The American underground band Swans, experimental, dragging and loud, comes to a heavily sold-out Vera, Groningen. For the fifth time in 40 years.
Swans: Vera, Groningen, May 31, 1984
The first time Swans in Vera! I had to be there, a very young music-loving student in Leeuwarden. Even though it was only a few days after Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – “a good week”, according to then programmer Peter Weening. I had the Swans debut album Filth already in the house. Overwhelming in all its cruel unwieldiness, that record, but only a pale reflection of what awaited us from the stage.
Brutal waves of blunt violence, pounding and dragging tempos, singer Michael Gira screaming his lungs out without caring about anything like melody. It wasn’t busy already, but at the end of this maelstrom there were only about ten people left. The rest seemed to be swept away by that dangerous noise. Those ten were all practically pressed against the stage, mesmerized by this frenzied sacrificial ritual.
Somewhere next to me, also leaning against that wall of violent sound, must have been Peter Weening, Vera programmer from 1980 to 2021. “With our knees against that low stage from back then,” he remembers. “Fascinated by those waves of noise, and by Michael Gira, who was kneeling and beaming.”
He also has information that about 65 tickets had been sold for that concert. “But when I looked back, there was really no one there anymore. Yes, the mixer and someone behind the bar. We still had the canteen in that room at the time, the linoleum floor had just been waxed. Quite a beautiful sight, that shiny floor in an otherwise empty room.”
The New York underground was on the map in Vera, six months earlier Sonic Youth played on that same stage for the first time. And they were also talking about Swans – apparently Youth frontman Thurston Moore was even a member of that band for a while. “It made perfect sense that they would play in Vera.”
Swans: Vera, Groningen, February 23, 1986
The second time Swans in Vera and if possible even harder. It was already a lot busier, the band had made quite a name for itself. The music had now become slightly more accessible and gentler. I interviewed Gira on that occasion. A sullen man, very tired too. There was, as I read back in my interview at the time, fuss about the sound system. That was too light, sir.
“It was no problem the first time,” says Weening. “We got amplifiers and speaker cabinets from everywhere. They were also in the back, you were now completely sandwiched by the sound. Yes, then we had enough of that man for a while.”
Michael Gira was not such a sunny type, for those of us who see that in his music (or song titles such as Raping A Slave and We”ll Hang For That ) had not already understood. His mother was an alcoholic, his father also left it at that. Young Gira, born in Los Angeles, had been arrested a few times for shoplifting and other petty crimes. At the age of 16, he left for Israel, where he was imprisoned for more than four months for hashish trafficking. Those things.
Swans: Vera, Groningen, June 29, 1989
Enough of that man or not, Swans (never say The Swans) were in Vera again that weekday evening. The sound had become so much more accessible in those intervening years that the band even found shelter with a major record company. The year before they had recorded a cover of the famous song Love Will Tear Us Apart . Gira later regretted both things, he told me again a few years later during an interview in Amsterdam.
So Weening was not at all looking forward to that difficult band around that difficult man, and certainly not because it had to be done in two weeks, even during the week. But the booker was persistent. We had to see it as a try-out for the subsequent performance at the big Roskilde festival, where they also had to set up and tear down quickly. And Groningen was nicely on the route.
So come on then. Weening: “I made a deal for, what was it, 1,600 guilders or something? Flat fee , so no hassle, done. I didn’t want them at all rip . But then it sold out too! After the concert I stood with Gira in the basement bar. He with a cigar in his mouth, Stetson on his head, a great guy. “You sneaky little businessman,” he said. With a smile.”
Michael Gira: Vera, Groningen, October 14, 2007
There was no chicken there, Weening remembers. Swans had been inactive for years and Gira did an acoustic set there, solo, very compelling. Weening and I were standing at the bar talking, not very quietly. A lady in front of us turned around indignantly: “Ssssst!” I expressed regret and didn’t tell that lady about those devastatingly hard Swans concerts from the past. Weening: “Of course we were wrong.”
Swans: Vera, Groningen, November 23, 2010
Michael Gira had just reactivated Swans and that was the start of a very fruitful period. With beautiful records, often doubles, made up of long songs with a sound that is as refined as it is penetrating, and a nail-biting build-up of tension. That performance in Vera was the start of the European tour and the band camped there for three days to practice. That happened before, with Dinosaur Jr. for example.
Gira is not an easy man, “but not that difficult either,” says Weening. The band actually wanted nine hotel rooms, “but in the end they crawled like schoolboys into our own four cubicles above.”
Swans: Vera, Groningen, February 7, 2024
Never thought, Swans again. The asking price was much too high for current programmer Peter Dijkstra. “Then we had to ask for a ticket price that goes against what we stand for.”
That was that, he thought. Until it turned out that the band really wanted to play in Vera again, precisely because of that shared past that spanned almost four decades. Dijkstra: “It wouldn’t have been possible without that history.” This is also a good time, in the year that Vera celebrates its fiftieth anniversary as a music venue.
It is again the first performance of a European tour, reason why the band nightliner (which also includes overnight stays) early in the morning with Vera to practice all day. “When the doors open, I have already had Swans on it for hours,” says Dijkstra. The band will play for about three hours in the evening, he warns.
What strikes him: the hall, which will be sold out in no time, will, based on ticket sales data, be filled with approximately as many people under 35 as people over 45. “That band also appeals to younger generations, not just old guys.” But Peter Weening is there. And I.
Encore! Tramhaus: Huize Maas, Groningen, January 18, 2024
Just in the week that it was announced that Tramhaus was the first Dutch band ever to win the Vera poll (for best concert), these young Rotterdammers were in Huize Maas, because of the Eurosonic festival. Nadya van Osnabrugge, the guitarist on the left and not much older than 25, wore a T-shirt with the cover of that first Swans album on it Filth , a dentist’s x-ray of a mean grinning set of teeth. Circle, round.
Swans, February 7, Vera Groningen. Out of stock.