Swervedriver was coated with 10 years of dust when they took
the stage at Coachella last month. The band—a seminal
coulda-been-a-contender that hazily spun out of the British shoegaze
phenomenon of the early ’90s, but never moved enough units to trade
their cult status for chart success—had been broken up for a
decade, and their afternoon set in the “Mojave” tent was the first of a
string of stateside reunion shows.
No one really cared.
That isn’t to say that the band wasn’t surrounded by fans—a
few hundred loyal supporters were there—but given the size of the
festival (and tent), the band was presented with a blunt reminder that,
despite all the critical prose on their legacy and those desperate
reunion inquiries from fans over the past 10 years, when it comes to
reunions, Swervedriver is not the Police. They aren’t even the
Pixies.
But there should be no pity for the poor alternative rock band whose
reunion is most likely a toothless paper tiger lacking the bite of
bigger artists. Swervedriver frontman Adam Franklin—the formerly
dreadlocked singer whose face was constantly draped in matted hair
during the band’s initial run—is painfully modest in his desire
to get the ol’ band back together. He doesn’t want to be Frank Black
(and of course no one in their right mind wants to be Sting). Instead,
the band’s reformation has more to do with reaching younger fans than
with delivering cheap ’90s nostalgia, or making a desperate cash grab
before the sun sets on the band forever.
“We know big fans of the band that never got to see us play,”
explains Franklin. “There are people looking forward to seeing us
again, but this is for the people who never got to see us. When I saw
the reformed Stooges, that was a band I’d never seen, and it was just
amazing seeing them on stage.”
For a generation of kids (present company included) who were
captivated by the band’s aggressive take on the usually passive
shoegaze genre, this reunion offers us what Iggy’s return offered
Franklin: an opportunity to see a band we thought we’d never see. And
of course, that Coachella show—complete with rolling tumbleweeds
(this can be taken as symbolic, or quite literal, given the desert
location of the festival) during their set—was most likely an
aberration, since the band was hastily added to the bill at the last
minute.
“We weren’t really up to full speed,” says Franklin, regarding their
daytime tent show, a terrible scheduling decision given the band’s
decadent and swirling guitar sound, which works best in a dimly lit
rock club late at night. “The pressure was off us because it’s a
festival. We just went out and did it, really.”
According to Franklin, this second time around for Swervedriver is
an open-ended excursion, and while they primarily want to play for new
faces, they are holding back on future recordings (“There’s no plan to
do anything”), or announcing anything more permanent than a handful of
club shows. Besides, the man is double booked as is, with another solo
record under his name due out soon, plus the Magnetic Morning project
with Interpol drummer Sam Fogarino. But until then—dreads or not,
huge crowds or not—Franklin will resume his role in front of a
band that we’ve waited over a decade to see. There is nothing more
important than that.