Quote of the day

"Once it gets really old then I can visit it with some sort of sense of rueful nostalgia. But not for a long time. I just tried to listen to the new album and I got through one and a half songs and I was just like, 'Ugh'. When you're making it, it's so full of mystery and light and it's so invigorating. You think, 'Finally I've reached something true!' And it sounds fantastic and then you work on it so much, and you hear it so many times and you run it through it through your brain so many times while you're laying in bed thinking about it, that by the end … it's just like a used condom."

Well, that comment from Michael Gira - made during a fascinating interview with John Doran for The Quietus - certainly explains why on Thursday in Reading, even on a tour ostensibly promoting new album To Be Kind, Swans spent much of their two-and-a-half-hour set playing even newer material.

Over the course of the interview, the pair also discussed the parallels between Swans' music and funk, free jazz and gospel, the evils of consumerism, Swans not really being a New York band, and Gira's involvement in a performance art piece that featured strung-up carcasses, men in nappies and lots of blood...