Firesideometer: Adam, thanks so much for taking the time to do this over the phone, which I hate.

Adam: No Problem at all. I’m on the main club phone though so I’m being told to keep it short! (Laughs)

Firesideometer: (laughs) I’ll try to keep it as short as possible. First question I have to ask is whether you have ever heard of the band Fireside?

Adam: I swear it rings a bell but to be honest I couldn’t name any songs that they may have written.

Firesideometer: You should try to check out their last CD, Elite. It has a lot of swervy sounding guitars. Really good stuff.

Adam: I might do that sometime if I remember.

Firesideometer: I understand Jez has written a book about Swervedriver. Have you read it? Is it any good or just a piece of rubbish?

Adam: Yeah I have read it. There are some really good stories in there! (Laughs) It’s a really good read, and it brought back a lot of good memories. There were a lot of touring exploits that Jez had written down that we had all forgotten about. He was going to change the names to protect us but then it just became too confusing. (Laughs) I don’t think that there is anything too incriminating in there, but there are some really funny stories about some of the bus drivers we have had and other crazy things that happened to us while on tour.

Firesideometer: So is Swervedriver still together?

Adam: Well, you know, never say never. I mean everyone’s kind of doing their own thing at the moment. I mean I’ve seen Steve and Jimmy pretty recently but right now just doesn’t seem like the right time to do the Swervedriver thing. It’s all up in the air right now.

Firesideometer: Are any of the old Swervedriver members playing music in other bands?

Adam: My brother Graham who was in the original line-up now plays trance music in a band called Dimension 5. Original drummer Paddy Pulzer went on to play with Slunk, Jack and Rosita. First bass player Adi Vynes formed Skyscraper. Drummer on Raise Graham Bonner went on to San Francisco to play in Brian Jonestown Massacre. Graham's replacement Danny Ingram has played in a slew of hardcore bands in Washington DC over the years and continues to do so.

Firesideometer: Wasn’t there supposed to be a new Swervedriver album in the works in 1999 though? What happened with that?

Adam: Nothing really. That’s when I started doing Toshack Highway, which was just supposed to be an offshoot of Swervedriver that the record label wanted, then the label (Zero Hour) went bust. When that happened the momentum of Swervedriver just kind of went bust too. I finished the Toshack Highway record. It finally came out a year after I finished it. But since then nothing has really happened with Swervedriver.

Firesideometer: Stylistically you guys went through some pretty different changes between the last few Swervedriver records. How did fans react to that?

Adam: Well, Ejector Seat Reservation didn’t get released here in the States, I think that’s about the best one. I’m not really sure whether fans liked 99th Dream or not. I know that personally I didn’t really like it for various reasons. It seems like we made a lot of compromises on that one.

Firesideometer: Did you feel like you got away from your roots a bit on 99th Dream?

Adam: Well, it's all subjective really isn't it? I mean what are my roots? My roots are probably in bands like the Beatles and T Rex, who were the first bands I remember listening to as a kid. In those terms it's probably quite true to my roots, as the second Beatles anthology (which came out around the time I was writing songs for that album) influenced songs such as 'In My Time' and 'Behind the Scenes...'.

I think there are people that like a band and want them to never change...I remember agirl in Australia coming up to me and expressing her disgust that on the song 'I Am Superman' from Ejector Seat Reservation, I sing "I am Superman, la la la la la "...she was disgusted by my la-la-la's!! Having said that, 99th Dream is the least satisfactory Swervedriver album for me, for a number of reasons. The production was too hard and it sounds disjointed, but the band was going through a rough time and had a record label breathing down its neck at that point.

I prefer the Toshack Highway album, which I know some Swervedriver fans hate and some people who hate Swervedriver love, mainly because it was a breeze to do. I notice your Fireside reviewer recommends skipping past 'Harlem' the first song on the Toshack album and calls it "awful"...well, I recommend putting it on very loud and smoking a cigarette to it...you just might like it.

Firesideometer: Wow, did he really say "awful"? He probably meant "challenging". Regardless, he's out! Back to Ejector Seat, did it upset you that the vast majority of the US didn’t get to hear it?

Adam: I don’t know, I think the majority of Swervedriver fans got to hear it for the most part. I mean, if you're sort of a mad Swervedriver fan you found it one way or another. It was pretty well received from what we could tell, and that was the album that we all finally felt like Swervedriver was headed the way we all felt it should be heading. Then the record didn’t get released here and that held things up momentum-wise for us.

Firesideometer: Does fan reaction influence you at all in how you write or release songs?

Adam: Hmm. It sort of does and doesn’t you know? I mean I don’t want to think about whether or not someone hates my songs, but in the end we always do what we want to do anyway. Swervedriver was always really stubborn in that way. (laughs) I’m sure we had shot ourselves in the foot more than a few times because we did what we wanted to as opposed to letting the record company dictate our band.

Firesideometer: Raise and Mezcal Head are kind of viewed as rock albums of mythic proportions. Is it ever daunting as a musician to feel like you have to live up to the standards that you have set for yourself?

Adam: Not really, I mean with Mezcal Head we had a lot of drum sample sounding stuff and with Ejector Seat we wanted to really strip it down and make it sound more raw, almost like we recorded it with a 4 track. With the momentum we had with the songs from Ejector Seat we were really happy with it as opposed to trying to go backwards trying to retread old ground. Not only with each album but with each song, we tried to write something a little different.

I think that with certain songs we might have taken little elements and said “well that worked in that song, it might work here again.” But no, we always just tried to move forward and not look back.

Firesideometer: There was a lot of hype around Mezcal Head. Were you guys waiting for it to hit big?

Adam: I guess there were people talking up the possibilities at the time. Truth is we never sold enough records for the label to risk a third album which messed us up at the time. It's a shame because we thought the third album was a real leap forward but it didn't get released in the states. Things seem worse with major labels these days with bands getting dropped after only one album.

Firesideometer: On to Toshack Highway, you did a small east coast tour back in June, and now you're back on an extended tour, so I’m guessing it was a good experience last time?

Adam: Definitely. It feels great to be back. Toshack Highway, is kind of different because when we did the album, we really didn’t even have an inkling of doing it live. I’d love to bring the full band out on the road, but economically it just makes more sense and is a lot easier for me to come out and do it on my own. But at some point I really want to get the lineup together and record a Toshack Highway album as a band. The CD was really recorded with just me, Charlie Francis and a drummer.

Firesideometer: The fans have been responding pretty well it seems to the new stuff? And do you play any Swervedriver songs, or is it mostly Toshack Highway?

Adam: Yeah this is the first date of the new tour so I don’t know! (Laughs) but the last time I just did a handful of dates, and the people who came out seemed really happy and enthusiastic about it. I throw in some Swervedriver songs, Toshack Highway and some covers. I really try to mix it up. I’ve been playing acoustically forever. It’s the first thing I ever did, so it’s nice to get back to that and get such a favorable response. Plus there are only really a few Toshack songs I can play on my own, so I’ve been playing a lot early Swervedriver kind of b-sides mixed with some new songs that I have written recently.

Firesideometer: When you started recording songs for Toshack, like 'Valentine #1' or 'Board The Bullet Train,'... the guitar leads on those songs in particular are amazing. Were you ever tempted to write a full album using that guitar sound? Will you ever use it again?

Adam: Thanks. Yeah possibly. The thing about 'Valentine #1' is that I wrote it quite some time ago, back in like 1991 I think? It could have easily been a Swervedriver song, but at that time I think us recording that song might have been viewed as us jumping on the bandwagon or something like that. But yeah so I rediscovered the song and thought “yeah this is pretty good” and thought it might work with this new thing I was about to start working on.

Firesideometer: Toshack Highway is very different sounding from anything you’ve done before. Did writing for Toshack open up your mind to some new ideas?

Adam: Yeah definitely. It wasn’t a drums , bass, guitar, band record. It was definitely anything goes, so if I wanted to put a drum machine in the song then I could do so. If I wanted to have a song with no bass at all or put some weird acoustic sounds or horn samples on a track I could. I was playing around with keyboards a lot during the writing and recording of the Toshack record and it was a really freeing experience.

I’m not so much into keyboards now but I’m glad I got it all out when I did. Otherwise I’d probably have a roomful of all these demos of keyboard songs that might not have ever seen the light of day.

Firesideometer: We've heard rumors that catapult might be re releasing Ejector Seat Reservation and 99th Dream. Is this true?

Adam: Catapult, yeah there was some talk about it. I’m not really sure what’s happened with that to be honest. We’ll have to wait and see. I suppose, because there were like four extra tracks that didn’t make the Ejector Seat album, that I would have loved to see on there.

Firesideometer: Are any of those songs available anywhere?

Adam: There was a song called 'Just Sometimes' that I wanted to re-name 'Song of Laughter & Forgetting' which has all the instruments and melodies going round in cycles, a song called 'Neon Lights Glow' which is ten minutes long, has a string section on it and is a cross between 'Neon Lights' by Kraftwerk, 'Rumble' by Duane Eddy and 'Signed DC' by Love, and 'Ennio II' which has an Ennio Morricone feel but is really just a strange little instrumental. None of these tracks are available as far as I know, but what do I know?

Firesideometer: What’s your take on the music scene right now? Anyone you truly enjoy?

Adam: I don’t know how I really feel about scenes; I mean I hear songs and I like them. There’s a Pedro The Lion song I really like, and a Sparklehorse song I really like, and I do enjoy Elliott Smith. So yeah I think there's quite a lot of good stuff going on. I think that these days the stuff I tend to like isn’t really the stuff that kind of hits big .There are lots of great guys and women out there making some really great music. But they don’t get to go on big tours or on MTV you know, which really seems like an alien world to me now anyway.

Firesideometer: Here's a silly question but we figured we would ask anyway. If you were on packing for a trip and only had room for 3 cds, which ones would you take?

Adam: Let me think. Loveless from My Bloody Valentine would be good. I think that’s a pretty timeless one. This one's kind of predictable I guess but The Beatles Revolver definitely. And Nick Drake's Pink Moon I think at the moment is quite good.

Firesideometer: That’s about it. What’s in your future?

Adam: Finish touring the states. Then I’d like to get back and record another album. I have so many new songs that there’s a whole backlogging that’s just begging to be put on tape so we’ll see what happens you know.

Firesideometer: Thanks Adam! We appreciate the time.

Adam: No really. Thank you, I appreciate the interest.

Interview by David. Photos courtesy of Art Thompson . Copyright © 1998-2001, Used with permission.