Interview by Mickaël Mottet
Interview with Monte Vallier (bass), Sean Kirkpatrick (drums), John Dettman-Lytle (vocals, guitar) and Niko Wenner (guitar) by Mickaël Mottet, with the benevolent presence of Renée Clancy.
Sean and Monte sit in front of the screen. They look relaxed. There are wooden beams on the ceiling; we feel that the atmosphere is warm, in the house near Le Mans where they are rehearsing for the David Freel tribute tour which starts in a few days.
Renée: I don’t know if you remember, but ADA is the French webzine that released a tribute album to 41.
Monte: Yes, I remember! It was great to hear these reviews. Some of these songs are very hard to play. “Here it is” is hard; “You’re so right” is really hard to play too. For “(It’s time to) Move on”, it’s a question of atmosphere. You have to know how to find the right mood.
Mickaël: It’s my favorite song from Swell, I think.
Sean: “Move on”, we are going to play it. But there are other songs that we wouldn’t be able to do. Can you come see us? Where do you live ?
Mickaël: In Malta. But you are welcome whenever you want. You could play on the roof!
Sean: It would be coherent: the very first concerts of Swell in Europe took place on a roof terrace in Spain. I lived in an apartment in the north of the country, near San Sebastian. David and I had made the first album in the United States, then I had moved to Spain, where I had found a job as an English teacher. David came to visit me and we rehearsed for two weeks on the roof of the building.
Mickaël: How did you find yourself working as an English teacher in Spain? Did you leave the United States intentionally?
Sean: I’ll give you the short version. I wanted to go to art school in London. I’ve been there many times before, and every time through customs I’ve been stripped of my clothes and searched and questioned, because my name is Sean Aaron Kirkpatrick, a name which sounds very Irish. However, at the time, the IRA killed many English people. Anyway, I enrolled in an art school; as usual through customs, interrogation, etc., except this time they sent me back to France, where I had flown to London. I thought to myself, what the fuck am I going to do now? The school was prepaid. Fortunately, I had met a guy from northern Spain the day before my departure: I called him, and he said, come visit me in San Sebastian. I went there, I fell in love with it, and it found me a job as an English teacher. I stayed there for two years.
I had gone home in the summer to make a record with David: Swell’s first album. I spent the whole summer with David, then I came back to Spain to get back to work. David mixed the record and sent me a bunch of copies, which I took to Belgium, where we had managed to find a producer. That’s why David came to meet me there.
Mickaël: And you, Monte, how did you join Swell?
Monte: I was a publicist in the music business. I did all the radio and press promotion for Swell’s debut album. But I already knew the guys, Sean and I had played together in several bands since 1981. I even played with David on some of his demos in 1987, 88, a few years before Swell. Sean met David around this time and said, hey, I know a bass player. So it was in San Francisco that it all started. The first album did very well on college radio and in the press. When the guys came back from Spain, it became necessary to form a real band, because we had concerts already closed.
There was a magazine in San Francisco that wanted us on the cover. I said to Sean and David, well, we’re going to make the cover of a magazine. More than forming a group. What we did, about an hour before the photoshoot! As for John Dettman, who will sing and play guitar on this tour, he was an old friend of mine from Santa Barbara, who had just moved to San Francisco and shared a loft with David. We said to him, well, you are part of the group. You will be the guitarist. And here we are 30 years later with the original line-up, completed by our guitarist friend Niko, who was part of Swell from 1993 to 2003. So this is the original Swell. Except for David, who is there spiritually.
Mickaël: Who sings?
Sean: John, mainly. He also plays acoustic guitar, it’s “the David”. John lived with David, as I said, and David taught John how to play the guitar. David was a kind of mentor for John. They are something like six years apart. John admired David, and he understood him. I think John has a good idea of how to fit into David’s clothes, although it’s far from obvious.
Mickaël: It must be a fine line, to pay true homage without falling into caricature.
Sean: Our goal is to sound as Swell as possible. By having brought together the original rhythm section, with also Niko who knows these songs by heart, and John, who has fully integrated himself, and is doing very well. People will be able to close their eyes and say, OK, I’m listening to Swell.
Mickaël: It’s so moving. So moving to hear you talk about all this. How did the idea come about?
Monte: Before David died. Sean, David and I had been trying to put on a tour. We almost got there, in 2017. After his death, our booker in Belgium, Peter Verstraelen, asked us if we still wanted to go on tour. We asked ourselves the question; did we have to do something? If yes, with which singer? We thought of Thom Yorke, Mark Kozelek, Mark Eitzel. Eventually, Sean pitched the idea to John. It was all natural. After that, Peter spent a lot of time trying to convince programmers to take that risk. People were very skeptical. “How are you going to get there, without David?”
Michael: Really? It’s amazing.
Monte: But Peter is an excellent agent. He managed to find enough dates for us to come.
Sean: It was very moving to embark on this project. A week after David died, I listened to “What I always wanted”, and I collapsed. I thought to myself, we have to do something. We have to play, while it’s still fresh in our hearts, and in mind.
Mickaël: On April 12, it will be a year since David died. That evening you will play in Germany. How do you anticipate this particular evening? The whole tour will be, of course. But it will be even heavier that day.
Sean: Of course. I see this tour as a whole as a memorial. That night will be just a little more poignant. Bielefeld is a small university town, I’m not sure we fill the room. It would have been great to play in Paris on April 12, but whatever, we’re going to have a great time together and of course David will be very present that day. I would like to do a kind of small ceremony, before the show. Just to let people know that this concert is a tribute to our friend, David; without falling into gloom, into the morbid, but simply to commemorate it.
Sean sheds a tear, an angel passes by.
Mickaël: What songs are you going to play, how is the selection made?
Monte: We naturally know which songs are too fragile to play, because we’ve tried them before. “Smile my friend”, for example. “You’re so right”, the same, it’s unplayable. We simply chose the songs with which the connection was the strongest. Without David, we didn’t want to get too complicated. We wanted to keep a certain spontaneity. We have selected about twenty songs. We can even play more of it, if people ask us to.
Sean: We play songs from each of the first four records. There are a lot of “41s”. There are at least four songs from each disc, but “41” probably has the most. As for “…Well”, we play it almost entirely. “…Well” is the liveliest sounding album, so it was the easiest to get into.
Monte: We’re not necessarily going to play the songs that people want to hear. “You’re so right”, we played it maybe five times in all and for all. It must be said that we mainly wrote in the studio. Swell has never been the kind of band that does jam sessions. We were still working on tape.
Mickaël: It’s true that a song like “Get high” sounds very live, whereas further on in your discography, especially on “For All The Beautiful People”, we feel that the studio and the production are fully part of it. identity of the group.
Monte: Yes, exactly. And then we play songs from the first four records, because those are the records we were on. Sean left before “For All The Beautiful People”, me after, when it got really heavy with David.
Mickaël: Sometimes Jim Putnam (of Radar Bros) imitates David Freel’s tour character: he screws a cap on his head, crosses his arms, and doesn’t say a word for the next 10 minutes. Is it a faithful imitation?
Monte: Yes, especially during this tour. We played 30 dates in Europe with Radar Brothers, we got to know each other very well. David liked to remain silent, he liked to be alone. He never felt comfortable being on tour, nor on stage. He didn’t like talking to people. He especially disliked doing interviews. He always said to me, “I’m not going to do this one, you go.” It was his personality, but at times he was hilarious.
Sean: He was uncomfortable in the spotlight. He was not always an exemplary friend. But at other times he was incredibly warm, supportive, curious, eager for knowledge. He was a complicated person.
Mickaël: When I met David Freel, I tried to explain to him how important “41” was to me. He remained stoic, taciturn. He ended up opening up when I told him about Saint-Etienne, its working-class culture, its mining past. He raised his cap and said to me, “There, you interest me!” Does it reveal his personality? Was he interested in politics, in history?
Sean: Yes. David was a very cultured man. He read constantly, he was extremely intelligent. He often talked about history and politics, he was really curious about that kind of thing. He would often surprise me: we were passing somewhere and suddenly he would explain something to us related to the history of that place, because he had read it in an Ernest Hemingway novel or something like that. He was also interested in financial information. On tour, I would buy the Herald Tribune, and I would always throw out the financial section. He was like, “You’re crazy, that’s the most interesting part!”
Monte: He also read The Economist. I even think he was subscribed.
Mickaël: How long had it been since the last time you listened to Swell, before starting this tour?
Sean: I don’t listen to Swell much. I probably stopped listening after David pissed me off. It’s a memory that’s still bittersweet, to this day. My kids listen to it, though. I have a 12 year old boy and a 20 year old boy, and they have been listening to Swell on and off for 10 years. Now that we had to relearn or rediscover the songs, I obviously listened to the first four albums. I don’t mean to sound presumptuous, but I’m proud of what we’ve done. The first four albums stand the test of time. I’m happy to play them for all the people who will be there.
Monte: I still work in the music industry, I have a recording studio, and I am surrounded by musicians all the time. And there are a lot of people who know about Swell’s albums, so we often end up talking about it. But I hadn’t listened to them carefully for at least 10 years. In 2017, when we were talking about touring, I started listening to them again, to relearn all the bass lines.
Mickaël: The story of Swell could be summed up by the formula of John Peel, who called you “the next, next big thing”. There was a sort of curse above the group.
Monte: There was a moment when the tide was turning in our favor. We were signed to a major record company, we received an advance for a recording… And at that time, it made David want to crawl into a hole. He appreciated that attention, of course, but then he rebelled against it all, and he did everything he could to scuttle himself. He didn’t feel like he deserved that recognition. He spent his time digging holes in it…until it deflated.
Mickaël: In a way, David reminds me of Mark Linkous.
Monte: I agree. Self-destructive personalities. If David had been bassist, guitarist, maybe it would have worked, but as a singer, you can really damage the image of the band if you spend your time sabotaging. He didn’t want to be the singer. He always said, “Let’s get a singer”.
Sean: Recently, David’s fiancée told us that David wanted Swell to continue without him, and do concerts. I did not know. David had told her, “I would love to be in the audience.”
John Dettman-Lytle and Niko Wenner enter the room, Sean and Monte invite them to pass in front of the camera. Smiling, Niko (who is also one of the founding members of Oxbow) seems experienced in the exercise; John, his head bent forward, a lock of hair over his eyes, is very impressively fragile. It is inhabited, clearly.
Mickaël: John, how do you approach taking over the voices of David?
John: I never really thought of myself as a singer. I think it is important to imitate it to a certain extent. I think his accent, and certain ways he pronounces the words, are crucial. I have no pride, I just want to do my best to make it sound like him. You know, he taught me to play the guitar. It is important that I try to get as close as possible to his rhythm. He had a very unique way of strumming the strings, which he showed me sometimes. We were roommates at the time of the first record, in a loft at 41 Turk Street, with his fiancée.
Mickaël: How are the rehearsals going for you?
Niko: It’s – sorry to be mystical – quite deep. I played live with Swell for 10 years, between 93 and 2003. So replaying those songs from 25 years ago is a bittersweet experience, but one that invokes David, of some way. There is a certain camaraderie between the four of us. Music is beyond language. It is a form of communication older than language. It’s strange, and beautiful, and a bit scary.
Mickaël: I’m going to ask you the same question I asked Sean and Monte just now. Have you listened to Swell a lot in recent years? And, subsidiary question, what is your favorite piece of Swell?
John: I’ve always listened to Swell. Even after leaving the band, I had a desire to listen to Swell. When I was invited to go on this tour about a year ago, it was incredible news, for me, a huge honor. I told them, “Are you kidding me?” I live in Las Vegas, and I play Swell’s songs on the street. I play them in neighborhoods where there are homeless people, hard, dirty places. This is the perfect environment for these songs. My favorite song is “At long last”. Because that’s kind of my story. At long last, I am again in this group.
Niko: I was quite far from Swell. I have my own band, Oxbow, in San Francisco. I really focused on that and walked away from Swell. I learned so much about acting and writing watching Monte, David and Sean. These are very nostalgic memories. My favorite song is “Everyday sunshine”, and in general, all the most mystical, most emotional songs.
Mickaël: Monte, your favorite song?
Monte: I would probably say “What I always wanted”. For me, this is the epitome of Swell. But my favorite Swell record remains “For All The Beautiful People”.
Mickaël: Mine too.
Monte: Most people think it’s a weird record. I’m biased, though, because it’s the album where I’ve written the most stuff.
Mickaël: What made me love this album even more than the others was listening to it in its entirety, and in the car.
John: Yes, for example it’s a good way to appreciate “Oh my my”. It’s one of my favorite songs too.
Mickaël: Are you going to record upcoming concerts?
Monte: Yes, we are going to make good multitrack recordings of certain dates. We will probably publish some of them on our website. Many thanks to Gérald for this unique opportunity.