“One chord is fine,” Lou Reed famously said. “Two chords is pushing it; three chords and you’re into jazz.”

This aesthetic is something Michael Gira, frontman of the post-punk band Swans, could be said to have taken to heart.

Gira is only ten years younger than Reed, who died last year at 71, and Swans first formed in 1982 as part of a new wave of bands that took The Velvet Underground as an influence. Other bands, such as Can, Suicide, Public Image Ltd, Joy Division and The Fall can be invoked in Gira’s hypnotic music, although Swans have a heavy aura of their own.

After 15 years of creativity, Swans broke up in 1997. Gira reformed the group in 2010 and they appeared in Brighton on the last day of a UK tour to support the album To Be Kind – their third since he revitalised the name.

Famous for playing at loud volume, the band slowly built up their songs from small beginnings of brushed chords into pulsating grooves with huge crescendos.

As a grizzled Gira waved his arms to conduct the apocalypse, any jazz player in the audience would surely have been impressed by the musicianship these epic, semi-improvised pieces demanded.