More on Manuela Zwingman from this All About Eve site: "A 5 track demo tape was recorded and sent to various record companies. The demo contained : D For Desire, This Isn't Heaven, This Trembling Hand, Fate Flies, and No Sleep Until Dawn. Through Manuela’s and Julianne's X-Mal and Jezebel contacts, Red Rhino offered them a short term deal, giving them their own Eden label. After recording the first single in May 85 at Southern studios, Manuela left the band to have a baby, while bass player James joined Test Department. In the 15 months The Swarm existed, they never played live."

From Le Label 4AD... "Après Tocsin, leur second album, Ivo leur conseille de trouver un label plus important et 'ils ont cru que je les laissais tomber!'". Roughly translates to: "After Tocsin, their second album, Ivo advised them to find a more significant label and 'they thought that I'd dropped them!'".

"Hamburg, Germany's Xmal Deutschland impressed Ivo with an "incredibly raw" demo tape whose live power was never completely captured in the studio. Nevertheless, the spiky intensity of the four-woman, one-man band proved compelling enough on their debut album Fetisch (CAD 302) and two subsequent singles--a different version of the album's lead-off track "Qual" (BAD 305) and a re-recorded and extended version of Xmal's pre-4AD debut "Incubus Succubus II" (BAD 311)--to capture the attention of John Peel and a substantial UK audience. Live performance proved to be the band's real strength: Ivo recalls a particularly memorable show from this period where Xmal, opening for the Cocteau Twins at one of The Venue's 4AD showcases, won over a crowd of aloof scenesters in a matter of moments." (From 4ad-(the perfect antidote)).

A bit of rummaging under the stairs has brought my yellowing X-Mal clippings to light; various reviews and interviews from the music press, plus full features from Zig Zag and Record Mirror. Scanning and transcribing to follow...