King Swamp – King Swamp (1989)
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Introduction
I had a few options swirling around my head, but when Foggy pointed out that there had only been five selections from the 1980s, that sealed my choice.
I bought this album in 1989 after reading a couple of positive reviews, and to be honest, after a couple of plays, I didn’t really get it. It was one of my final vinyl purchases (having already moved to CDs in 1986), and I didn’t hear anything that made me think that it was worth the effort of slipping it out of the sleeve and putting it on my plasticky turntable.
And then in the 1990 season finale of
Miami Vice, as Crockett and Tubbs roared over a bridge to the pounding drums and driving guitar of “Year Zero”, it made me want to revisit the album and see if I’d missed something.
I had. It’s a masterpiece. I recorded it to tape and spent nearly two years playing that cassette in my car or at home as I hunted down a CD copy in every record shop in Manchester. One day, the miracle happened – sometime in April/May 1992, HMV on market Street had two copies of the album! The green on the band’s logo had changed to a nice purple, and my wait was rewarded with a bonus track, “Glow”, that didn’t appear on the vinyl version.
The Band
King Swamp was the brainchild of Gang of Four founder, Dave Allen, and Steve Halliwell who had been in Shriekback with Allen. After a tour of the states, Allen and Halliwell spent some time hanging around in Louisiana, soaking up the local music and tales of voodoo and zombies. They poured all of this experience into writing songs for an album and were joined by ex-Shriekback member, Martyn Barker, on drums. Dominic Miller, who has had a low-key solo career but has also been Sting’s main guitar player for over 30 years, handles guitars, which just left the vocals.
Allen and Halliwell spent over a year trying to find a vocalist who matched the lofty ambitions of their songs until finally they found Walter Wray. And what a voice this guy has! Whilst King Swamp would only record one more album after their debut, and Wray went on to record a very good solo album with Miller (
Foxgloves and Steel Strings), I’m gobsmacked that another band didn’t pick him up as a vocalist.
Interesting fact: The band’s name is a play on The Band song “King Harvest”, which I hadn’t heard until it came up in the Top 1000 albums thread, but it’s a song I now love.
The Album
Mixed by the legendary Bob Clearmountain, the album has a terrific classic rock feel with a few interesting twists.
It opens with the more commercial-sounding singles “Is This love?” and “Blown Away”, but really hits its stride in a heavyweight middle-section that recalls Led Zeppelin at their finest.
“Widders Dump”, inspired by Russel Hoban’s novel
Riddley Walker, starts with some epic lonesome Dobro from Miller and builds into something more powerful with Wray’s snarling vocal and Barker’s thumping drums – a latter-day “When the Levee Breaks”. This is followed up by the aforementioned “Year Zero”, a dynamic rocker whose lyrics, along with the title, are clearly inspired by Pol Pot’s devastation of Cambodia:-
Year Zero and I’m back in the fields
Demolishing history for a new regime
What were our virtues are now our sins
The bad move out and the worse move in
The lyrics even go on to tip a nod to Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness, and another fantastic element of this song is the chain-gang vocals that punctuate each line of the verse – a trick that is repeated on the equally good “Motherlode”. Just listen to that groovy bass and twang that starts “Motherlode”, and when Walter Wray sings the refrain: “The government got my money; juju man’s got my soul”, you know you’ve got a different version of 80s rock and roll. To think, I’ve seen a pithy comment online that refers to King Swamp as a “faceless AOR ploy”!
The keyboard-driven “Lousiana Bride” brings a barrel-load of cultural and mystical influences into the mix with its zombie brides, gris-gris, alligator teeth, devil’s shoestring, bayous, Mama-Louis and Papa Chickenshack.
The bonus track “Glow” is a nice change of pace with some spooky guitar to accompany the fevered dreams and nightmares of somebody “down in a bunker with a double key”. Nice gloomy stuff!
Final Thoughts
King Swamp is a showcase for Dominic Miller’s guitar skills – it’s no wonder Sting snapped him up shortly after this album. The songs are brilliant, and high on atmospheric lyrics – which I love, even if they don’t always make literal sense – and both the arrangements and performances are top-drawer. Riding on top of all this is Walter Wray’s epic vocal talent. There are so many reasons why this album sits proudly in my top five of all time.
It’s not as slick as most rock that was around in the mid to late 80s, but neither is it as left-field as the alternative rock bands of the time. Whilst it isn’t as revolutionary as the grunge that would follow within two years, it does feature some satisfying crunchy guitars. I’d say that King Swamp sits in a middle ground between slick and raw, and The Cult would probably be the best reference point.
I don’t think it’s everybody’s cup of tea, and I think some will still find it a bit too commercial, but I’m hoping that some of you can appreciate why I think it’s a lost classic.
