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person, so I guess I made music reflected that, but also
what I wanted from the experience of music was much
more extreme. I wanted the music to destroy my body.”
That intensity of thought is what has always separated
Swans from the rest of the record-producing world.
Given the depths of emotional extremes which their
early records explored not just lyrically but physically,
it seems utterly fatuous to call Swans a rock’n’roll
band. Rock’n’roll is traditionally feel-good music,
whereas for a time Swans were the ultimate feel-bad
experience. Attending their live performances was a
health risk, threatening broken limbs and burst ear
drums, and causing various cities’ police across the
globe to literally pull the plug on them, such was their
decibel measurement. Swans live were the ultimate
catharsis, where the audience would enjoy being sonically
pummelled into a bloody daze and pay for the
pleasure too.
While this all made good copy for journalists, Gira’s
reasons for producing such music often went un-noticed,
lost in the on stage spectacle of abasement. As if
aware that his voice was being lost amongst the noise,
Gira effected a massive shift in the Swans musical direction
with the 1987 album Children Of God. With the
arrival of his new partner and collaborator Jarboe, Gira
had finally met someone of his own strength who made
Swans spread their wings, albeit schizophrenically. The
whole album is drenched in religious iconography, in-
BUY Swans music online from and
spired by Gira watching American TV evangelists like
Jimmy Swaggert who he considered “great rock’n’roll
performers”. But while thematically Gira’s concerns
remained the same – death, love, God, sex, shame, lust,
pain – sonically Children Of God combined the noise
terror of tracks like ‘Beautiful Child’ with Jarboe’s
haunting oboe-backed ballads ‘In My Garden’ and
‘Blackmail’. The result was a uniquely unsettling album
which went against the grain of everything Swans
fans had come to expect.
That a radical change was happening to Swans was
acknowledged at the end of their live album Feel Good
Now, recorded during the Children Of God tour. After
the final track has played out, you hear Gira’s voice
saying “This is a record of a time now gone. Good bye
and good luck”. It’s a strange and touching inclusion, as
if Gira was mindful that many Swans devotees would
neither understand or enjoy the band’s new direction
and that this was the parting of the ways.
Before the emergence of the next Swans album The
Burning World, Gira and Jarboe produced two albums
under the name Skin. Blood, Women, Roses featured
Jarboe’s voice scattered over a collection of diseased
torch songs, while Shame, Humility Revenge saw Gira
move towards narrative lyric writing for the first time,
instead of his previous collage approach inspired by
the brute power of advertising slogans. Both albums
reflect Gira and Jarboe at the height of their powers,
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