Musical Heroes Series, Inge Thomson Chooses Swap

Inge Thomson is a singer accordion player song-writer. Known outside her solo work as a member of The Karine Polwart Trio.  Inge is also Martin’s wife, lucky, lucky girl.

Lucky Inge Thomson

Despite not actually drawing a wage from Lau, I feel acutely entangled in their business. It is both an honour and a total pain in the arse.  And so here I am writing a wee blog for some of my musical heroes about some of my musical heroes – Swåp.

I first heard about this accordion player, Karen Tweed, from the marvellous master of the quadruplet, Gary Peterson, he’d encountered her alongside Roger Wilson when they had graced the stages of the Shetland Folk Festival back in 1987.  I was playing the accordion (badly) at the time, and had never really heard of any other young female box players.  I saw her myself at the same folk festival several years later performing with the Poozies and was smitten.  Her virtuosity and elegance on stage, her sparky effervescence offstage, she just seemed a joy!

Then I encountered Swåp.  Anything is possible.  The combination of those four musicians, Carina Normansson and Ola Bäckström driving the strings and Ian Carr urging the chords towards beautifully squint, and Karen making magical musical snowflakes cover everything. They would push and pull with such intricate arrangements that at the end of a set of tunes you would feel like they had divulged a piece of essential information to you. Bliss.

I was very fortunate to have had a few years of cross-pathing with Swåp, where I was often moved to a catatonic state by their sound but more often very excited by it.  They released four studio albums, all champions, which provided much to aspire to for my band Harem Scarem.

It is hard find footage of Swåp that is not filmed by a shaky limb but I managed it –

Swåp broke up in 2007.  I was not alone in being genuinely devastated by it.

Anyway, Swåp, Heroes.

Thanks Inge, and Lau would also like to add that Swåp have and are a huge influence for us, and we miss them very much.

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• December 8, 2011
• Musical Heroes Series
• 2 comments