The platter yielded a confusingly alluring musical plasticity, like a midnight downtown meeting of the Lounge Lizards and Tom Waits. It seemed like an attempt to stir up a sleaze-riddled, fake-jazz storm.

It began with fingers snappin' out the rhythm, the low deep moan of an upright bass, a brief run along a vibraphone and, later, a saxophone attacked with an uncouth coarseness. All instruments generally being handled with a punky modicum of technical expertise.

The singer sounded as though he was gargling with a high-powered bleach, his phrasing slithering and twisting into partially non-decipherable throaty expressionism but managing to cough out such lines as ‘the heat in here makes me hot’ and 'what time is it?', later to be repeated in French.

It was a song seemingly hellbent on creating an effect, crafting a clever illusion of a particular style, and it was likeable despite, or perhaps because of, its bold and deliberate inauthentic.

By chance, I found a copy the very next day on a Sounds window sill and rescued it from the edge-curling sunlight (a few strains were sneaking through the cracks in the shutters into this habitually dark and dungeon-like place).

The cover depicted Swans Way, two men and a woman from Birmingham, snapped in studiously sophisticated poses and approximately 1940s-ish attire. On the front was a male model sitting on the ground in a sailors suit picking flowers. The whole affair was, to say the least, unusual. I decided to unravel the mystery.

Hanging around outside Euston station, I eventually panhandled sufficient funds for a express jaunt Midlands-wards. Once aboard I, clambered into the luggage rack: the only place where a man of my dimensions can comfortably recline during long journeys, and assumed a reflective, horizontal position.

An hour-and-a-half later the ample folds of my de-mob suit were flapping gaily in the breeze as I strode purposefully towards Exit Records (responsible for the Swans Way disc and also the Bloods 45 of earlier in the year), my trusty biro being crunched to smithereens between my teeth which were clenched in anticipation.

The two men and a woman turn out to be Rick, Robert, and Maggie. I should now inform you of who plays what but I consider such trivia to be beneath me. Anyway, I forgot to ask. But what is important, as will shortly be revealed is what they create between them and not the individual contributions. Seekers after inside truths will have to content themselves with the sad but honest 'fact' that Swans Way like Jaffa Cakes.

Rick and Bob once owned guitars and Maggie possessed a synth. These things were ousted during a puritanical rethink of strategies and donated, via the dustbin, to Birmingham Corporation.

Maggie: “We met last October and decided we all wanted to do something different to what we'd been doing before. Forget the past and start afresh.”

(A chip-eating waif later accosted me in the street saying that Maggie and Rick used to be in the local buffoon band and made such fools of themselves onstage that they became the laughing stock of the city.)

Rick: "It was really just through talking that we changed all the instruments, feeling that we could then create something new and stronger."

Robert: “We wanted to achieve something with a strong atmosphere yet be very natural at the same time. Because we all started playing new instruments we were immediately thrown into a whole new dynamic of playing. We could no longer rely on the things we'd been used to."

Maggie: "We also wanted to leave a lot of space in the music, for it to be uncluttered. We want each note played, each beat struck or word sung to be clear and defined, not wishy washy."

Following their autumnal chit-chat origins, Swans Way maintained the lowest of profiles, only emerging to play live last May.

Maggie: "We've played places that aren't regular band venues in Birmingham. One was a strip club. It's nice for people to go to places that are new and previously unexplored. Being somewhere different helps, it prevents complacency.

Robert: "We want play places that complement our atmosphere. We enjoy playing live but to play every night would take the spirit away and it would be like operating a machine. We could never be a good support group because of the way we are.”

Rick: “We'd wear the audience out by the time the main band came on.”

Maggie: "Watching us is a draining experience. We take a lot out of people. You either get totally drawn in or left completely cold. For us, playing is a very intense, passionate experience."

Robert: "From what I've heard about this 'new-jazz' thing it seems that the groups are quite laid-back. You could watch them while sitting at a table having a conversation. You couldn't do that with us, it's a performance and you have to give it your attention.”

'Theme From The Balcony' is virtually a drawing-board blueprint of 'cool'. By virtue of the instruments used, the clothes worn, the lyrics venturing into French, it could easily strike a tot of people as horrendously pretentious, the posey end of ‘new jazz’ (in the background, a trumpet squeals out a long imitation yawn).

Rick: “The atmosphere we try to create has spirit (he clicks his fingers in mid-air). It’s young and has spirit but it's not ‘jazz'. We've been totally cut-off from all that 'new-jazz'. It just seems like nostalgia."

Maggie: “It's middle-aged. People say the single is jazzy but we’re not a jazz band. Now one of us is influenced by jazz. Perhaps it sounds that because it is very natural, what we do comes from our hearts. We haven’t thought ‘let’s do jazz’.

“We’ve got a method we work with now and we all really understand what we're doing. That helps spontaneity, we just get together and play. What we do is timeless. It's classical and contemporary.

“Us playing together triggers things. The lyrics aren't just odd phrases stuck together, in everything we do there is strong discipline and form but to us it is natural because we understand that discipline and form. Having lyrics in French may seem pretentious to some but not to us. It is all part of the atmosphere, we don't do anything just for the sake of it.”

Rick: "We each share a strong idea of what we are doing. When we play together songs just happen, we don't sit down and write them. With that single we had to make some sort of statement about what we are doing. We're got a lot of songs, some of them we aren't sure how to record, but that one is very clean cut and either you like it or you don't. There is a very definite Swans Way atmosphere that comes across.”

Robert: “We aim to capture our live naturalness."

Maggie: "if you do a single you take into account the medium of the single and arrange the song accordingly. The way we record is very natural but also very unusual. The engineer at the studio said it was a complete new experience for him and it changed a lot of his ideas about working with bands.

"We recorded everything absolutely plain. We used no effects at all but took into account the ambience of the room and tried to get the feel and vibeyness (!) of it over. The engineer said our approach was quite radical."

She recollects this observation as a compliment and grins happily.

Robert, a wide-eyed innocent of the multi-track admits “we didn’t know we were being 'radical' at the time. Recording is very difficult when you're inexperienced.”

As I prepare to leave, they press a cassette into my kit-bag. As if by magic my playing the contents endorses all the talk of 'naturalness' and ‘atmosphere'. The components (which include some delectably melancholic violin scrapings) weave together all manner of sticky tensions and intrigues. The arrangements carry a scent of ripening purity and the three songs are evocative, rich and vibrant.

The single, in comparison, is full of phoney feelings and only a cardboard indication of their real talents.

Weirdly the name begins to make sense as well. Before just a misappropriation of Marcel Proust now a summation of their direction. Steering a determined but graceful course of their own through languid waters.