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An excerpt from "Looking for a Friend" by Nikki Sudden

Being a post punk hero, one of England’s most underrated Songwriters and a hard artist to collect is all in a day’s work for Nikki Sudden. For a relatively obscure artist who has crafted a career well outside of mainstream circles, Nikki Sudden has always carried himself with a larger than life rock star panache. Like an oddly Victorian take on Marc Bolan or Keith Richards—two of Sudden’s unabashed idols—bursting with a dandy Wildean wit, as well as a certain underdog quality fitting a Dickens hero, Sudden’s thirty year career hasn’t counted any massive hits, gold albums or the other empty trappings of rock and roll lore.

Yet to look at him. With a rumpled velvet jacket, leather boots and scarves tied at his neck, Sudden’s appearance undoubtedly proves he can out-“pirate” Keef any day. It is, however, when he sings his songs of bemusement and lost glory that Sudden’s real power and potency as an artist can be sussed. In his slightly nasal, wistful whine his uniquely soulful and utterly English voice wrings with a detached elegiac.

The legend of Nikki Sudden started with glam rock’s ascent in Britain in the early 1970s. London lad Nicholas Godfrey, enamored with T.Rex, the New York Dolls and the Rolling Stones, took up the guitar, rechristened himself with a more apropos rock moniker and along with his brother—reborn Epic Soundtracks—on piano and drums started Swell Maps. The duo stabbed their unique take on bedsit glam bombast largely behind closed doors for almost four years before a Sex Pistols performance in 1976 impressed them to take greater action.

The Swell Maps’ noisy, shambolic attack squarely fused hypnotic psychedelia with jagged guitars and panicked vocals, and evidenced the artier sides that punk could cross into. It remains a totem of the D.I.Y. aesthetic as well as the more relevant than ever “post punk” sound.

Upon hearing the band’s initial offering, a 1978 self-released single called “Read About Seymour” on influential DJ John Peel’s BBC1 program, fledgling label owner Geoff Travis insisted on putting out the Swell Map’s debut album, A Trip To Marineville as Rough Trade Records’ second release. The album was a breakthrough in many ways. Aside from it’s artistic merits, the record helped to keep afloat the label that would later introduce the world to The Smiths, Violent Femmes, and The Strokes, to name but a small few. The band made another album, the brash Jane from Occupied Europe, and a few more singles before calling it quits in 1980. The members would continue to collaborate, particularly brothers Sudden and Soundtracks (until the latter’s untimely death in 1996.)

Sudden’s post-Swell Maps life has included a vast array of solo material and a stint with fellow traveler Dave Kusworth in The Jacobites. Sudden and Kusworth traded in a harsher punk edge for a sound that shined a light on early glam and Stones and also nodded at English trad folk, Faces-style pub-ready rollicking rock and Dylanesque songwriting. Nowhere is it better glanced than the Jacobites’ 1995 double-album Robespierre’s Velvet Basement. Among the numerous solo albums, his best might be 1986’s woeful but redemptive song cycle Texas or 2003’s The Last Bandit.

It can be hard, however to navigate the expansive waters of Sudden’s recording career. Between his two bands and his own solo career, Sudden’s catalog is staggeringly hard to piece together and littered with small pressings and one-off releases. A complete accounting of his body of work would seem almost apocryphal. Yet this just adds to the myth and notoriety of an artist like Sudden. He’s the quintessential brand of hero and sonic delicacy that record store clerks, completist collectors and (cough) music journalists obsess over.

Nowhere was this better illustrated than when in 2002 Jonathan Gargill of taste-making indie imprint Secretly Canadian —home of Antony and the Johnsons and Black Mountain—made it his personal mission to overhaul and reissue Sudden’s ’80s back catalog of solo and Jacobites material.

If there needed to be any more argument for the significance of Sudden’s legacy, look no further than the bands who’ve acknowledged a debt to Sudden. The list reads like a who’s who of artists of underground rock: Sonic Youth, Pavement and Mercury Rev. For further proof of his influence, Sudden decamped to Athens, GA in 1990 at the behest of members of R.E.M. who backed the musician on his solo opus The Jewel Thief (a/k/a Liquor, Guns & Ammo). For 1998’s Red Brocade, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy turned up to duet with him on the lilting ballad “Farewell My Darling.”

Now primarily based in Berlin, Sudden continues his hard-earned emblem as underground rock and roll hero as he continues to write and record voraciously. In between regular tours across the globe, he’s recently found time to act; appearing as himself in the Wim Wenders-produced film Egoshooter. Playing Nikki Sudden looks to be much cooler role than, say, having Keith Richards playing a pirate.

An interview with

Nikki Sudden:

You’ve created a career well outside of mainstream circles but always had this panache of being a larger than life sort of rock star figure. How does one manage such a feat?

“Basically not enough luck! I dress and act like a star because I am one… even if only in the eyes of a few.”

When you and your brother started Swell Maps, what where you hoping to accomplish? Was there something you wanted to do musically that wasn’t happening at the time?

“We started playing because we were listening to a lot of music and started writing our own songs because we couldn’t play anything by anyone else. We made music, as I still do, because we had no choice in the matter!”

How did you come into orbit with Geoff Travis and how did the Swell Maps end up as Rough Trade’s second release?

“I used to hang out on Portobello Road on Saturdays in the late-seventies and had met Geoff when I sold Rough Trade some copies, maybe 250, of the Maps’ first single. In 1978, I fixed up a John Peel session for the band; walking past Rough Trade the following day Geoff saw me and asked, ‘How many copies {of that single} do you have left? We’ll take the lot!’ We used the money from the sales to finance A Trip To Marineville. I played the tapes to Geoff and he said that even though the company was totally overdrawn… they had to release our LP.”

A Trip To Marineville was a breakthrough in many ways. Does it still rate for you?

“I’m still incredibly proud of the stuff Swell Maps recorded. I’m really glad that John Rivers and I had the chance to remaster the material again... for the first time since the late-eighties. The Maps material sounds far, far stronger than it ever did before.”

When I think of your influences, there’s a couple that always come up: The Stones and T.Rex. Can you elaborate on how they’ve stayed constant influences? Who else inspires you?

“I’m inspired by everything I read, everything I hear and everything I feel and see. Often a line from a book, a movie or a conversation will leap out and stick in my head as a possible song title or a lyric. I also love Charlie Patton and Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin and Ronnie Lane, Charlie Feathers, Robert Johnson, Fairport Convention, Martin Carthy and Slade. I like all the good bands and despise the rest.”

Your brother passed away almost a decade ago and the loss undoubtedly impacted your life in many ways. I wonder how his death changed you musically?

“Every time I saw my brother he always wanted to turn me on to some new band he’d discovered… and I did the same with him. His death obviously had a big effect on me… it brought out some great songs… one of which has been released. When I was writing the songs for Red Brocade I started using some of Epic’s chord changes.”

What was your reaction when taste-making indie imprint Secretly Canadian decided to overhaul and reissue much of your back catalog between solo work and Jacobites albums? How did it all come about?

“Chris Swanson from the label tried contacting me for six months before I responded. Other companies had approached me with a view to reissuing my material but never wanted to do it properly. Chris and I chatted and he was in agreement with me about how the albums should be re-presented. 24-page booklets, remastered and, in some cases, remixed. John Rivers and I remastered everything then I wrote the sleevenotes and chose the photographs…then I got the artwork assembled and sent off. It was Secretly Candian’s idea to include the bonus tracks. I think the albums stand better on their own, but the extra numbers do add something.”

Those inspired by your work is like a who’s who of significant artists of underground rock: Sonic Youth, Pavement, Mercury Rev and Wilco. Do you see the legacy of Swell Maps in anything that’s going on today with a new crop of post punk D.I.Y.-ethic bands that have recently sprung up?

“Not really! I’ve been told that we’ve influenced many bands but can’t really hear it! The No Men from Scotland are one of the few exceptions.”

A few years ago you released a “Best Of,” The Last Bandit, but for someone with as much material as you, there ought to be a box set. When’s that coming? Also, what else is new and forthcoming?

“Ah, the box set! I’ve been thinking about it for many years now and have enough material to do one easily and still have stuff left for ‘Volume Two.” But it has to be done properly. If you know the Free Reed box sets… that’s the sort of thing I have in mind. Treasure Island, my last album, came out in 2004 and the new one, The Truth Doesn’t Matter, will come out in late May. The new set moves things on a few steps.”