Pere Ubu's first singles

Pere Ubu formed from the ashes of singer David Thomas's and guitarist Peter Laughner's previous band Rocket from the Tombs, a less obviously art-warped proposition modeled on the raw power of the Stooges and MC5. Pere Ubu's inaugural act was recording one of Rocket from the Tombs' least characteristic tunes as a single. In Ubu's rendition, "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" - an attempt to create the "total sonic environment" inside American bombers as they set off on their World War II mission to flatten Japan's capital - became even more eccentric. It starts out like some loping, rhythmically sprained hybrid of Black Sabbath and reggae, speeds up a bit, dissolves into free-form splinters, flips back to avant-skank, lurches into a sort of doom-laden canter, then expires in a spasm of blistered feedback. Over six minutes long and almost prog in its structural strangeness, "30 Seconds" sounded about as far removed from the Ramones as, say, Yes did.

Pere Ubu - 30 Seconds Over Tokyo 1975

The band's next two singles, "Final Solution" and "Street Waves", sold very well in the U.K. and Ubu's first tour there in the spring of 1978 was greeted as the Second Coming. Emerging bands like Joy Division and Josef K were in the audiences, assimilating Tom Herman's fractured guitar, Tony Maimone's baleful bass-as-melody approach, and the ominous atmosphere of song like "Real World" and "Chinese Radiation".

Pere Ubu - Final Solution 1976


Pere Ubu - Street Waves 1976


Pere Ubu - Real World 1978


Pere Ubu - Chinese Radiation 1978

Swell Maps

Teenagers growing up in Solihull -  a middle class suburb on the edge of the Midlands industrial city Birmingham - Swell Maps were a gang of friends centered around two brothers who hated their given surname (Godfrey) so much they renamed themselves Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks.

Pooling their savings and borrowing some from the Godfreys' parents, Swell Maps pressed two thousand copies of their debut, "Read About Seymour". Released on the group's own label, Rather, the single is often said to be about Seymour Stein, founder of the New Wave-friendly U.S. label Sire, who'd signed Talking Heads and the Ramones. 

Actually, the title refers to a totally different Seymour Stein, this one known as "the king of mods" in 1960s England. The lyrics, though, were composed in cut-up fashion.

Swell Maps - Read About Seymour - 1977

Swell Maps were obsessed with war, but in a whimsical and boyishly innocuous way. "Then Poland", "Midget Submarines" and "Ammunition Train" drew on military history (especially the Spanish succession wars of the early eighteenth century) and the boys' adventure story character Biggles, also a fighter pilot.

Swell Maps - Midget Submarines - 1979


Swell Maps - Ammunition Train - 1978

The Maps also loved Gerry Anderson's marionette TV shows of the sixties, Thunderbirds and Stingray. A Stingray episode provided the title for Swell Maps' debut album, A Trip to Marineville.

Along with their pals the Television Personalities, Swell Maps invented a whole strand of postpunk that made a fetish of naiveté, characterized by weak vocals, shaky rhythms, rudimentary droning basslines and fast-strummed discords. For believers, much more than the "sped-up heavy metal" that was first-wave punk, this was the true realization of the here's-three-chords-now-start-a-band ethos - except some of the groups didn't even have three chords. 

"It took me two years to learn two chords", Sudden told NME. "I can't even see ourselves becoming polished, note perfect and all that. We hardly ever rehearse - about once every six months".

Fervent amateurists, Swell Maps believed bands got ruined when they depended on playing gigs and releasing records in order to make a living. One of the reasons the group split, shortly before the release of their second album Jane From Occupied Europe, was that they were becoming too successful, with a tour of America looming.

Many of the groups in Swell Maps' wake, though, went a step further and equated amateurism with amateurishness, the deliberate avoidance of anything that smacked of professionalism or slickness. From the liberating declaration that "anyone can do it", DIY became a confining injunction to sound like anyone can do it.

Swell Maps were always more expansive and experimental than this: for every frantic racket such as "Let's Build a Car", there was an eerie metallic instrumental, such as "Big Empty Field", clangorous and full of cavernous hollows, the missing link between Neu! and Sonic Youth.

Swell Maps - Let's Build a Car - 1979


Swell Maps - Big Empty Field - 1980