only time, chooses to credit himself under his birth name: Ellidge), lending his unmistakable voice to the only real song, "Jelly, Babies", which also features Vicky Aspinall (Raincoats) and Georgie Born (Henry Cow), on violin and cello respectively.

The choice not to sing stems from Epic's chronic insecurity about his vocal abilities, one of the reasons that for a long time discouraged him from tackling his own compositions. "A 3-Acre Floor" is a disguised reinterpretation of "Raining In My Room", already featured on Jane From Occupied Europe, while "Pop In Packets" is nothing more than a field recording captured at Wyatt's home (in the background you can hear Flossie, Robert and Alfie's dog, barking). In the same months, he takes part, alongside Gina Birch of the Raincoats and Lora Logic of X-Ray Spex, in the album "Kangaroo?" by the just-reformed Red Crayola. The following year comes "Rain, Rain, Rain", recorded together with former Swell Maps bassist Jowe Head, a very strange single built on dub-industrial sounds. The title track owes a debt to the atmospheres of A Certain Ratio and 23 Skidoo, while "Ghost Train" recalls the spectral pulses of Factrix. Hard to pin down within either the band's output or his later work, it stands as testimony to the two artists' omnivorous eclecticism.

Epic's solo adventure comes to a halt in the mid-80s, when he's called in as a guest by his brother for his new project, the Jacobites, which reflect their never-hidden passion for 60s and 70s rock. In the same years he enters the ranks of Crime & The City Solution, playing drums on "Just South Of Heaven" (1985) and "Room Of Lights" (1986), before following the Howard brothers into These Immortal Souls. Epic's distinctive style behind the drums gives a decisive stamp to the sound of these bands. Alongside Sudden, Howard and Jeffrey Lee Pierce, he also guests on Jeremy Gluck of the Barracudas' debut, I Knew Buffalo Bill (1987). A career as a session player, however, isn't the right fit for a sensitive soul like his, one that needs not only to play but also to express himself: in the early 90s, finally free of commitments, he decides to pick his solo career back up after nearly a decade's hiatus, finally finding the courage to sing his own songs by himself.

Recorded between London and New York with production by Victor Van Vugt, mostly a solitary affair but featuring an all-star cast of guests politely queuing up to appear alongside this small legend (J Mascis, Lee Ranaldo, Kim Gordon, Anthony Thistlethwaite, Martyn P. Casey, plus his friend Roland S. Howard), Rise Above (1992) stands as proof of a staggering, timeless songwriting talent, jealously guarded for years and now mature enough to reveal itself to the world. Anyone expecting a continuation of the eccentricities of his early work can only be thrown off guard by these elegant small-hours ballads, built around a high-class, piano-driven pop-rock suspended between Burt Bacharach, Randy Newman and – above all – Todd Rundgren, carried off with a delightfully old-fashioned flair (starting with the cover art, which refers quite unmistakably to his much-venerated “Pet Sounds”).

The mood is sweet and dreamlike, though occasionally disrupted by more energetic moments (the overwhelming crescendo of the opener “Fallen Down”, the noir atmospheres of “Big Apple Graveyard”, the murderous build of “Wild Situation”). The themes are the classic stuff of torch songs: lost loves, nostalgia for happier times and angelic female figures (in “Farmer’s Daughter” the mysterious Emily May appears for the first time, a figure who would go on to haunt him in later albums too), narrated with a tone so plain and sincere it breaks your heart with every listen. Whether it's the night-club numbers of “Everybody Else Is Wrong”, the sumptuous orchestrations of “She Sleeps Alone” or the Morricone-esque laconicism of “Meet Me On The Beach”, Epic's touch has an almost unreal delicacy. How an artist of this caliber could remain in the shadows for so long remains a mystery explainable only by his elusive and troubled personality. Few records are so conspicuously out of step with the frantic 90s, a fact that only makes this luminous gem even more precious. The album was reissued in 2015 as an expanded double-album edition.

For the first time since the days of Swell Maps, Epic had control over the music he was making. And he was finally confident enough in his vocal abilities to let his voice be heard by an audience.

(Nikki Sudden)

Encouraged by the warm reception from critics, Epic was happy to follow up two years later with Sleeping Star (1994), in which the lack of a surprise factor is offset by a broader stylistic range, embracing the alternative country of Gram Parsons (“Something New Under The Sun”), the smoky feel of early Tom Waits (“Tired Eyes”), late doo-wop echoes (“Tonight’s The Night”, “I Believe”) and more ethereal, expansive suggestions (the magnificent “Baby I Love You”, the orchestral swoon of “Hear The Whistle Blow”). A sense of wonder and indolence dominates, exemplified by the willful childishness of “Don’t Go To School”. Piano remains the guiding instrument, but Epic doesn't shy away from picking up a humble acoustic guitar (on “There’s A Rumour” he sounds like the most stripped-down of singer-songwriters), while his growing vocal confidence surfaces in the Cave-like excursions of “Waiting For The Train”.

But above all, this is the album of “Emily May (You Make Me Feel So Fine)”, his best-known and most celebrated song: a perfect track, the kind you'd study in songwriting school, the sort that alone could justify an entire career. There's not the slightest pretense of originality in these humble, anachronistic melodies, and it is precisely this unspoiled “resignation” that gives them their power.

By now hailed as one of the finest songwriters of his generation, following the demo collection Debris, his contribution to Mike Watt's sprawling debut “Ball-Hog Or Tugboat” and his collaboration with his friend Evan Dando on one of his most touching compositions (“C’Mon Daddy”, later included by the Lemonheads on “Car Button Cloth”), Epic released what would become his swan song, ironically titled Change My Life (1996).

The opener “You Can Be My Baby”, a breezy Graham Parker-style pub-rock number, kicks off his most straightforwardly rock record, which also features the explicit love letter to Phil Spector that is “Stealaway”, the Laura Nyro-esque harmonies of “Sweet Sixteen”, the gutter rhythm'n'blues of “Landslide” and the cinematic piano-and-strings instrumental “Ring The Bells”.

If the previous album was relaxed almost to the point of brazenness, this one is shot through with a creeping tension that, on tracks like “Wild Child” and “Sleepy City”, seems to turn into a macabre premonition. At the close, after yet another knockout melody (“The Wishing Well”), comes a live medley paying tribute to another of his idols, Alex Chilton, combining “Nightime” and “Thirteen” with real feeling. Bucking every trend, “Change My Life” is yet another (and sadly final) first-rate statement from a class act.

Epic Soundtracks was a wonderful person. His problem was that everything seemed to affect him far too deeply.

(Geoff Travis, Rough Trade)

Bar/None decided not to fund a new album, and, during a particularly stressful period of his life, Kevin Paul Godfrey was found dead in his London flat on 6 November 1997, at the age of 38. The cause of death has never been clarified, but it was most likely connected to a life of excess, true to rock'n'roll's own code to the very end. To those who favor the suicide theory, Nikki Sudden simply responds that his brother would never have left just weeks before the release of the “Pet Sounds” box set, whose liner notes were read aloud amid the many tears shed at his funeral. With him went a born-classic songwriter, an extraordinarily distinctive performer, and one of the most sensitive and compelling personalities in contemporary rock, a fallen angel who left far too soon for a planet unworthy of his tenderness.

Released posthumously were Everything Is Temporary (1999, a collection of unreleased material curated by his brother), Good Things (2005, demos from what would have been his fourth album), Wild Smile (2015) and Film Soundtracks (2017).

Nikki Sudden and the Jacobites

After the band split up, Nikki Sudden found himself in a deep identity crisis. He was still working part-time at the Rough Trade shop and writing reviews for a few publications when he decided to take a break and cross the Atlantic to spend several days in the company of his new idol, Johnny Thunders. So, after that encounter, at twenty-three Nikki Sudden realized the time had come to launch a solo career. Waiting On Egypt (1982) catches him in this transitional period between his past with Swell Maps and the elegant Marc Bolan-style rock that had always seduced him. The tracklist is split between these two tendencies: while some songs look firmly back to his old band – like “Back To The Coast”, a track originally conceived as the fifth Swell Maps single, and “Channel Steamer”, a small tribute to the Desperate Bicycles – a glimpse of Sudden's future as a songwriter comes instead from tracks like the Rolling Stones-style cover of “I’d Much Rather Be With The Boys” and the visceral ballad “Still Full Of Shocks”.

Despite good reviews, Nikki Sudden's first album barely sold 400 copies on release: discouraging numbers, especially compared to the decent reputation Swell Maps had built up on the alternative circuit. Rather than getting demoralised, the guitarist turned up at the home of his friend Dave Kusworth, intending to form a new band and in doing so achieve a less "amateurish" sound. Even though Dave had just committed to the Rag Dolls, he still promised to lend a hand with Sudden's second album, Bible Belt (1983).

Compared to the "haphazard" way Waiting On Egypt had been recorded, Sudden's new solo effort draws on a string of skilled musicians from the Waterboys, including Anthony Thistlethwaite (bass), Kevin Wilkinson (drums) and Mike Scott (piano). Old bandmates David Barrington and John Cockrill also take part in the sessions, while Dave Kusworth turns up alongside Mark Lemon to help out on three tracks, which rank among the finest of the lot ("English Girls", "The Road Of Broken Dreams" and "The Angels Are Calling").

With Bible Belt, Nikki Sudden moves ever further into songwriting territory poised between Marc Bolan, the Rolling Stones (of "Exile On Main St.") and Johnny Thunders, finally rejecting every trace of the noise-making avant-garde that had defined Swell Maps: good examples are "Road Of Broken Dreams" and "Chelsea Embankment", two power-ballads that perfectly capture the leaden allure of English life, bringing out all the melancholy in Sudden's decadent voice, which sits perfectly at ease over Kusworth's Stooges-like guitar. Nikki believes in this new creation so strongly that, for the first and last time, he decides to shop it around to the majors, only to be met with a string of doors slammed in his face.

It's during the Bible Belt sessions that the Jacobites effectively come into being, debuting with the self-titled album credited to Nikki Sudden & Dave Kusworth. Originally conceived as Sudden's third solo effort, Jacobites (1984) also contains a jam session with Epic Soundtracks, David Barrington and John Cockrill - namely the first version of "Big Store". The first song officially recorded by the Jacobites thus also happens to be the last collaboration between the Swell Maps. Epic would also contribute that year to the EP "Shame For The Angels" (1984), but the story of Swell Maps had by then truly reached its end.

At the time, journalists spoke of the Kusworth/Sudden pairing in the same breath as Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards, and indeed their lifestyle of sex, drugs & rock'n'roll wasn't far removed from that of the two Stones - except that money was a very real problem for the duo back then.

On the back of this comparison, the second album, Robespierre's Velvet Basement (1985), achieved decent critical and commercial success, so much so that even Tom Waits named it among his all-time favourite records. Among the tracks where the artistic partnership works best is the desolate "When The Rivers Ends", written during a trip in a Brixton parish hall, which captures all the lost magic of the castle pictured on the cover. A love for the austere elegance of bygone eras, for a Europe now reduced to ruins, runs through much of Robespierre's Velvet Basement, among which three gems are worth singling out: "Hearts Are Like Flowers", "It'll End Up In Tears" and "All The Dark Rags".

A clear example of this nostalgic formula is "Son Of A French Nobleman" and, above all, "Ambulance Station", whose title refers to a London club of the same name from the 80s. It's worth noting that, once again, the opening track is the aforementioned "Big Store" - though the title shouldn't fool you: the version here is actually a cover of a song written by Stephen Duffy for the Subterranean Hawks, the band he left to join Duran Duran. Conversely, the first recording of "Big Store" on Jacobites was Sudden's attempt to recreate its chords, resulting in a completely new song, lyrics included.

Originally conceived as a double LP, the outtakes from the Robespierre's Velvet Basement sessions were later released on the album Lost In A Sea Of Scarves (1985) and the EP "Pin Your Heart To Me" (1985). It wasn't until 1993 that it was reissued on CD for the first time in its original form, containing all 24 tracks.

From the mid-80s onwards, Nikki Sudden split his time between England and Germany, where he found a certain popularity, not least for his distinctive dress sense, which landed him in plenty of specialist magazines. It was in a cinema in Hamburg that Nikki Sudden wrote what would become his most famous ballad, "Death Is Hanging Over Me", featured on Texas (1986). The album marks Dave Kusworth's departure, with Epic's friend Rowland S. Howard (ex-Birthday Party and Crime & The City Solution) stepping in, lending the atmosphere a far more compact feel while also making it more nihilistic and desperate. Among the album's guests is also Epic Soundtracks, alongside his brother on the little gem "Jangle Town", where the drummer does his own personal impression of Keith Moon.

What was meant to be the original title of Texas, namely Kiss You Kidnapped Charabanc, ended up instead becoming the name of the album credited to the duo Nikki Sudden/Rowland S. Howard, released in 1987. The curious title is the result of a cut-up drawn from three separate sources: "Kiss You" from a note written to Nikki Sudden by one of his German lovers; "Kidnapped" from the Robert Louis Stevenson novel; "Charabanc" from a children's book by Nicholas Thomas. It's said that upon hearing the album, Nick Cave confided to Rowland, his former bandmate in the Birthday Party, that he wasn't particularly fond of it on account of its sound, which was heavily indebted to the Rolling Stones. More than the Stones, though, this time Sudden ties himself to the iconography of maudit musicians like Robert Johnson ("Silver Street") and to Keith Richards's solo albums ("Debutante Blues", "Wedding Hotel"). "Crossroads", meanwhile, brings to the surface Nikki Sudden's passion for religious history, stirring up feelings of guilt over the actions of the Catholic Church.

Also in 1987, Sudden and Rowland reunited with Epic Soundtracks for Jeremy Gluck's project I Knew Buffalo Bill. The backing band for the former Barracudas frontman was dubbed by the press "the first indie super-group". Whether or not that claim holds true, what's certain is that this stimulating collaboration allowed Nikki Sudden to put together "Gallery Wharf", one of his most visceral songs, a stirring acoustic poem that distils into music the thirty-year-old Sudden, who at that point in his life felt particularly downcast ("I've been alive for twenty-seven years"). A true romantic bohemian, worthy of an Oscar Wilde novel, Nikki Sudden lived perpetually out of step and out of place: his love of blues, of folk, of all that music which by the 80s was ancient history, made him increasingly alien to his own world. And yet, he sometimes proved to be the saboteur of his own career too, like the time the chance to record with Alex Chilton went up in smoke the moment he crossed paths with a beautiful golden-haired drug dealer on the way to the studio.

The Nikki Sudden of this period, torn between women, drugs and an endless string of shows, was a man only half satisfied. Because of this, the following album, Dead Men Tells No Lies (1987) - effectively the last of the decade under the Jacobites name - marks his attempt to make, in his own words, "the saddest album ever created". With it, Sudden aligns himself with the acoustic folk tradition of Neil Young, telling desolate stories such as that of "When I Cross The Line", a love song dedicated to a deceased woman. "Cupful Of Change", on the other hand, is the only country track in the catalogue, featuring Rowland on slide guitar, who also wraps the spectral "Wooden Leg" in his organ playing.

Groove (1989) marks a brief return to electric rock with the short-lived French Revolution line-up, finding unexpected inspiration in Jimmy Page's guitar work on "Achilles Last Stand". Here too, of course, Sudden's stylistic reference points sit more than a decade behind those of his contemporaries. Even the cover artwork deliberately evokes a compilation by his beloved T-Rex. Despite these anachronisms, and a rhythm section not quite at its best, Groove quickly established itself as Nikki Sudden's best-selling album. The opener "See My Rider" perfectly sums up the shift from the recent past, with a thick wall of guitars that becomes the leitmotif of the entire record.

Having attained cult status on the alternative circuit, the former Swell Maps member was able to surround himself, on The Jewel Thief (1991), with top-tier musicians like Mike Mills and Peter Buck of R.E.M., who during an American tour invited him backstage to talk. The album was recorded at John Keane's studio in Georgia, co-produced by Peter Buck and Nikki Sudden, who as ever made sure not to overlook a single detail of his recorded output. The songs, mostly acoustic, therefore only occasionally brush up against the R.E.M. sound: that's the case, for instance, with "I Belong To You", which wouldn't sound out of place next to "Half A World Away" from "Out Of Time", released the same year. Sudden has other passions besides Stipe, though, and his Rolling Stones-indebted rocker streak comes through in the thrilling "Liquor, Guns & Ammo" and in "Spend Little Gold With Me", which tilts decisively towards the blues.

Nikki Sudden is the only person who ever paid back money I'd lent him.

(Peter Buck, Rem)

By 1993, the time seems right to dust off the Jacobites name. Seven years on, Howling Good Times shows a renewed chemistry between Rowland and Sudden, already evident on the opening track "Don't You Ever Leave Me". The rest of the backing lineup changes completely, now featuring Glenn Tranter (guitar), Carl Eugene Picôt (bass) and Mark Williams (drums). Despite the promising setup, the Jacobites' comeback turns out to be pleasant pop-rock that lacks real bite, with only a handful of tracks on the album memorable enough not to be spoiled by the intrusion of female backing vocals.

Things go decidedly better with Old Scarlett (its title inspired by the name of a gravedigger!), which manages to revive the glam rock atmospheres of the '80s with the drunken boogie of "Over & Over" and the touching gallop of "When Angels Die".

At this point, right after the release of his seventh solo album Seven Lives Later (1997), the tragedy that would mark Nikki Sudden's life forever strikes: Epic Soundtracks is found dead in mysterious circumstances. The loss of his only brother would weigh on his music and his life forever. The most heartfelt tribute comes with the Jacobites' own God Save Us Poor Sinners (1998), an album dedicated to Epic himself, as stated in the liner notes. But words alone aren't enough, so the covers of "She Sleeps Alone" and "The Wishing Well" step in, sung with a lump in the throat.

Devastated by his brother's death, Nikki Sudden abandons the Jacobites project and spends three months in Chicago, where he puts together the new album Red Brocade (1999) with a lineup made up of Ellis Clarke (bass), Kevin Junior (guitar) and Anthony Illarde (drums). Among the many guest musicians is also Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, who contributes a fine harmonica solo on "Silver Blanket" and trades vocals with Sudden on the splendid "Farewell, My Darling". Making the most of his backing band's versatility, Sudden also ventures skilfully into country ("Miss You So") and soul ("Countess") territory. The mixing work gives the instrumentation a clarity that never dulls Sudden's wild rock & roll edge, making Red Brocade one of his cleanest-sounding albums.

As the new millennium begins, between one film cameo and another, Nikki Sudden decides the time is right to put together his own "best of", which he titles Last Bandit (2000) after a Keith Richards bootleg. It's also during this period that work begins on what will become Treasure Island (2002), on which, alongside the returning Dave Kusworth, he enlists the help of his musical heroes Ian McLagan (Small Faces) and Mick Taylor (Rolling Stones). The sound formula – vintage rock – doesn't change, but still manages to deliver unexpected soul inflections, as on "When The Lord".

Sudden pays tribute to the Small Faces with his "Fall Any Further" and to the Stones with "Looking For A Friend", while on "Highway Girl" the heartfelt homage goes to Chuck Berry  and all the founding fathers of rock'n'roll. While almost every one of Nikki Sudden's solo albums features a country song in its tracklist, this time that tendency is confined to the brilliant wildcard that is "Break Up".

The album's title – as had already happened in the past – is a tribute to the writer Robert Louis Stevenson: initially "Stay Bruised" was meant to be the title track, but Nikki decides to change the album's name as soon as he realizes he would have had to spend too much time explaining its meaning to non-English speakers, namely the importance of staying pure while still keeping a "bruise on one's own heart". 

Taken as a whole, Treasure Island gives us a set of genuine rock songs – some truly sublime, like "House Of Cards" and "Sanctified" – that represent the swan song of a musician born in the wrong era, who nevertheless never bowed to market compromises or the aesthetics of the moment, staying forever true to his own definition of rock'n'roll as a way of life. His husky, seductive voice, aimed at the chest like a pistol, was a constant throughout a career built on an old-fashioned romanticism that never knew doubt nor faltering.

In 2006, shortly after completing his autobiography "L'ultimo bandito" and taking part in the album by Italian band Circo Fantasma ("I Knew Jeffrey Lee"), Nikki Sudden is found dead during a US tour, not yet fifty years old. An unstoppable globetrotter, in the final period of his life he was working on a biography of guitarist Ronnie Wood and on an album titled The Truth Does Not Matter. As with his brother Epic, a heart attack proved fatal. If the heart had united them in their sincere passion for a totally independent and free music, it was that same heart which, at the end of their days, managed to reunite them through an incredibly similar death. We like to still picture them as it all began: two brothers in front of the television, struck on the sofa by the sound of Marc Bolan's guitar.

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