“London, the affordable years. Circa autumn/winter 1990-91. In the no man’s land between the arse end of Camden Town and the red light end of King’s Cross, sits St Pauls Crescent. Located in the shadow of the Maiden Lane estate, where the high walls of the whitewashed concrete housing units cast a menacing Clockwork Orange vibe over the area, the street is short and terminates in a dead end. Number 44 turns out to not be a Georgian townhouse, common to the area, but a small industrial yard set back from the road. At the rear is Playground Studios. Housed in a former car repair workshop, the building is a single storey, breezeblock construction. The rear borders a footpath overlooking the electrical umbilicals and parallel steel of the London Overground railway tracks, while at the front, the potholes and ruts of a short driveway are filled with dirty rainwater, that does nothing to brighten the reflection of the overcast skies.
Entry is via a set of battered double doors and finds you in a concrete corridor, flanked on both sides with wire mesh storage cages, where overhead strip lights cast their fluorescent wash over the stacked musical belongings of nascent and semi-successful bands, waiting patiently for the recall to action. At the end of the corridor is the studio office, small and functional with a couple of low desks, a stereo, shelves stacked with files and assorted paperwork and where the build up to Gulf War One plays out on a small black and white TV to an audience of empty chairs, grimy coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays. Take a right turn before the office, however, and you find yourself in an open area bordered by four heavy, soundproofed doors. Behind these are the rehearsal rooms, although the smallest – Studio 4 – was until fairly recently used merely as a storeroom. But, with the various boxes, bags, cases and other rubbish now cleared, the room contains detritus of a different kind – both human and electrical. Cables, chords and Converse High Tops. Marshall stacks and matted hair. Cymbals and symbols, vibrations, noise and blabber and smoke. With heads full of ideas and a new Ampeg bass rig and recently acquired vintage Jazzmaster, both of which need putting through their paces, Swervedriver have settled into Studio 4 to begin the writing sessions for their upcoming debut album.
It’s been a busy year so far. The band have signed to Creation Records, recorded a session for legendary DJ John Peel, shared stages with My Bloody Valentine, Jane’s Addiction, The Lemonheads, The House Of Love, Soundgarden, Buffalo Tom and many others, headlined their own UK tour, appeared live on national radio and the ‘Son Of Mustang Ford’ EP has broken into the Independent Top 10. With all that accomplished in a few short months, there is plenty to live up to and still much to do.
The first sessions take place between 25th of October and 7th of November. Whole songs, basic ideas, jams, riffs or sometimes just mere fragments are all filtered through the channels of an outdated mixing desk and onto the reels of a cassette based Portastudio, all four tracks with the meters in the red and the tape in glorious compression. ‘Sunset’ and ‘Sandblasted’ emerge fully formed in time to be included as part of the live set during the upcoming tour in support of the ‘Rave Down’ EP, which starts at Middlesborough Polytechnic on 8th of November and continues all the way through to Oxford Venue on 15th of December, after which the writing sessions reconvene.
Jimmy Hartridge’s home, a squatted basement flat on St Augustines Road, is only a couple of hundred yards away, as is The Murray Arms, a shabby local boozer located on the corner of Murray Street and Agar Grove and within sight of the back door to Playground Studios. A pattern soon develops – all day spent making noise in Studio 4 then into the Murray for refreshment and then a short walk to Jim’s for a smoke and to review the day’s recordings, cherry picking the best bits for retention or development. This circuit will become a familiar routine over the upcoming weeks, especially when heavy snowfall brings London to a standstill for a while and everyone is forced to crash on Jimmy’s floor for a few nights, until the weather situation improves.
January 1991 sees the band take a break for a day to play a sold out gig at the Camden Underworld. ‘Sci Flyer’ ‘Pile Up’ ‘Hands’ and ‘Flawed’ all make their live debuts. “Swervedriver hew their melodies from the hills themselves” reports Melody Maker magazine “There’s an extremely pure and raw feel to the way they wield their melodies – great slabs of noise lurching into each other in the most elemental manner”
As a reward for the success of the gig, the band move into the larger and slightly more secluded Studio 5 at the Playground and with the album recording scheduled to begin in March, the songs start to take their final shape, although new ideas continue to come. ‘Feel So Real’ appears in the last week in February, as does the beginnings of ‘Never Lose That Feeling’ (but that’s a story for a different time frame).
So, what you hold in your hands in the results of all those weeks’ work. The audio quality is not pristine but considering our rudimentary recording skills and the technology available at the time, it was never going to be. You may hear an occasional bum note, or a dropped beat here and there. You will definitely hear the hiss of amplifiers and the buzz of FX pedals but most importantly what you will also hear are the songs as they first emerged, fresh and to all intents and purposes, played live. Some would undergo further refinement as the album recording progressed but this particular release is a time capsule, a document of a crucial period in the band’s development and as such it deserves to be shared. It contains the best moments of those original Portastudio tapes expertly tidied up, restored and balanced by persons eminently more qualified than ourselves. However, the result is still raw and immediate and takes you straight into that grimey rehearsal room in Camden Town during the winter of 1990/91.
Apologies for the omission of ‘Rave Down’ by the way. That was written earlier in 1990 and recorded straight away, bypassing the demo stage altogether. No early recording of that song exists. You can also find the original demo of ‘Son Of Mustang Ford’ on the ‘Juggernaut Rides’ compilation, which you already own, of course.. right? So, as a bonus, also included here is a version recorded during the ‘Raise’ sessions but not used. Cleaner, more restrained but with a unique coda.
Thanks go out to everyone who helped make this project happen, especially the Tascam company of Japan, who invented and sold the Portastudio home recording device. Without them, this particular record wouldn’t exist at all and keeping track of ourselves during the writing of ‘Raise’ would have been considerably more difficult.”
Adi Vines 2026.
credits
releases October 23, 2026
Adam Franklin – guitars left channel & vocals
Jimmy Hartridge – guitars right channel
Adi Vines – bass
Graham Bonnar – drums & percussion
Recorded at Playground Studios, Camden Town 1991