The Wild Swans microsite

Q Whose idea was it for Revolutionary Spirit to come out as a 12"? It seems right for two such epic songs to be complete statements on each side of a 12".

Ged: I think the idea of releasing a single at all came from Pete De Freitas - we didn’t have the finances to be able to consider it. Each of the Bunnymen had received a windfall of £2000. Pete took an interest in our work from the start and wanted to invest in a record.

Paul: I don’t think we were ever consulted about the format. Bill Drummond and Dave Balfe, who ran Zoo Records, were keen to enter the 12-inch single market. It was the only thing they hadn’t tried yet. A hundred or so 7-inch promos were also pressed up of The Revolutionary Spirit with the last verse edited out. Producer of the single, the late, great Pete De Freitas (Echo and the Bunnymen’s drummer, credited on the single as Louis Vincent), in an effort to improve the sound quality, took the master tape to New York and worked on a different mix of the track with Talking Heads’ live engineer. Although sonically it was a slight improvement we still insisted on putting out the original version. This despite the fact the track was in mono and sounded like it was drifting up from the ocean bed. It just had something.

Jem: The structure of The Revolutionary Spirit was particularly suited to a 12" version as we weren’t in the business of writing 3-minute pop songs. Also, the quality of the 7" edited version is appreciably worse than that of the 12", which is a usual difference between the formats, but the quality of the original recording carried distortion that the 12" format seemed to balance out.

Ged: I agree with Paul that we didn’t really have a fixed idea to start with, nor were Zoo involved from the start. It was a completely independent project. Zoo became involved after hearing the recordings. Bill Drummond said later it was the best thing Zoo had released - and he was right. It was appropriate that it was their final project. Curiously we were a bit hesitant about them as Paul and I had had dealings with them before. As soon as it was finished it became clear that this was the perfect format for the two songs.

Q Why was this the only release for the first incarnation of the Wild Swans, on Zoo or anywhere? The radio sessions prove there was material enough for at least one of the greatest LPs ever!

Paul: Zoo Records folded shortly after the release of the single and despite achieving single of the week in the music papers and the support of John Peel, people weren’t exactly banging on our bedsit doors demanding more. Mind you that probably had something to do with us not owning a telephone. Don’t forget The Wild Swans formed just a few short years after punk’s asteroid had hit and there was still this feeling within our circle that there was something terminally uncool about trying too hard. We were very suspicious of bands like China Crisis and The Icicle Works whose crime in our eyes was that they actually sent off demo tapes and played gigs.

Jem: Had we been properly managed we’d definitely have signed a deal and recorded an inspired and inspiring album. Circumstances conspired against us.

Paul: We were eventually given some demo time at Matrix Studios in London, paid for by Phonogram’s A&R man Dave Bates (The man who had signed post-Zoo Teardrop Explodes). As a result of these demos we were offered a spectacularly poor album deal. It had this clause in the contract that Dave Bates himself had to produce the album. We took one look at his Leo Sayer haircut and the Tears For Fears posters on his office wall and scarpered back to Liverpool.

Ged: It wasn’t only that we didn’t want to try too hard. We were sort of shocked by the desperate dash for fame by our peers, as though the purpose of writing songs was to sign to a major and get on Top Of The Pops. I hated this approach. I liked things to be more open-ended, I hated high production values. Like these old idiots in studios sagely telling you that there’s too much distortion or all of the other crap. That never bothered me. You can listen to anything if it’s good. I love the fact Rev Spirit is in mono. It’s because we were doing it ourselves and we were inexperienced, but even so it’s a million times greater than all of the other stuff around at the time.

Q There is a lot of stuff being written about Dylan and his Rolling Thunder revue at the moment, and the cast of characters involved. Are you aware that the people involved in the Wild Swans have the same heroic status for another generation in the way Dylan & co. do for an earlier one? Whose fault is it (yours or ours) that the history books do not reflect this? Have you been too nonchalant about your own legacy that it is only now that the back catalogue is seeing the light of day? This seems to be a trait of many of the best people involved in the late-'70s/early-'80s music e.g. you, Subway Sect, Blue Orchids, and many more.

Paul: Whose fault? It’s yours of course.

Ged: I think we were too unconcerned and terminally nonchalant. Perhaps it’s impossible to have one eye on history. We were living in Pete De Freitas’ and Paul’s flat on the top floor of a gloomy Victorian villa in a run-down part of the city. We were stoned to the point of incapacity nearly all the time and never professional the rest. I’m convinced we were doing it for different reasons than everyone else. We certainly weren’t trying to be successful. In fact you could argue that we undermined our chances by consciously making decisions that would harm our careers. We turned down nearly everything we were offered. TV, radio, press, photo sessions. We just weren’t interested in feeding that machine. We thought exposure would kill us. Within our small circle everything we touched turned to gold, we didn’t worry about the outside world. In Liverpool everybody wanted to be us or copy us. Because of his part in the birth of the whole Liverpool scene in the late 70s Paul had this mythic status. How could we fail?

Paul: I think the common denominator in all the bands you mention was probably a healthy disrespect for anyone not actually in the band. Unlike most of our contemporaries at the time we didn’t make music for any other reason than it made us absolutely miserable not to. The Wild Swans’ problem was always management or the lack of it. We’d played the Club Zoo dates and triumphed on The Bunnymen’s UK support tour of ‘81 but, for some reason, the press and record companies just weren’t biting. Apart from John Peel and Kid Jensen nobody took us very seriously until long after we’d split up. Including us. With hindsight we should have gone to Rough Trade. After the buzz of the Radio One sessions had died down we were left feeling a bit flat. A lethargy crept in to our rehearsals closely followed by a little paranoia. Jem had somehow got it in to his head that I had been offered some sort of contract by Arista Records but had turned it down without consulting him or the rest of the band. Simon Potts, head of A&R at Arista had invited us all down for a meeting some months earlier where his secretary had plied us all with Hawaiian grass but he just wouldn’t commit to a deal until he had seen us play live. I remember being very pissed off when he suggested I take singing lessons and absolutely fucking furious when the rest of the band agreed with him!

This was around the time of the Falklands crisis and Simon was adamant that if we signed to his label our first single for them should be Flowers of England. He was convinced it would be the squaddies anthem, the 80’s equivalent of Pack up Your Troubles or The White Cliffs of Dover. The truth was we were so naïve and unpatriotic that Ged and I had a contingency plan, in the event of the war escalating, to hit all the cashpoints in the city centre, and withdraw the maximum allowed on our cards at each machine before the central computer could register the loss. Then pockets bulging we would jump a ferry to Amsterdam.

Anyway Simon Potts wouldn’t budge on the live issue, and we refused to be dictated to, so that was that. The Wild Swans imploded shortly afterward and I’m still trying to find out why. Subsequently Arista went on to sign the two bands that The Wild Swans split into. Paying twice the price for half of the magic. Looking back on it now I can see we acted like complete idiots. We were too young, too stubborn and too stoned to see what we had.

Ged: We were rightly circumspect about the dangers of signing a major deal. The attraction was that, sure, you could afford a load of expensive new equipment - we’d always survived on old borrowed equipment. Apart from Jem, who was the only one with a job, the rest of the band owned next to nothing. Without a few labels chasing us we had no lever with Arista to improve their terms. In a way although this inertia did lead to our break up, I’m satisfied with hindsight that we didn’t do the deal. Even though they had bands like Patti Smith in America, Arista in the UK was a crappy set up. Look at who else they had on the label - Haircut 100 and so on. These were all signed by the same A&R man - terrifyingly he must have seen something of that in us too. It was probably the best thing for us that a bland Arista-produced version of The Revolutionary Spirit didn’t appear. It would have been too awful to contemplate.

Jem: Isn’t it always the case that a media frenzy has to be whipped up in order to extend the creatives’ notoriety beyond an audience that can identify quality to one that has to be told? The Wild Swans were caught in a microcosm outside of which nothing and no-one seemed to matter much, least of all journalists, DJs and record company personnel.

Ged: In a way we were over-confident. Already assured of a status, we thought. We were blind to what we had to some extent. I suppose it was bad luck. I wish we had recorded that album with Pete DF because I think it would have been an underground classic. But I’m happy that a major never got their hands on it.

Q We all have our own favourite things about the Wild Swans, whether it be the melodramatic keyboards, the gorgeous swooping vocals, the perfect guitar lines, and so on. What was important for me though seems to be the words: for example, just hearing No Bleeding after many years I was amazed how the line about "my courage is melting with the ice in my glass" had stayed with me. There always seemed a doomed romanticism there, like say Malcolm Lowry's Under The Volcano, which I loved. Am I on the right lines here, or is this my own twist on the Wild Swans?

Ged: That was my favourite line from that song too. It’s an incredible image. We didn’t get to hear Paul’s lyrics until we went into a studio. It was impossible in rehearsals as the volume was deafening. We wore ear-plugs. It was always an amazing experience for the music to take on Paul’s imagery. I loved night spread your skirt around from Enchanted too. It was something I looked forward to.

Jem: Just working together on the songs was brilliant: moments of intense concentration interspersed with insane laughter followed by a run-through in which Paul would sing strange, enticing lyrics. I was only 19 and sensed without ever fully understanding an enormity to what we were doing.

Ged: Doomed romanticism - exactly. Wouldn’t that have been more interesting than the new romanticism that we got?

Paul: If we sounded like doomed romantics that’s because we were. I was fascinated with the magic of language from an early age. By the time I was 19 I’d made myself thoroughly miserable by reading every second-hand Picador and Penguin Modern Classic I could lay my hands on. My bedsit was groaning with them. If it was a choice between buying records, books or food - and it often was - I’d always go for the books. No wonder I look so thin in the photos. By the time The Wild Swans came into being I was on a strict diet of Henry Miller and the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun. Pre-Teardrops I’d been so enamoured with Patti Smith’s wordy Piss Factory single and her debut album Horses I’d paid what in those days was a lot of money (£1.50) for an imported copy of issue 2 of Legs Mc Neil’s Punk magazine. It was devoted to Television and the rising stars of C.B.G.B.s. Inside was a long Patti Smith interview about the Tower of Babel and communicating telepathically. You know what she’s like. In the same issue Tom Verlaine was name checking Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. I’d already fallen in love with Television after buying their Marquee Moon album on import purely on the strength of its back cover artwork. Something about that black and white spiral galaxy just connected with me. Tom was also raving about Gérard de Nerval hanging himself from a lamp post in the snow because he had fallen hopelessly in love with a showgirl. This stuff was better than drugs to me, news from a distant star. I was so inspired I simply had to get hold of these books. As I couldn’t possibly afford to buy the expensive American imprints of the French poets that I’d seen in my local independent bookshop Atticus, I had to steal them. And you thought those baggy suits were a fashion thing?

Q And was the name a Yeats reference?

Paul: Contrary to popular opinion the band’s name wasn’t a Yeats reference at all but taken from the children’s fairy story of the same name. If you remember Merseyside had all just passed through the phase of the long unwieldy band name. The Teardrop Explodes and Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark etc. Now the country was knee-deep in one-syllable names like Gel and Blurt. I wanted something different. A beautiful name, a naïve name. So The Wild Swans were born. Soon it became de rigueur to have pretty Pre-Raphaelite sounding names. Come in The Pale Fountains and The Blue Orchids.

Q It was Bill Drummond who argued Seymour Stein should have insisted the Flamin' Groovies and Talking Heads split after releasing Shake Some Action and Love Goes To Building On Fire respectively. Much as I hated the fact, and this contradicts my earlier question, there was a kind of perfection to the original Wild Swans releasing one classic record. What made you return a few years later? I have to confess at the time I protested by not going to your shows or buying the new records. My loss!

Paul: I was in Cyprus for a family wedding, kicking back in a crumbling old hotel in Nicosia killing time drinking whisky sours and contemplating my future. I’d just been through two big emotional traumas and had grown my hair down to my shoulders as a reaction to the thousands of kids now sporting my old look. I’d really been through the emotional wringer with Care and I’d decided to put together a new band and resume working under the Wild Swans banner again. I interpreted a chance meeting with Ged on my first day back in Liverpool as an omen. Instead of spending the next six months recruiting a new band I could make one quick phone call to Jem and our drummer Alan Wills (presently managing The Coral) and be back on track and rehearsing within a few days. Although it was an identical line-up to the Mk 1 band, the second incarnation was a bird of a different feather. We’d all managed to bury our differences and had grown up a bit in the few years we’d been apart.

This new maturity turned out to be something of a double-edged sword though. On the one hand we were now a tighter more focussed unit, but on the other something of the band’s edge had been blunted by our time on the majors and a new pop sensibility had crept into the songwriting. Don’t forget while we had been away The Smiths had neatly stepped in and filled our shoes and New Order were in the charts with hummable tunes. I think in working with outsiders we’d forgotten how to be The Wild Swans.

Jem: In 1985 I was working in a band of my own, attempting to sing. When Ged suggested that Paul might be interested in a Reformation I recollected my formative years in The Wild Swans and jumped at the chance to make things right…again. The trouble is, you never can quite recapture the essence of the past, can you? I thought we’d be as unbridled in our approach to songwriting as we had been first time around, but something had changed. The only thing we did remember accurately was how to spend hours wandering through Liverpool in search of a decent café.

Paul: When Ged left us shortly after recording the Janice Long Session to pursue his career in painting the band’s soul diminished somewhat and the spell was broken. The spark had not gone out completely but it was flickering. Combine this with Paul Hardiman’s unsympathetic production of the Bringing Home The Ashes album and a rapid succession of managers it was obvious our days were numbered. I can’t listen to that 1st album now. It’s a faint photocopy of an X-ray of the sound and spirit of the original band and in my mind a wasted opportunity. In 1981 I mistakenly thought we sounded sophisticated like Roxy Music. Listening to it now over 20 years later it’s closer to punk. Unlike our stable-mates The Teardrop Explodes and Echo and The Bunnymen our reference points were not rooted in the 1960s but rather in the 1860s. If I look back I see this whole Wild Swans Mk. 1 period as taking place in permanent winter. Tweed suits, Prison boots, roll-up ciggies, soup and amphetamines. I’m immensely proud of those early recordings and nothing I have done since has come close to capturing that majesty of sound we captured on tracks like The Revolutionary Spirit, Flowers Of England and No Bleeding.

Ged: Yes. I think we were all haunted to some extent by the spirit of the Mark 1 Swans and so it seemed the obvious solution to reform. Perhaps we felt there was unfinished business. I think Paul’s analogy about the Wild Swans 1 existing in winter is spot on. It was freezing bedsits, fingerless gloves, and sex with your clothes on. Our tour with the Bunnymen ended in the severest winter for twenty years. In the tunnels at Edge Hill going into Lime Street hung curtains of icicles thirty feet long. We were on the train because our van’s engine had frozen and we’d abandoned it one night in a blizzard somewhere outside Lichfield. The second Wild Swans seemed to develop in a different age entirely. If any of the Wild Swans Mark 1 songs had a commercial edge it was purely by chance. I don’t know why but by 1985/6 we’d been corrupted by the interminable stop/start soul destroying processes of producing records for major labels. It shows how fragile these things can be.

Q Was there ever a Pete Frame style family tree drawn up of the Liverpool groups of the late '70s/early '80s?

Paul: There was a two-volume book knocking around in the mid-eighties with a Wild Swans branch but I never saw it. For a band that had 28 bass players pass through its ranks I’m not surprised we never appeared in Pete Frame’s Rock Family Trees.

Jem: I saw a Dr Martens’ ad. depicting The Wild Swans lineage, circa 1996.

Paul: I actually rang him about ten years ago to point out a few mistakes in his Liverpool branch. Presuming him to be a man who would pride himself on his accuracy I thought he would be keen to iron out any mistakes. He wasn’t remotely interested. I was particularly eager to rectify my entry in relation to my leaving The Teardrop Explodes in ‘79. To this day his version has me leaving Messrs Cope, Finkler and Dwyer to attend college. This was just damage limitation by Julian. The truth was that Julian did not want the world to know that I had voluntarily left The Teardrops to form my own group. It just didn’t look cool so he invented this nonsense about me going on to further education.

Q I remember a Vic Godard interview from 1982-ish where the interviewer says your career has a lot of momentum right now, and Vic replies that's not his fault. I guess my favourite people of that time could be drawn together in a book called "How Not To Have a No. 1 Record!", which I find perversely attractive - even if it does not pay your bills. Were you deliberately going against the tide and keeping a low profile? I seem to even remember Dave McCullough making up an interview in Sounds because you couldn't be bothered to play the "promotion" game.

Paul: That was a nightmare. Mick Houghton, fledgling press officer and our manager at the time, had instructed me not to do any press. I think he wanted us to build up a word-of-mouth thing. So when Dave McCullough bypassed Mick and rang the payphone in our rehearsal room I quickly got rid of him. Using what little he had gleaned from talking to me in those few moments, and from talking to some of our friends in other bands, he constructed this piece. Cleverly covering himself by presenting it as Paul Simpson ‘speaks through’ Dave McCullough. A play on the fact he knew my mother was a healer and spiritualist. The rest of the band and even my own mother were furious with me.

Jem: I was working 7.30am – 4pm as an apprentice electrician throughout those early, inspirational days and remember Paul and Ged reluctantly agreeing to travel to London for the pressing of The Revolutionary Spirit. For my part, I was late for a soundcheck at a Club Zoo gig when The Wild Swans were supporting Teardrop. The reason? ‘I haven’t eaten my mum’s trifle, yet.’ We seemed to be interested in anything other than promoting the band, knowing instinctively that self-promotion is for careerists, professionals and the desperate.

Q I was arguing with someone about haircuts the other day, and this is probably the most important question: who was the first among the punks in Liverpool/Manchester to go for the Brideshead Revisited/severe army style of haircut with the shaved back and heavy fringe? Are you happy for A Certain Ratio to get credit for this?

Paul: OK you only have to check out the back cover of Julian Cope’s Floored Genius 3. It’s a photo dated April 1978 taken in my old Rodney Street bed-sit in Liverpool of A Shallow Madness. (The band that turned into The Teardrop Explodes) Ian McCulloch on vocals, Julian on bass, Dave Pickett on drums, and yours truly on £40 organ, Edith Nesbitt hair and experimental gorblimey trousers. This was a second stab at a look I’d tried out briefly a year earlier in Eric’s. I’d based my look on that of a feeble-minded postman I’d once seen on a day trip to London. Such was the impact of this Hovis boy / Hitler Youth look on the testosterone soaked streets of Merseyside I’d frequently have to fight for my honour. People just took one look at the hair and the voluminous trousers and presumed I was a raging homosexual. Just popping out to the corner shop for a pint of milk could and often did result in my literally fighting my way back home. People were so repressed in this country in late 70s and early 80s that they saw any outward display of individualism as a threat to the very fabric of society.

Jem: it was only a haircut! But, there was a truly laconic barber we all used to go to at a three-seater salon off Whitechapel, Liverpool. His name was Victor and he’d seen it all before in the 60s when he cut bands’ hair (obviously the 70s was a different story). You could be in there sat next to Mike Head, Will Sergeant or anyone with a sensibility, but you’d be praying no-one else in a band was in there as you’d have your own nuances that you wouldn’t want anyone else to know about. Victor was most discrete and a true egalitarian: I remember seeing Ian McCulloch standing in line on the stairs because Victor’s three seats were full.

Paul: Before I started going to Vic his business was so bad that there were cobwebs on the chairs. After The Wild Swans had made it fashionable his shop was always packed. His salon grew so popular that he eventually had to retire due to liver problems through not being able to take a break to urinate. A year later all the Liverpool bands began to follow me down to Victor’s and ask for a ‘Paul Simpson’. I clearly remember our first gig was supporting Orange Juice at Pickwick’s in Liverpool.