Swn Diaries // Day 1

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Photographs courtesy of Jonathan Fisher.

When we get to Swn, it is uncommonly early. Those of you unfortunate enough to have ever gone travelling with me will testify that, with Megabus booking in hand, my normal grace and poise (ahem) morph into what some with a looser grasp of the implications of such might term “fascism”. Having legged it for the coach (I have packed for three weeks, and it doesn’t half hinder my athletic (desperately unfit) sprint (plundering) down Victoria towards the coach station), we arrive, knackered and parched, and head straight for Dempsey’s. Here they have a lovely photocopied poster up for their indie disco, Twisted By Design (prizes for guessing which band sung that lyric), where it says they play The National on the dancefloor. Thus I have already decided this is my favourite pub ever, a decision which is only proven correcter when we visit the wristbanding table in the back, and the yellow-t-shirted Swn volunteers agree to stash our silly amount of baggage for the day. Aah, say my shoulders. We are not meeting lovely Jen Long (presenter extraordinaire of TLOBF’s podcast and general music goddess) until 6pm as she (unlike us skivers) is at work.

So into Cardiff we go, straight to Spillers in its new arcade premises. They have dreamy stock, and it takes a lot to stop myself going I’LLAVALLOFIT (the tasty new Y Niwl album for a starter, and Sweet Baboo’s too), so we abscond and look at its old location around the corner, all sadly boxed in with orange plastic traffic atrocities, ready to be eaten alive by the new shopping centre, which we stroll through to exercise our “urgh shopping centres have no personality”-whingeing urges. Then, at 4pm (we have waited two hours, ok?) it’s back to Dempsey’s for a pint, where we see John Rostron – he, along with Huw Stephens, is the grandaddy of Swn – spraying little black Swn logos on the pavement, tagging the city with his chalky (it will wash away in two days) paint.

Brown Brogues

The next bit goes walk to Jen’s house (lots of grumbling, ow my shoulders, what do you MEAN, you only THINK you know where you’re going), pizza, beer, Jen hand-numbering mix CDs for Flux=Rad on Saturday, taxi back to town, then our first band, Brown Brogues in Undertow (the basement of 10 Feet Tall). They are two men with one guitar, and a floor tom, snare, tambourine and cymbal, the latter four of which their drummer bashes giddily like a two year old Animal discovering the pots and pans for the first time. They’re all a-wash with fuzz and clatter and racket, and we whisper about No Age and Queens Of The Stone Age and Thee Oh Sees, and I write something in my notebook about wanting to roll around in their fuzz, but that might have just been the beer talking.

Then we trundle across town (my, it is cold) to see Sun Drums in The Model Inn. In the programme, it says that they’re from Liverpool and make atmospheric indie. This does not bode well. However, they’re actually much, much better than that sounds, and it is an apt description, but instead of drony choruses and epic instrumentation that wants to tickle every rafter of a stadium, they sit their songs atop fiddly, warm electronic bits, and the singer has a lovely, birdlike and cooing voice (which occasionally is a little bit too birdy). We’re all in agreement that they are very good, and that in a year, they might even be excellent.

I have been all over the internet writing about how much I frickin’ love Chad Valley recently, and tonight is no exception. Despite mine and Jen’s best efforts to shake it at the front, there are far too few people dancing, which is a crime when presented with a man who makes lovely slippy disco that reminds me of Active Child, Studio and Hall & Oates (and Miami, the place, which is odd as I have never been nor seen Miami Vice). He has a wondrous voice too, and has a trick known as “yoghurting”, whereby he makes sounds that could be words, but aren’t really. Alas, he cannot stay, as he must catch a train back to Oxford.

Chad Valley

Having been on a shopping spree on Shape Records’ website last week and bought all the Attack + Defend I could get my mitts on (two of Islet are in Attack + Defend, and I LOVE Wimmy an awful lot), we venture upstairs in the Model Inn, but it is rammed, we cannot see, so we find Jon Hillcock and talk about magazines and radio and the horrible “ME I AM FIRST” culture of some blogs. And remark that one of Attack + Defend’s songs perfectly fits one of Lenny Kravitz’s, which Jonathan demonstrates with aplomb.

Trundling thirty seconds down the road from the Model Inn (still enough time for a lot of grumbling about how cold it is), we try and squeeze into Y Fuwch Goch (prize if you can say that) for Tall Ships. I am intrigued, as they are from Cornwall (like me), and I saw them a fair old while ago and didn’t think they were much cop, to be honest. But then Big Scary Monsters sent me their new EP, There Is Nothing But Chemistry Here, and I started to swallow my words, one by one. As they start playing tonight, I am ramming whole fistfuls of “meh” and “they were alright”s down my gullet, as they are PHENOMENAL (as the heaps and heaps of bodies in the room will testify). The first bit of my notes says “fuck me, look at you, Cornwall!” (not like that), as the three young chaps on stage (the singer is 24 today, one of them notes), hop between instruments, noodling out songs that have certainly heard pre-Antidotes Foals, but are pushing them into almost post-rocky, maybe emo (the nice kind) territory. Without being pseudo about it, they really understand progression in songs (but not prog, no), scaling those heart-burstingly lovely peaks and troughs that make you screw up your face and think YES. Some of their songs have words, some don’t, and as well as the spikiness, they remind me of that lovely vague quality that Foals have, where they use a lot of empty but beautiful metaphors for you to squeeze your own private angsts and troubled thoughts into and feel as if their songs are your own. I take it all back, Tall Ships are fucking brilliant.

Sun Drums

Back upstairs in the Model Inn, Bellini cannot match Tall Ships one jot, particularly because they have a name like a posh girly cocktail, but actually sound like a much less good Shellac (much less good). But Swn is no time for negativity as there’s so much fun and brilliance around that to be grumbling about the few bands you don’t like takes time away from squiffing out adjectives about those that you do, so we run away to “Chippy Lane”, lament the fact that Dorothy’s (best chips in Cardiff, says Jonathan) does not have seats (and did I say it was cold, and that we will not be eating outside?), so we go to Tony’s instead, and stuff our faces with fishcakes and battered sausage (whilst worrying about the health of some wacky students painted blue and not wearing very many clothes at all), before finding Jen and heading back to sleep. Ah Swn, you are dreamy thus far.

Head back here tomorrow to read about me embarrassing myself whilst trying to talk on a panel (probably), and read of Visions Of Trees, Truckers Of Husk, and more tales from Chippy Lane.

For snap judgements and drunken silliness throughout Swn, you can follow me on Twitter.