By Vincent Arquillière
Very happy to have been able to chat (remotely) with Sean Kirkpatrick and Monte Vallier about the Swell tribute European tour to David Freel this April, passing through France. They will be in particular on April 18 at Petit Bain, in Paris.
It is 2 p.m. in California, 11 p.m. in France, we launch a video call on a famous social network that we will not name. Two faces appear on the screen, thousands of miles away. Sean Kirkpatrick is apparently at home, and Monte Vallier in his car (“stopped”, he specifies to reassure his colleague). We offered the legendary Swell ex-drummer and bassist a little chat a few weeks before the Sunshine Everyday Tour, their European reunion mini-tour which will of course pass through France (all the dates are here). Obviously, David Freel, singer, guitarist and only permanent member of the group, will not be traveling since he died a year ago. A bit like for Morphine (without Mark Sandman), or more recently the Swell Maps (without Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks) and TV Personalities (without Dan Treacy even if he is still alive), it is not for ex-members to capitalize on the legend, but simply to bring a repertoire to life on stage for a few evenings by paying homage to those who are no longer there. And if there is a country where Swell was understood, appreciated and supported, it is France. There is therefore reason to rejoice in this unexpected return, despite an absence that is impossible to fill.
Selected pieces.
Monte: At first, we thought it would be impossible. How can we replace David Freel? Sean and I knew we couldn’t take a singer out of nowhere. We thought about it for a few months, we thought of people from the same scene as us like Mark Kozelek (ex-Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon) or Mark Eitzel (ex-American Music Club), even Thom Yorke (smile)… And then Sean called Swell’s original guitarist, John Dettman-Lytle [he played on the album “…Well?”, NDLR]. He was ready to join us and to play the role of singer, which made it possible to concretize this idea of tour. Prior to Swell’s formation, he lived with David, who taught him to play the guitar. He knows his personality, the nuances of his singing. It struck us as the perfect choice. Of course, nobody can sound like David but John is doing a really good job, and we’ll be singing all the backing vocals to support him [Niko Wenner, also a member of Oxbow and who played on the album “For All the Beautiful People” in 1998, will complete the training, Editor’s note].
Sean: We try to organize concerts in the United States as well. Playing in California would be easy enough, touring in such a big country much less… Ideally, we would like to do at least one date in San Francisco and one in Los Angeles when we return from the European tour to take advantage of the energy and of the cohesion that we will have acquired.
A final tribute to David Freel
Monte: Once we make those dates, we don’t intend to carry on as if the band had reformed. It’s just a tribute to David and it should be particularly moving for us to play these songs again. It is also the opportunity to play together again, once again, which had not happened for thirty years. And of course there won’t be a new Swell album, how would that be possible without him? On the other hand, we explore the archives to find all the pieces that remained unfinished and all the tracks of David’s voice. Sean and I will try to finish the songs to release a posthumous collection next year. And that should stop there, the idea is not to relaunch Swell. However, it would be interesting to work on the back catalog if we have the possibility: bring out the albums that are no longer available, maybe make a box set, that kind of thing…
Sean: There is an unfinished song that we would particularly like to release. We just want to revive David’s legacy, his music and also his lyrics. For the first time, I really paid attention to his lyrics and was very impressed with his writing skills, he was particularly good. He read Charles Bukowski a lot and it shows. David was a personality, with good and bad. Someone unique. We have had some difficult times together, and some really incredible ones. When we rehearsed for this tour and played “What I Always Wanted”, we all felt the power of his compositions.
Monte: We will only play from the first four albums, because then Sean was no longer in the band. I was still present on the next one, “For All the Beautiful People”, then Sean came back and participated in a duet with David on “Whenever You’re Ready” in 2003. For my part, I had played on “Everybody Wants to Know”, the sixth album released in 2001, but David and I then broke off our relations and he then erased my parts! He had rewritten everything.
Big in France?
Monte: In the 90s, things were going pretty well for us in France. We also had an audience following us in Germany and the Netherlands, with a somewhat cult band status. In fact, we had fans all over Western Europe, Scandinavia and Great Britain. But France was particularly receptive to our music.
Sean: I remember that the newspaper “Liberation” supported us a lot. More broadly, Swell has always had motivated fans who really cared about the music. We were probably too apart, too isolated to reach a very large audience, but I know that we meant a lot to some people. The emails and messages on social networks that I have received in recent years attest to this. It makes me very happy and it motivated me to mount this tour.
Monte: It’s hard to remember just one memory of our concerts in France… We played in big festivals, the Eurockéennes de Belfort or the Route du rock de Saint-Malo, and in other smaller ones, in Lille, Toulouse , Bordeaux… We also keep very strong memories of a Black session at Bernard Lenoir. We felt like we were really an underground band and we were always amazed to see so many spectators. We hope that will be the case again with this tour.
It was also an opportunity to meet French musicians, who were sometimes fans of our music. I had also produced Erik Arnaud’s second album, a good experience. Otherwise, I remember that we had played the same poster as the Little Rabbits, Les Thugs… I don’t remember all the groups, but there are some with whom we stayed in contact.
Recordings of sounds and cinematographic atmospheres
Sean: On the first albums, we sometimes integrated ambient sounds, picked up in the street, into our songs, to give them a certain atmosphere. There was such an intensity in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco anyway, when we had our studio there, that it could only seep into our music. The area was dark and dangerous. The studio was in the middle of it all. It was located on the second floor and we constantly heard noises, cries of junkies, gunshots… For “A Town”, a track from the first album, David had just wanted to capture sounds through the window and integrate them into the music. For “The Sick Half of a Church”, also on the first album, he had recorded a guy yelling, very angry… We liked the result very much and we continued this idea on the next album, on which Monte and I were more involved.
Monte: Originally, David was a director, he had studied at the Santa Barbara film school. He composed the music for his films himself, and even before the formation of Swell, he was already capturing a lot of sounds, street atmospheres, for his productions. He said that in the end he did not become a filmmaker because his music was better than his films. He therefore preferred to focus on the former.
Sean: He was also a big fan of “The Dark Side of the Moon” by Pink Floyd, a record in which there are a lot of noises integrated into the music. At the start of Swell, he said, “Let’s do ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ 2!” ” (smile)
Monte: I hadn’t joined the band yet, but Sean and I made music together long before Swell. In 1981, we were already on stage together!
Sean: Basically, it’s a family affair!
Success/Failure
Sean: I remember that David and I didn’t really believe that Swell could have massive success, whereas Monte had a more precise idea of what the group should do. So we should have listened to him more! (laughs) I know that for David, touring or giving interviews did not come naturally. Myself, I had to stop in the middle of an American tour because I was exhausted, we had played for two months in Europe and we were still doing two months of concerts… And I left before the end of the recording from “Too Many Days Without Thinking”. I have some regrets, but hey, “c’est la vie” (in French)… We are a cult band, that’s already it!