YES, the Adam Franklin playing the Blank Club this week is the same one whose band Swervedriver rode the ’90s shoegaze craze into stadium tours and high-profile releases on Creation Records, the be-all, end-all of British hip in that pre-Britpop era. Yes, he knows you think it’s weird. No, he doesn’t care.
“People have said, ‘It’s weird to see you playing in this little club,” says Franklin, “but this is what I’ve always wanted to do.” It may sound like a line, but Franklin seems to have genuinely chosen a working-class musician’s life. He certainly could be touring again with Swervedriver, who reunited in 2008 at Coachella before embarking on a world tour. But instead he’ll be playing the Blank with his backing band the Bolts of Melody, with whom he’s about to release his third solo album under his own name, I Could Sleep for a Thousand Years.
Franklin has no patience for fellow musicians who have let fame go to their heads, and prefers to pal around with folks who take a similar workaday view of their career, like Sam Fogarino of Interpol. Franklin plays with Fogarino in their side project Magnetic Morning.
“He’s somebody who was playing in bands for a lot of years [before Interpol hit it big],” he says. “He doesn’t get a ridiculous, overblown complex about it.”
Over Christmas, Franklin returned to Oxford, where he was able to get some time in with other hometown chaps he’s always found to be down to Earth, like Colin Greenwood of Radiohead and the Coombes brothers from Supergrass. There, he says, “it doesn’t matter who’s selling 8 million records and who’s playing small clubs.”
Oxford was where Franklin formed his first band, Shake Appeal, in 1984—he played guitar while his brother Graham sang lead. Also part of that lineup was Swervedriver’s other future guitarist, Jimmy Hartridge. His brother lost interest after some demos, and other than Franklin and Hartridge, the whole lineup would change before Swervedriver came into its own. Around this time, Creation Records, an indie label that had hit it big with the Jesus & Mary Chain and Primal Scream in the mid-’80s, was single-handedly kick-starting the shoegaze movement, so named because of the subgenre’s abstract, geeked-out guitar wizardry, and its musicians’ habit of staring down at their effects pedals during performances. Creation put out the early My Bloody Valentine records that defined the genre, as well as other key shoegaze bands like Slowdive, the Boo Radleys and Ride. Also from Oxford, the members of Ride got Swervedriver’s demo into the hands of Creation head Alan McGee, who signed them on the strength of their song “Son of Mustang Ford.”
Thus did Swervedriver find itself lumped in with shoegaze, but despite Franklin’s talent for strange and fascinating guitar sounds, it was an uneasy fit (“shoegrunge,” a description that seemed to have been made up purely for the sake of describing Swervedriver, was closer). The band built on the success of singles like “Duel” through the ’90s, but by 1998, Franklin was fed up.
“There were some strange bills we were on,” he says. “I would look out into the crowd and see people wearing T-shirts of bands I didn’t like. I felt like I was in the middle of something that didn’t involve me. I definitely wanted to do something else.”
“Something else” turned out to be his solo project Toshack Highway. The first songs were actually meant for another Swervedriver record, but were deemed unusable since they featured keyboards fed through wah-wah pedals, rather than electric guitars. When the band broke up, Franklin spun them even further away from his previous band’s sound.
“I ended up turning away from electric guitars,” he says. “I confused a lot of Swervedriver fans in the process.”
Interestingly, his solo records have sort of come back around to the Swervedriver sound over the last 10 years, and he says that’s more true than ever on the new record. It was probably influenced, he admits, by playing with his former band mates on the reunion tour.
“I was quite surprised at how fast and loud and heavy the songs were compared to what I was doing in the interim. It’s fun plugging in and playing that loud swirling guitar,” he says. Franklin’s newest songs combine all sides of his complex and varied career, from the big 1995 guitar sound, to his acoustic period in the early 2000s, to the more laid-back fuzz of last year’s Spent Bullets. It’s hard to say where he’ll pop up next—Blank Club or big tour—and what he’ll be playing when he does. He likes it that way.
“If people aren’t really sure what’s going to happen next,” he says, “that’s the perfect thing.”
ADAM FRANKLIN AND THE BOLTS OF MELODY perform Monday, Jan. 18, at the Blank Club, 44 S. Almaden Ave., San Jose. Case in Theory and the Albert Square open at 8pm. Tickets are $18. (408.29.BLANK)
