BACK STORY: STUFF OF NIGHTMARES

In the Faber book of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy interviews, Will Oldham describes the beginnings of Superwolf as a therapeutic intervention, beckoning Matt Sweeney “back into the real world” in the aftermath of an unhappy sojourn in Billy Corgan’s ill-fated altrock supergroup Zwan (above). The initial plan was to write three songs together (but separately) and then perform them for the first time with minimal – or, as it turned out, no – rehearsal at a Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy show at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire. Sweeney looks back on that experience as being “as close to the dream where you have to go on-stage unprepared as you could get, without it being an actual nightmare”.