Album Notes

"Amusingly droll lo-fi art-rockers...A collection of rough edged, twitchy songs that has them sounding like a sardonic Modern Lovers with a large dose of Northern Grit....Intro, Hospital List #1 and Simple Pleasures all spark with raw energy".
The Wire September 2004

swiss guards are Adam Turner and Harvey Sharman-Dunn (HSD).

swiss guards believe they are the future, but they don't know of what.
swiss guards are anti-retro, anti-revivalist, anti-war.
swiss guards are pro a thousand artists, writers, bands and records that don't need to be mentioned here.
swiss guards can bring the noise and bring the pain.

The band started as a scam, a virtual band.
Adam Turner and former member Dom Utton both wrote for a local Manchester arts magazine and decided to hype a band that didn't exist, slip interviews, live reviews and record releases past the dozy editors and see how far they could run with it. Interviews written, T-shirts printed, photographs taken, band inserted into gig listings.

Whist staying with Harvey Sharman-Dunn (who had an eight track studio and a lifetime's worth of pissing about in bands, such as Chomsky and more recently Bocca) they then went and spoilt the whole thing by writing some songs, and worse, recording them.
With occasional help from drumming-mountaineer Neil Barnett, a sound emerged - looped beats, scuzzy guitars, fluffed notes, "anti-guitar" guitar solos, acoustic guitars, 70's organs, kids percussion all mashed together.
There was no ego.

swiss guards cancelled gigs left, right and the middle-of-nowhere to hone the songs on plastic. Lyrically the tracks tell various tales -wide-eyed enjoyment of life's simple pleasures; imaginary meetings between dead actors and writers at Imaginary service stations; the inability to write a proper love song; overheard and found sentences; and detailed descriptions of the traumatic year spent in a bone marrow unit with a two year old. In other words, the standard lyrical fare of daytime radio.

Quotes
"I've heard enough of this -what else have you got?" Pete "pop idol" Waterman
"I know you -where do I know you from?" Bill Drummond