Swervedriver’s Adam Franklin Wants You Right Now: The Electric Prunes’ “Holy Are You”

How do you best the anti-guitar-god bluster of arguably the most sonically bold and melodically sophisticated band of England’s shoegaze era? If you’re Swervedriver’s unflappable former leader, Adam Franklin, you don’t even try. You simply work off the various templates for greatness set forth by your former outfit, which, quite frankly, spewed out enough novel ideas to sustain a half-dozen indie-rock careers. Which brings us to Franklin’s latest, I Could Sleep For A Thousand Years (Second Motion), whose initial tracks were hammered out in New York late last year with his newly minted backup outfit, Bolts Of Melody. Sleep is Franklin’s most well-rounded collection to date, balancing the more laid-back guitar balladry and pop sensibilities of his last two solo albums with the ornery, volatile spark of vintage Swervedriver largely missing on those efforts. Franklin will be guest-editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him as well as our 2009 Lost Classics post on Swervedriver’s Mezcal Head.

Franklin: I feel that this tune has been my spiritual guide for the last year or so, as it has a becalming effect that’s perfect for diffusing the ills of the modern world. You could never describe me as a religious man—though I do occasionally enter churches when on tour and did recently add the dalai lama as a friend on Facebook—but this is the sort of tune that makes you feel like you’re traversing the foothills of some holy mountain when in fact you’re just walking down the high street to buy some fags. The amazing back story to this tune, though, is that the Electric Prunes themselves, the band that recorded seminal cuts “I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night” and “Get Me To The World On Time” as well as classic second album Underground, didn’t own the rights to their own name. By the time of third album Mass In F Minor, control had been relinquished to their producer David Hassinger, who decided to enlist classical composer David Axelrod to record the aforesaid album, which was a hybrid of psychedelic rock music and ecclesiastical Gregorian chants. The formula was deemed a success and the band’s fourth album, Release Of An Oath, continued in the same vein with “Holy Are You” as the second track on side one. The band’s actual involvement is therefore minimal and most may well have left by the time this record was recorded, but the transcendent vocals are at least rumoured to be by some of the original band.

“Holy Are You”: