Swell Maps: Big Maz in 'The Desert From The Trolley'

Track of the Week - 7 July 2019

In the continuing saga of what to do with my dad's stuff, this week I helped my mum take a lot of old Ordnance Survey maps to the local library. I was all for using them as wrapping paper but the library wanted them so that was that.

So, as I lugged a box swelled with maps from my car I think I can use a track by Swell Maps this week. Released in 1980, Big Maz... was from the group's second and final album, Swell Maps in Jane from Occupied Europe.

Swell Maps' work is largely experimental, which might be another way of saying ramshackle and thrown together at times. (Although Pitchfork, the online music magazine, described it as "a thrilling catalog of new sounds' and put it in their 200 best albums of the eighties list.)

The band surely had some of the best nom de plumes in rock though - Epic Soundtracks, Nikki Sudden, Jowe Head, Biggles Books and, my personal favourite, Phones Sportsman.

I remember picking the album up in a sale section of one of the town's record shops. I probably bought it because of the name. To be honest I didn't like it much, (it was a bit too 'out there' for the young me, I'm warming to bits of it now) but this largely instrumental racket always stood out.