Swan Songs

When Brendan Wade and Paul Bell, two seasoned Wexford musicians whose separate musical careers have now merged into The Swans, heard that Chris Porter had agreed to produce their first album, they nearly wept for joy. Porter—who's produced top albums for George Michael, The Pet Shop Boys, Take That and Tina Turner—was number one on Paul and Brendan's producer list, so they were enormously flattered when he called them, full of enthusiasm for their melody-driven music, just two days after getting their tape.

"We recorded most of the album in Porter's studio down in Surrey, where we lived in his beautiful mansion for about three and half months," recalls Paul dreamily. "He is an amazing guy, and we learnt a lot from him in lots of ways. The calibre of the music he brought into the project was incredible. He got us working in Abbey Road in Studio Two, The Beatles' studio. And it was his idea to bring in the London Symphony Orchestra."

The Beatles' studio? The London Symphony Orchestra? It must have blown your minds!

Brendan enthusiastically agrees. "You dream about those things when you're first getting into music. We've both recorded in fabulous studios in the past, but this studio has something special about it. And Paul was playing the grand piano, I was singing, there was an orchestra there—it was awesome. Absolutely awesome."

"And the thing is," continues Paul, "the whole ambience of that studio—I don't mean from a technical point of view, I mean more from a spiritual vibey point of view—is that they've left the studio part of it exactly the same as it was in The Beatles' days, though the control room is obviously very '90s high tech. And being on the studio floor with Chris Cameron, who does all George Michael's string arrangements, conducting the orchestra—it was amazing. And I have to say, though I don't mean to sound blasé or big-headed, that we weren't in any way daunted by it, because we've been doing this for a fairly long time. There was an adrenalin thing, but we weren't nervous about it."

"And for two fellas from Wexford," Brendan adds, "to have been in the music business the way we have been, and to be back, at least on the recording side of things, in the upper echelon of the industry, and working with people of that calibre, it was great."

Paul and Brendan both have long track records. Brendan was previously lead singer in Cry Before Dawn, a successful rock band in Ireland during the '80s, while Paul's former rock band, Zero One, did very well abroad. Paul attributes some of their current joy to the fact that they've already been around the block.

"Because we'd been there before as regards the big recording contracts with the major record labels, and then having come out the other side and kinda gone down, and had to drag yourself up again by the bootlaces, and then to be in Abbey Road, it meant an awful lot. It sums up all the bloody hard work and slog we've put into the last four years. And the belief that we had when a lot of people didn't."

"It's really uncanny," observes Paul, "because we're both from Wexford town, and we both knew each other in the past. We had a connection before because I had produced some stuff for Cry Before Dawn, which thankfully helped them get their record deal.

"We both came and went in and out of that mid-'80s Irish rock machine thing, with very little say-so ourselves. I had great respect for Brendan as a singer/songwriter, and as an Uilleann pipes player, as a traditional musician. When I heard that his band was finished I got in touch with him out of the blue and I asked, 'Would you fancy writing a few tunes?' And he did.

"And we were really, really lucky," continues Paul, "because we got a publishing contract within about two weeks. To be really honest, we just feel blessed."

The Swans' album Photographs And Letters will be released on Grapevine on 12th March. The band play Vicar St., Dublin on 26th February.