Swansea Sound, Quarry House Tavern, Silver Spring MD, June 6, 2024
Of the living musicians I never expected to have a chance to see in concert, one of the most personally interesting to me has always been Amelia Fletcher, the songwriter and singer of Heavenly among dozens of other bands in the Sarah Records universe in Great Britain.
Not only is Fletcher a prolific singer, with numerous bands and dozens of records to her credit, she has one of the
most fascinating resumes in indie music, with a PhD in economics, and recognized as a Commander of the British Empire for her contributions to UK labor and public sector economics research.
Fletcher has so many bands to her credit that it’s hard to keep track, but her two current working units are Catenary Wires, her current band with husband and musical partner, Rob Pursey, and
Swansea Sound, a collaboration with the former singer of the Pooh Sticks, Hue Williams. I had no use at all for the Pooh Sticks, and I never listened to any of their work, but I actually bought the Swansea Sound record on LP during a sale, mostly for the Fletcher connection.
It was a total surprise to me when both Heavenly and Swansea Sound announced their first tour of the United States in dozens of years, and I initially thought this was going to be a tour in which both bands would be featured. To my regret, it was only a Swansea Sound show, in a venue that was as down at heels and authentically indie as any of the scene that the band songs are written about.
The Quarry House Tavern is a 100 year old bar in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, an actual basement bar with no stage and a roof that is so low that several members of the audience had a hard time walking beneath the air-conditioning ducts. Not that the AC did very much good, since the place was sweltering when I arrived. But it’s hard to deny the place’s authenticity. I walked in off the bus from an event in DC still wearing my tie and dress shoes. As I got in,
the Owners were in the middle of a set that featured a Kinks cover, and some of the originals that I saw them play most recently at the Black Cat 35th anniversary.
I only caught a few of their songs before
the Jeanines took the stage. The Jeanines are one of the bands on the Slumberland label whose emails I get, but otherwise are unfamiliar to me. They play the kind of naïve, earnest guitar-based indie pop that has never been fashionable but has a diehard fanbase from its ancestral homelands: Bristol, England, and Olympia, Washington. The Jeanines are actually from Brooklyn, but their sound completely harkened back to the 1990s Sarah Records/K Records ethos and sound with wispy-earnest singing, chunky and rudimentary guitar playing, and a winsome lack of maturity although the band members are full-grown women and men. I found most of the set pleasant but a bit unmemorable.
Following the Jeanines set, I had the chance to speak with Fletcher in the back of the bar, where she was sipping a beer and politely chatting with fans both new and old. Hilariously, one man in the audience had just heard the band on WFMU (shout out to Evan “Funk” Davies) and figured they were a brand new act of 20-year-olds. She was charming and gracious when I chatted with her about playing the
P.U.N.K Girl EP on college radio in the 1990s and following her subsequent career with Marine Research, Catenary Wires, and other acts, while going back in time to get into Tallulah Gosh. Amusingly she asked me if I was still in radio since I’ve been in nonprofit management for almost a quarter-century now. Sigh.
To my disappointment this was not a Heavenly co-headlined show, unlike a prior gig in Brooklyn. This was just Swansea Sound. The entire Swansea Sound show and content is a tribute to a certain era of indie music, and the subject matter is largely an homage to living an indie lifestyle. They have songs about record stores (“MARKING IT DOWN”), going to see bands in tiny basement venues (“SEVEN IN A CAR”), touring on a budget (“PACK THE VAN”), and the memory of one’s favorite band when one was a child, the feeling that music gives you, and whether that will ever come back with the same intensity (“ROCK N ROLL VOID”). Pursey, who apparently writes all the songs, is an indie rock lifer, and most of the content of Swansea Sound is about a life spent in pursuit of independent music and choosing to stay on the margins of the industry, but but he was a quiet presence on guitar while Williams and Fletcher shared vocals.
Being “indie for life” (or as the shirt once put it, “twee as fuck”) is of course a choice; most people don’t pursue music with much intensity or for very long before they retreat entirely from it, or treat it as a side hobby. Playing at Quarry House Tavern is also certainly a choice, as is touring this kind of way given Williams’ and Fletcher’s age and professional credentials. In addition to the tiny size of the venue and the grotty conditions overall, the place was so DIY that audience members squeezed past the band to use the restroom — there was no stage and the band played in an area roughly set aside by ropes.
In the show, Williams is the clear frontman, although he played off Amelia Fletcher as the co-vocalist and periodic foil in back-and-forth lyrical sparring akin to their antecedents in the Human League or the Beautiful South.
She was wearing a Riot Twee t-shirt and playing a guitar with HEY HO LET’S GO on it, and given the decades-long collaboration between her and Williams, there was plenty of cheerful joshing. Hue described her as “from Heavenly, Talulah Gosh, and every other indie band that has ever existed.” And he joked that this was clearly a Swansea Sound show, since at a Heavenly show all the audience members are 16. Williams himself was wearing one of the Swansea Sound “Corporate Indie Band” t-shirts.
The band build in some stagecraft during their set, with a few syncopated dance moves. But as Fletcher observed, to have stagecraft, you need a stage, and she is a very small person, so her gestures were scarcely visible beyond the first row of the audience. But I found all it very entertaining and amusingly self-referential, never more so than the song “The Pooh Sticks,” written by Pursey but sung by Williams about his own band. Even though the songs were simple in construction, the band played energetically and with more skill than their genre demands; Hue even mockingly disparaging the idea that they were a punk band in response to an audience comment.
The set closed with “21st Century” and “Corporate Indie Band,” two statements of sardonic purpose about the function of independent music in a radically unequal music economy driven by streaming superstars. Of course the Swansea Sound record is not on Spotify; as they
tweeted they have
more songs on WFMU than they do on the streaming service.
Full setlist of the Swansea Sound show
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/10/2024 09:59PM by zwirnm.
