april 4th extract-swell maps

Swell Maps-H.S.Art-A Trip To Marineville

When I was a small child I loved, really loved, the Thunderbirds TV series. I believed it all despite the wobbly puppetry and now clearly visible strings. I only had one of the toys- a plastic Thunderbird 1 rocket plane and was desperate for the undersea Thunderbird 4, which I think was yellow. As it was originally aired in the mid-sixties I must have been about six or seven years old. I don’t know how I knew Thunderbird 4 was yellow as I am sure there was only a black and white television at home. I presume some other more privileged child at school must have had Thunderbird 4. There was always one spoilt kid in every school who had all the full set of toys, whatever the latest craze may have been- but they never had many friends. Maybe that was a lesson for us all even back then.

What was it I loved about Thunderbirds? The battle of good vs evil, (there must have been some undercurrent re the Cold War I guess in there), the fact that when they called into base the eyes on their portraits would light up and the cliffhanging narrative-would they get there in time etc. I recall vividly being  six years old on literally the edge of my seat, hardly being able to watch. Even now I can remember well one episode with a train full of passengers teetering on a collapsing bridge and watching in horror in case the Thunderbirds crew didn’t get there in time to save the day.(They did of course, they always do). I also remember another brilliant episode with a named drilling machine on articulated tracks emerging from the green Thunderbird 2 to drill through a rock fall to save some hapless civilian trapped perilously close to death.

Thunderbirds was my favourite. I never particularly liked Stingray, which was a slightly earlier effort by Gerry Anderson, largely because the evil fish people scared the shit out of me. By the time Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons and Joe 90 came around I was too old and sophisticated for it all (I must have been nearly 8 years old by then) but Thunderbirds will always have a special place in my heart.   

Apart from the summer holiday classics that were an intrinsic part of growing up in the 60’s(Belle & Sebastian,The Flashing Blade, Robinson Crusoe and White Horses) my other special TV programme when I was growing up was the animated Boss Cat (it was only years later that I understood that it was really a re-write of Sgt Bilko) but I’d still watch it now and enjoy it.

This brings me neatly onto Swell Maps and this album. Quite possibly one of the finest albums I have ever heard and certainly up there with the best. It’s been so hard to write anything about it without falling into clichéd rhapsodies that the best way to approach it is sideways. Marineville was the name of the sea base in Stingray and Swell Maps were the living embodiment Top Cat’s gang- Benny, Chooch ,Fancy-Fancy, Brain and Spook. When I was 19 I loved, really loved, this Swell Maps album. Still do, all those years later.