Sudden Sway emerged from Peterborough, a nowhere town in the nether worlds of the UK Mid-Eastern fenlands as a four piece band sometime in the early 1980s. Their first, self-produced release on the Chant label was the metaphysical 7” double A side Janes Third Party/Don’t Go which became a cult dance track on the indie circuit. They followed this in 1981 with the mystic-pop 12 inch To You with ReGard, “Space Oddity in now-language, four little operas of song with mad irresistible lyrics” as Dave McCullough of Sounds described it. Included inside was a four page Joycean tale of urban love and loss which set the scene for the multi-media experimentation which was to become one of their trademarks. Their next release The Traffic Tax Scheme (1982) moved the group further toward their objective of unravelling and reinterpreting what it means to make music within a commercial format. Its two anthems Sir Savoir: Her Valoir & Me Says Conscience? combined the idea of a journey towards understanding with Newtonian mechanics and came in the format of a child’s ‘edutainment’ school folder containing a fold-out map of London’s Kings Road transformed into a Kabbalistic route to enlightenment. As part of its multi-media format The Traffic Tax Scheme was the first vinyl to include a proto-type computer game.

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By this time their unique approach had been noted by the legendary alternative music DJ John Peel who invited the group to record a session for his late-night BBC Radio 1 slot in November of 1983. What emerged was unlike anything else which had ever been aired on the show. Rather than songs it compromised two sound pieces: Lets Evolve - a 12 minute ‘work-out’ tape which enabled listeners to evolve from fish into land creatures and Relationships – a radio play about a recipe for spinach gnocchi combined with a song about songwriting.

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The success of the first Peel Session led to an invitation to record a second, and a still more radical session followed a few months later. The Hypnostroll broadcast depicted an imaginary technology which allowed listeners to acquire compressed life experiences by entering new worlds - without ever having to leave their armchairs. Anticipating later concept of virtual reality and the metaverse, Hypnostroll created a sound-piece which took listeners on a journey to the 00 prime meridian in a parallel Greenwich where a Climate-Change Rally was being hosted by Sunnitec, Icetec & Cositec - three political parties with very differing perspectives on the ecosystem. Their political campaign ‘songs’ formed the backdrop to the broadcast.

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Their growing reputation as musical revolutionaries with as great a focus upon science as upon art, was sealed with the release of Spacemate in 1986. Having been signed to the major WEA label they set out to thoroughly deconstruct the format of the music album by creating a self-help programme called ‘Spacemate’ contained within a cereal style box. The box/album contained psychological tests, a new type of Tarot style predictive system and a map of the cosmos - all designed to assist the user in learning how to ‘Spacemate’. Two 12” records, each loosely associated with the Past, Present, Future and ‘Somewhere Else’, told the story of the bands own (failed) attempt to Spacemate and their transformation into vacuous marketing objects within an ominous – but strikingly prescient – neoliberal, privatised dystopian future.

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In an attempt to promote the seemingly unmarketable WEA tried to persuade the band to release a single. The band took the invitation at face value, producing a musical meme called Sing-Song – a pseudo sound algorithm which could become whatever type of song suited the listeners taste best. 8 versions of the song were released, ranging from an uber-pomp pop piece produced by Eurovision winner Andy Hill, a mellow jazz version value produced by the Bee-Gees keyboardist Blue Weaver, a head-shattering dance-mix produced by the influential Adrian Sherwood through to riffs on Motown, Punk and Indy. Versions of the eight Sing-Songs were randomly distributed within an identical sleeve leaving purchasers unsure which version they would actually obtain when they went to buy it. 

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Not content with deconstructing the concept of the band, the album and the single Sudden Sway then turned their attention to reshaping the experience of the live performance. In 1987 they created the Home is Heavenly Springs exhibition staged at London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts and at the Edinburgh Festival. The exhibition pursued the dystopian themes of Spacemate by (ostensibly) promoting a bland new-town called Heavenly Springs. At the event, visitors could explore town plans, take a video-drive through the streets of Heavenly Springs, examine its interior design styles and receive counselling for home-owner related varieties of trauma. In the centre of the exhibition, sealed tight within a Heavenly Springs living room was a Human Jukebox/Peep Show containing Sudden Sway. Visitors to the exhibition could use keypads attached to each peep-hole to select one of four song-types: Ballad, Dance-Floor, Rocker or Experimental which the band would then proceed to play. On command. All day and every day.

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The cost of Spacemate, its uncomprehending (sometime hostile) reception by the music media and the negative attitude of the band towards traditional forms of promotion led to an inevitable schism with WEA and the band moved to the seminal Rough Trade records where they went on to produce their next album ’76 Kids Forever (1988). Described as a ‘Soap Opera Musical’ the album took the form of a Broadway musical performed by an amateur musical society somewhere in the UK provinces. The musical, fused with typical soap-opera themes, told the story of one last, lost 1970s weekend of dating, drinking & dancing in Peterborough – before the main protagonist moved up to London and into the 1980s future which awaited. It came complete with cast lists, biogs, a radio drama and… tap dancing.

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Songs from the musical were aired in one of their last TV appearances on Channel 4’s Night Network which they combined with a ‘telephone gig’ which allowed listened to call in and listen ‘online’. The world-wide-web was still 3 years away.

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Their penultimate release on Rough Trade, titled Autumn Cutback Job Lot Offer aimed to further explore their fascination with the mundane and the marginal by reproducing a classified advertisements page in the form of an ‘album’ contained on a single. In a series of 1 minute songs, Autumn Cutback Job Lot Offer set out sad stories reconstructed as alternative advertising ‘jingles’. One told the story of the ‘Namebook’ a new resource for creating social networks, through links and contacts… 

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Following the departure of guitarist Simon Childs, in 1991 Sudden Sway produced their last official release - the album Ko-Opera. Positioned at the dawn of the digital era it refocussed early 90s club music through the filter of a humanised ‘sad’ computer sound to explore what social communion might now mean in a hyperconnected world. With songs representing the voices of a series of ‘Leagues’ of the marginalised - the ugly, the disappointed, the abused, the deceived and the abandoned the album offered its own idiosyncratic take on how electronic music might have sounded had the 1990s gone a different way.

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To accompany Ko-Opera they created a radically new kind of clubbing event – the Klub Londinium experience. Participants were invited to take on different personalities in an immersive live form of theatre and, guided by a taped sound landscape perfectly synchronised with their surroundings, follow in the footsteps of these personalities through different areas and histories of London.

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After Ko-Opera and the Klub Londinium event, the band withdrew from the process of commercial releases to ‘encounter the ordinary’ in all its actualities. Adhering to an anti-celebrity philosophy they defined as ‘invisibilism’, Sudden Sway remained active on their own terms whilst never promoting or advertising anything of what they were doing. For over 25 years their attention remained focussed upon life, birth, death, the pursuit of science, philosophy, global exploration and immersion within parallel cultures, During this period they produced an invisibilist song cycle comprising tracks such as AliceOmega Man, LoveSong of J. Arthur Rank, Eclipse Festival, FederationShip, (Mr) Buddy Desire, Easy Machinery and Moldovan Motel Mystery amongst many others. For now, these remain unavailable, awaiting excavation as elements within the structure of an ongoing project – their most complex and multi-layered yet. Details of this long-term piece remain limited and, given their decisive rejection of the commercial music world what may (or may not) emerge remains unclear at present. Reference to a four-dimensional sensory encyclopaedia, a new ‘deep-net’ of the unknown inaccessible by standard search engines, avatars in block-chains and a wiki of wonderment is all that has been suggested at present. But their anticipations of neoliberalism, the rise of authoritarianism and the culture of the digital age suggest that it may yet point the way to the ‘somewhere else’ once imagined in Spacemate.