You have no individual mind. You’re an Amoeba.

I’ve spent most of my life in Peterborough, a city (and it’s only just a city) that for all its flaws, always remains just about interesting enough to keep me here. Too far south to be considered authentically northern, it's also too far north to be comfortably southern. Historically divided between two counties, it’s also awkwardly not quite positioned in either the East Midlands or East Anglia. A home to countless immigrant communities, it remains stolidly Anglo-Saxon. Usually Tory, but frequently Labour, it’s an old working class town in a sea of gentrified suburbs.

It’s really a kind of English everytown, with every social and economic trend of the last fifty years making a mark on its fabric. If anything, what makes it so unusual is its remorseless usualness. That, and the fact that it has managed to keep most of its industry - indeed during the Seventies and Eighties, one of its claims to fame was that on a per capita basis, its export earnings were reputed to be greater than Japan’s.

The Seventies and Eighties were times of great dynamic change for the city. Peterborough had been designated a "New Town" in the 1960’s, and the following decades were the era when the Peterborough Development Corporation set to work laying out the housing estates and business parks to house and provide work for the "overspill" populations, mainly from London, but also from as far afield as Manchester and Glasgow. As most of its historic centre was preserved, the city, far from being a modernist Year Zero in the manner of Milton Keynes, became a strange mixture of the ancient and modern, and this is reflected in its social life. One of the remarkable aspects of the place is that if you go to any of the town centre pubs, the accent you are still most likely to hear is the old local Fenland accent. Visit any of the new estates that ring the centre, and you’ll find them eerily quiet. What do these people, the incomers, do with themselves? It was this strange gulf between the traditional life of the old town, and the weirdly disembodied unlife of the new one, that no doubt inspired Peterborough’s greatest gift to the world of pop.

Nobody understood Sudden Sway during their active period in the 1980’s, and it’s easy to see why. Heavily conceptual, always obscure, their career was marked by what seemed to be bizarrely self-defeating marketing initiatives that appeared to explode in their faces. What wasn’t apparent then, but is obvious now, is that Sudden Sway possessed an unusual prescience. During the dawn of neoliberalism, they had already seen through it, and into the incoherence that it masked.



Sudden Sway liked to portray themselves as a corporation. This was nothing new for a post-punk band of course. Public Image Limited and the British Electric Foundation adopted corporate veneers as a means of intimidatory self-aggrandisation; to project a kind of world-conquering invulnerability (however ironically). The Residents had utilised the idea of the corporation to suggest secret-Masonic infiltration into everyday life. Together these bands saw the corporation as a power-multiplier, as a hidden army that gave them artistic leverage. Sudden Sway on the other hand saw the corporation as a locus of confusion and purveyor of incompetence. They understood that the corporate lexicon of acronyms, buzzwords and futuristic sounding product names (full of x’s and z’s, like the medieval magical grimoires, as English Heretic would no doubt point out) was there as a smokescreen, to obscure the fact that most corporations produce useless or detrimental products via an impenetrable cloud of bureaucracy, the whole melee being kept together only by marketing (the only really important part of the organisation) and political lobbying.

After a couple of unconventional post-punk singles, the first outing of their new corporate sensibility was their Peel Session track "Let’s Evolve". The song mischievously draws the links between classroom listen-and-learn radio shows, New Age self-improvement tapes, aerobics lessons, pharmaceutical innovation, corporate growth strategies and their ur-principle, the theory of natural selection. One of neoliberalism’s great tricks was to adopt Charles Darwin as one of its godfathers, to pretend that "market forces" were simply the inevitable social and economic compliment of his theories. After all, you can’t argue with nature. Sudden Sway’s subsequent career was aimed at demonstrating that neoliberal capitalism, far from being a red-blooded hyena, was in fact a lumbering megatherium plodding towards extinction.



Following their second Peel Session, which introduced another bizarre self-improvement technique, the "hypno-stroll", they were signed to major label WEA’s "indie" offshoot, Blanco y Negro, who no doubt possessed the worst A&R team in the history of the music business. The band’s first release was the "Sing Song" single which was recorded in eight different versions with a promo that was intended to be given to record shops to explain to them how the concept ran together. Each version of the single could only be differentiated by its catalogue number, which meant that the band’s small number of fans had to drive to and fro across the country to track down all the versions if they wanted to hear them. It was the first of incident of what was to become the band’s signature - the disastrous marketing ploy.



Next came the farrago that was "Space Mate", a double album housed in a large, flimsy box that was purported to be a board game. The packaging, which seemed to be deliberately designed to inconvenience both WEA’s distributors and the record shops that sold it, came with a bewildering array of inserts, instructions, wall charts and stickers. I’ve no doubt that there are still warehouses in the south east of England that are full of them.



Sudden Sway were swiftly ejected from WEA and signed to Rough Trade, with whom they released "Autumn Cutback Job Lot Offer", a 7" single that included eight one-minute advertising jingles for products that the band themselves invented. The recording was accompanied by a performing stint at the ICA, and an appearance on "Whistle Test", in which Mark Ellen and Andy Kershaw, (the Jeremy Clarkson and Richard "The Hamster" Hammond of the music biz) could barely contain their authenticist disdain for the group.



For their final release, the concept album/pseudo-West End musical "76 Kids Forever", the band returned to their youth in Peterborough, and lamented how Britain had changed in the mere ten years up to 1986. Remembered nowadays, if at all, as obscurist failures, they were among the very few people of the time who really understood the changes that were happening around them, as well as the ephemeral nature of the ideas that were driving those changes. As neoliberalism starts to wither and contract all around us, Sudden Sway will no doubt emerge inviolate as the prophets without honour that foresaw it all along.

Guitar Soloing: Blood from a Stone

For a brief spell there is the early 1980s, things got a little peculiar with the major record labels in the States. Having over-invested far too much of their product line in disco and glutted the market in the latter half of the prior decade, it was as if they were in a frenzied scramble to diversify after the post-1979 backlash. All those A&R guys, one imagines, scouring an array of clubs and cornering various scenesters, beating all the bushes in order to find out what kind of new music people might actually wanna hear. The end result was -- for a short spate of time, at least --  that some of the major-label rosters got oddly "pluralistic." In some instances, a few artists who would've otherwise never gotten a major contract at any other period in music history suddenly did. As one would expect, they'd get their three-disc run, often putting out albums that were widely and well-reviewed in top-of-the-rack publications, only to slide into obscurity and the discount bins a few years later.

One such artist was South Carolina-born blues/jazz guitarist James 'Blood' Ulmer, who briefly ended up on the Columbia label. Ulmer had come to New York City some years earlier, looking to play in the big metro leagues. He'd already spent the latter half of 1960s gigging around the rustbelt cities of the Midwest as an itinerant member of a number of funk combos, and had also recorded as a sideman with 'Big' John Patton, Larry Young and a number of established jazz musicians. By the time he arrived in New York, it proved to be auspicious timing, as the city's "loft jazz" scene was gearing up its 1970s hotbed furvency. He soon fell under the tutelage of Ornette Coleman, learning to apply the free-jazz pioneer's theories of "harmolodics" to his own repertoire of jazz, blues and funk licks.

Soon enough, he was playing with Ornette, David Murray and a broad array of the downtown avant set. By decade's end, he'd released Tales of Captain Black, and formed -- alongside Murray and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson -- the Music Revelation Ensemble. He also put together his own large ensemble, which wound up playing at the Mudd Club and the Knitting Factory, frequently wedged onto the bill with the likes of James Chance & the Contortions, the Lounge Lizards, or Kid Creole & the Coconuts. It was about this time Rough Trade took note, signing Ulmer and his group for the album Are You Glad To Be In America? It was about this time that Columbia Records came calling.

{     Here it is we've been talking about guitar solos for a week plus, and if the name of Jimi Hendrix has come up, I've somehow managed to skim past it. No matter, and perhaps just as well. We all know how it goes, what with the excessive reverence heaped on Hendrix, and those esteemed mega-titans (Carlos, Clapton, Garcia, Cosey, McLaughlin, whoever & etcetera, amen) who fall within a tight orbit in the grand cosmology of such stuff. But hell, even Ulmer reputedly claimed that modern guitarisms hadn't evolved a single step post-Hendrix -- which probably played no small part in the why & how of Mr. Blood himself seizing upon the whole harmolodics thing and busting his own balls to take his instrument apart, hoping to put it back together in some new, jarringly freakish reconfigurational way.     }

Ulmer would get the standard run of three albums out of his deal with the label. Freelancing (1981) and Black Rock (1982) were each an extension of the sort of material the guitarist had been exploring with his big band in the past few years -- often serving up a dense, multihybrid funk-fusion mutation that at times sounded like On The Corner being fed through a woodchipper. Heady moments were plenty, but it was perhaps of the more scaled-back moments of Freelancing in which Ulmer dazzled the most. At a few points on the album, Ulmer performs in trio mode with bassist Amin Ali and drummer G. Calvin Weston, and it's at those moments that his guitar takes the foreground -- with Ulmer charging up and down the frets and summoning up spikey clusters of notes that erupt like glass-slivered blossoms...






With the release of 1984's Odyssey, however, Ulmer lost a few listeners. The album found him slipping into a largely rhythmic mode throughout many of the tracks, leaving the lead to the improvised soloing of violinist Charles Burnham. While Odyssey was deemed Ulmer's most accessible album, it prompted some to ask, "What happened to the funk?" Fact is, the funk was still there, albeit it a (once again) different mutational form. It was as if the guitarist was starting to take it back to its Delta origins, by way of an extended, meandering sojourn through the Appalachian foothills.






It was a return to roots that Ulmer would follow in the years to come; first narrowed his focus to more standard avant-jazz outings, than narrowing it further to concentrate on playing and signing in a strictly traditional and unadorned Delta blues style. Talking to a magazine many years later, he recalled the days of the late 70s and early 80s when he and his group had played for crowds at the Mudd Club. "There's no way a person could keep playing that way -- the way we did, with that kind of energy -- night after night for very long," he said. "That would've killed us."