‘Honestly I’m terrified,” says Paul Simpson. “I don’t know what I’ve written and I’m far too close to it.” The singer, musician and frontman of cult 1980s Liverpool group the Wild Swans is speaking from a residential room in the Rubrics, in Trinity College, Dublin, where his partner, the theatre director Gemma Bodinetz, is currently working. The oldest residential building in Ireland and also, by many accounts, the most haunted building in the country, it is a suitable setting in which to discuss his book Revolutionary Spirit, a music memoir and social history of the 80s Liverpool music scene that is steeped in learned erudition and infused with the ghosts of an old port city.
“I’m a peripheral voice on the scene,” admits Simpson, with self-deprecating honesty, his Mersey sibilances adding a necessary softness to this statement. “Louder voices than mine have always had control of the narrative. When my agent initially approached publishers they were very honest. They said: ‘We love your writing but you’re simply not famous enough to make this project viable.’”
What these bigger publishers missed, or perhaps confirmed, is that it is exactly Simpson’s peripheral vision, his ability to be ever present yet never central to his city’s musical history, that makes Revolutionary Spirit – published by an indie press – such an important work. As with, say, Julian MacLaren-Ross’s memoirs of 50s Soho or Céleste Albaret’s book on Proust – and unlike Julian Cope’s own assertive biography of the same period, Head On – this is a work that recognises the importance of the margin-dweller; the ability to stand off-stage and, in the manner of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, observe the Hamlets of this world and offer up their own unique take on events.
“I’ve learned a lot of that from Gemma,” says Simpson. “She sees things from multiple stage angles. And that’s really had an effect on my writing.”
Significantly, Revolutionary Spirit is written in the historical present tense, allowing Simpson to perfectly inhabit the vivid ongoing moment of his remarkable life. Like some corvine scally Boswell sporting a first world war army-conscript haircut and Great Depression tweeds, Simpson is close by at historic moments within the 80s Liverpool scene, forming Beefheartian punk minimalists A Shallow Madness with Julian Cope and Ian McCulloch, then co-founding (and naming) the Teardrop Explodes before leaving them in 1979. He also introduces Cope to the godlike genius of Scott Walker (before Cope releases an album called The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker) then co-founds literate pop duo Care with Ian Broudie before leaving them midway through the recording of their debut album. He flat-shares with a teenage Courtney Love in 1982, witness to her mirth-making declaration that her face will “one day adorn the front covers of NME and Vogue”, and that same year records what is arguably the greatest single to come out of that whole post-punk, neo-psych Liverpool scene: the Wild Swans’ Revolutionary Spirit, after which his book is named.
“I’ve been writing this book for years,” admits Simpson. “I’ve rewritten it a lot. Historical present tense is really hard because you constantly exist in the moment. You can’t really reflect on anything, and anyway, I didn’t really want to do that.”
The use of the present tense allows the book to operate like a time machine, dropping you down in Eric’s nightclub in 1977 as Simpson, McCulloch and “bespectacled trainee teacher Julian Cope” witness the Fall for the first time; or drinking wine and listening to Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours at McCulloch’s house on the night Simpson hears that his best friend and Echo and the Bunnymen drummer Pete de Freitas has been killed in a motorbike accident.
“The first thing I wrote was about Pete,” says Simpson. “I used a story about sharing a flat with him on a Wild Swans B-side [The Coldest Winter for a Hundred Years] in 2009. Everyone talks about how integral Pete’s drumming was to the scene but not that he was just a lovely man. He had a huge calming influence on me. You’re 19, still eating beans out of the can but Pete would come home with two mackerel and a bunch of garlic and cook for us. He’d lay the table for breakfast! No one did that. Not only did he look like an archangel from a 16th-century painting, he presented as one. He was amazing and I was very fond of him. I just wanted to trap that time in amber.”
Simpson succeeds perfectly and those coming to Revolutionary Spirit hoping for an evocative conjuration of quadruple-strength brown microdot psychedelic 80s Liverpool will not be disappointed. However, as befits a memoir that comes with the sub-heading “A Post-Punk Exorcism”, much of Revolutionary Spirit also reads like a vital act of therapy. “My father was a disciplinarian who told me I’d never amount to anything,” says Simpson. “And my mum was a proto-new age hippie who told me I was a genius and that ghosts were real. It made for a bit of a shaken-up individual. Psychically fragile at the best of times.”
From his first existential crisis, aged nine, under a bridge on the Burscough-to-Halsall stretch of the Leeds–Liverpool canal, through incidents of depression and self-harm and on to a late-in-life symbolist epiphany adrift in a kayak on a Scottish loch, Simpson writes lyrically and purposefully about his moments of crisis and euphoria. But never, thankfully, with any words of after-the-fact self-analysis. In fact, you sense Simpson is still unsure as to what happened to him and what all these documented events might mean.
“That is exactly right,” he replies with a huge beam on his face. “Each story I wrote would expose something else from my past but I didn’t have time to analyse any of it. I remember thinking very late on, ‘Now Paul, you need to write some sort of tie-in-a-bow section that links everything up.’ But no, I would have had to fake that. Also, I was out of runway. I’d missed two deadlines. So the minute I finished, I pressed send with no read-through. I’m thinking, ‘Hang on a minute, I’ve left my three best stories out, about Nico, Gregory Corso and Paul McCartney.’ But it was like I’d removed this huge lead cloak I’d been wearing my whole life. I’ve been trapped, possessed by all these weird microtraumas since childhood.”
after newsletter promotion
There is something significant in the fact that Simpson’s memoir will appear on bookshelves without its three best stories, as one of its subtexts is the importance of transience and imperfection. Take the Revolutionary Spirit single. Financed and produced by De Freitas and released on Bill Drummond’s Zoo Records label, here was a chiming, ghostly cry of twin-guitar euphoria; a Penguin Classics vision of cultured ecstasy that arguably defined the indie aesthetic of the 1980s. Yet it is also a flawed object. The bass is inaudible, it was recorded in mono, the guitars are muffled and vocals sound like they were sung through a sock. It is incomplete – yet in its incompleteness it is also exquisite.
It’s a theme that runs through the book and also Simpson’s own career: running away from things when they get too close to perfect. “There’s a lot of truth in that,” admits Simpson. “It wasn’t so much I was scared of it being perfect – more that it didn’t quite tally with how I saw it working. I walked away from the Teardrop Explodes because we weren’t sounding how I thought we should. I walked away from Care after a hit single in 1984 in a horribly selfish moment of cowardice and depression.”
Then, in 1989, following “a bandmate betrayal”, Simpson also sabotaged the Wild Swans’ two-album deal with Sire Records by recording the throwaway bubblegum pop album Space Flower, which wasn’t released in the US until 2008. “That was my Venetian mask of a smiling face held up to hide unhappiness and damage,” he says. “I could have made a masterpiece but I was too damaged. I couldn’t answer a ringing telephone for two years. I’d just sit at home hugging myself. I was a control freak. I thought if I hadn’t done it as well as it was in my mind I’d abandon it. When I was at school I’d get a new exercise book and the minute I put my name in there, or the date or something, I’d think, I’ve spoiled the empty page – so I’d rip the pages out.”
However, against these moments of withdrawal and disavowal, Simpson’s memoir is ultimately a story of rebirth and recovery. The book begins in September 2011 with a trip to the Philippines, where the Wild Swans are unlikely megastars, and ends in 2019 when a police marksman shoots dead a rare white stag on a Bootle housing estate just two miles from Simpson’s home, which he takes as sign to leave Merseyside for good. “The gods have been having a laugh with me,” says Simpson. “I was in bands with Julian Cope, Ian McCulloch and Ian Broudie and I shared a flat with Courtney Love and they go on to be megastars. They finally make me a superstar in a territory where no radio plays are logged and everything is bootlegged. But it’s also beautiful, because if I’d had that level of success when I was a young man I would have seriously messed up.”
Things are starting to change in terms of how Simpson is regarded in the history of post-punk Liverpool. “I got an email the other day,” he says, “from someone making a film about Scott Walker saying, ‘Would you consider speaking to us because you re-popularised Scott in the 80s?’ I thought, ‘Wow. How did they find out?’ I was never even thanked by Julian.”
Now, award-winning film-maker Grant Gee is making a documentary about the post-punk Liverpool scene. He has called the film Revolutionary Spirit. “Turns out I’m quite a big part of that documentary,” says Simpson with a smile. “I said, ‘Oh, aren’t you going to talk to Julian and Mac?’ Grant said, ‘Well, probably not because we know their stories. The best stories come from the peripheries.’”
‘Honestly I’m terrified,” says Paul Simpson. “I don’t know what I’ve written and I’m far too close to it.” The singer, musician and frontman of cult 1980s Liverpool group the Wild Swans is speaking from a residential room in the Rubrics, in Trinity College, Dublin, where his partner, the theatre director Gemma Bodinetz, is currently working. The oldest residential building in Ireland and also, by many accounts, the most haunted building in the country, it is a suitable setting in which to discuss his book Revolutionary Spirit, a music memoir and social history of the 80s Liverpool music scene that is steeped in learned erudition and infused with the ghosts of an old port city.
“I’m a peripheral voice on the scene,” admits Simpson, with self-deprecating honesty, his Mersey sibilances adding a necessary softness to this statement. “Louder voices than mine have always had control of the narrative. When my agent initially approached publishers they were very honest. They said: ‘We love your writing but you’re simply not famous enough to make this project viable.’”
What these bigger publishers missed, or perhaps confirmed, is that it is exactly Simpson’s peripheral vision, his ability to be ever present yet never central to his city’s musical history, that makes Revolutionary Spirit – published by an indie press – such an important work. As with, say, Julian MacLaren-Ross’s memoirs of 50s Soho or Céleste Albaret’s book on Proust – and unlike Julian Cope’s own assertive biography of the same period, Head On – this is a work that recognises the importance of the margin-dweller; the ability to stand off-stage and, in the manner of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, observe the Hamlets of this world and offer up their own unique take on events.
“I’ve learned a lot of that from Gemma,” says Simpson. “She sees things from multiple stage angles. And that’s really had an effect on my writing.”
Significantly, Revolutionary Spirit is written in the historical present tense, allowing Simpson to perfectly inhabit the vivid ongoing moment of his remarkable life. Like some corvine scally Boswell sporting a first world war army-conscript haircut and Great Depression tweeds, Simpson is close by at historic moments within the 80s Liverpool scene, forming Beefheartian punk minimalists A Shallow Madness with Julian Cope and Ian McCulloch, then co-founding (and naming) the Teardrop Explodes before leaving them in 1979. He also introduces Cope to the godlike genius of Scott Walker (before Cope releases an album called The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker) then co-founds literate pop duo Care with Ian Broudie before leaving them midway through the recording of their debut album. He flat-shares with a teenage Courtney Love in 1982, witness to her mirth-making declaration that her face will “one day adorn the front covers of NME and Vogue”, and that same year records what is arguably the greatest single to come out of that whole post-punk, neo-psych Liverpool scene: the Wild Swans’ Revolutionary Spirit, after which his book is named.
“I’ve been writing this book for years,” admits Simpson. “I’ve rewritten it a lot. Historical present tense is really hard because you constantly exist in the moment. You can’t really reflect on anything, and anyway, I didn’t really want to do that.”
The use of the present tense allows the book to operate like a time machine, dropping you down in Eric’s nightclub in 1977 as Simpson, McCulloch and “bespectacled trainee teacher Julian Cope” witness the Fall for the first time; or drinking wine and listening to Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours at McCulloch’s house on the night Simpson hears that his best friend and Echo and the Bunnymen drummer Pete de Freitas has been killed in a motorbike accident.
“The first thing I wrote was about Pete,” says Simpson. “I used a story about sharing a flat with him on a Wild Swans B-side [The Coldest Winter for a Hundred Years] in 2009. Everyone talks about how integral Pete’s drumming was to the scene but not that he was just a lovely man. He had a huge calming influence on me. You’re 19, still eating beans out of the can but Pete would come home with two mackerel and a bunch of garlic and cook for us. He’d lay the table for breakfast! No one did that. Not only did he look like an archangel from a 16th-century painting, he presented as one. He was amazing and I was very fond of him. I just wanted to trap that time in amber.”
Simpson succeeds perfectly and those coming to Revolutionary Spirit hoping for an evocative conjuration of quadruple-strength brown microdot psychedelic 80s Liverpool will not be disappointed. However, as befits a memoir that comes with the sub-heading “A Post-Punk Exorcism”, much of Revolutionary Spirit also reads like a vital act of therapy. “My father was a disciplinarian who told me I’d never amount to anything,” says Simpson. “And my mum was a proto-new age hippie who told me I was a genius and that ghosts were real. It made for a bit of a shaken-up individual. Psychically fragile at the best of times.”
From his first existential crisis, aged nine, under a bridge on the Burscough-to-Halsall stretch of the Leeds–Liverpool canal, through incidents of depression and self-harm and on to a late-in-life symbolist epiphany adrift in a kayak on a Scottish loch, Simpson writes lyrically and purposefully about his moments of crisis and euphoria. But never, thankfully, with any words of after-the-fact self-analysis. In fact, you sense Simpson is still unsure as to what happened to him and what all these documented events might mean.
“That is exactly right,” he replies with a huge beam on his face. “Each story I wrote would expose something else from my past but I didn’t have time to analyse any of it. I remember thinking very late on, ‘Now Paul, you need to write some sort of tie-in-a-bow section that links everything up.’ But no, I would have had to fake that. Also, I was out of runway. I’d missed two deadlines. So the minute I finished, I pressed send with no read-through. I’m thinking, ‘Hang on a minute, I’ve left my three best stories out, about Nico, Gregory Corso and Paul McCartney.’ But it was like I’d removed this huge lead cloak I’d been wearing my whole life. I’ve been trapped, possessed by all these weird microtraumas since childhood.”
after newsletter promotion
There is something significant in the fact that Simpson’s memoir will appear on bookshelves without its three best stories, as one of its subtexts is the importance of transience and imperfection. Take the Revolutionary Spirit single. Financed and produced by De Freitas and released on Bill Drummond’s Zoo Records label, here was a chiming, ghostly cry of twin-guitar euphoria; a Penguin Classics vision of cultured ecstasy that arguably defined the indie aesthetic of the 1980s. Yet it is also a flawed object. The bass is inaudible, it was recorded in mono, the guitars are muffled and vocals sound like they were sung through a sock. It is incomplete – yet in its incompleteness it is also exquisite.
It’s a theme that runs through the book and also Simpson’s own career: running away from things when they get too close to perfect. “There’s a lot of truth in that,” admits Simpson. “It wasn’t so much I was scared of it being perfect – more that it didn’t quite tally with how I saw it working. I walked away from the Teardrop Explodes because we weren’t sounding how I thought we should. I walked away from Care after a hit single in 1984 in a horribly selfish moment of cowardice and depression.”
Then, in 1989, following “a bandmate betrayal”, Simpson also sabotaged the Wild Swans’ two-album deal with Sire Records by recording the throwaway bubblegum pop album Space Flower, which wasn’t released in the US until 2008. “That was my Venetian mask of a smiling face held up to hide unhappiness and damage,” he says. “I could have made a masterpiece but I was too damaged. I couldn’t answer a ringing telephone for two years. I’d just sit at home hugging myself. I was a control freak. I thought if I hadn’t done it as well as it was in my mind I’d abandon it. When I was at school I’d get a new exercise book and the minute I put my name in there, or the date or something, I’d think, I’ve spoiled the empty page – so I’d rip the pages out.”
However, against these moments of withdrawal and disavowal, Simpson’s memoir is ultimately a story of rebirth and recovery. The book begins in September 2011 with a trip to the Philippines, where the Wild Swans are unlikely megastars, and ends in 2019 when a police marksman shoots dead a rare white stag on a Bootle housing estate just two miles from Simpson’s home, which he takes as sign to leave Merseyside for good. “The gods have been having a laugh with me,” says Simpson. “I was in bands with Julian Cope, Ian McCulloch and Ian Broudie and I shared a flat with Courtney Love and they go on to be megastars. They finally make me a superstar in a territory where no radio plays are logged and everything is bootlegged. But it’s also beautiful, because if I’d had that level of success when I was a young man I would have seriously messed up.”
Things are starting to change in terms of how Simpson is regarded in the history of post-punk Liverpool. “I got an email the other day,” he says, “from someone making a film about Scott Walker saying, ‘Would you consider speaking to us because you re-popularised Scott in the 80s?’ I thought, ‘Wow. How did they find out?’ I was never even thanked by Julian.”
Now, award-winning film-maker Grant Gee is making a documentary about the post-punk Liverpool scene. He has called the film Revolutionary Spirit. “Turns out I’m quite a big part of that documentary,” says Simpson with a smile. “I said, ‘Oh, aren’t you going to talk to Julian and Mac?’ Grant said, ‘Well, probably not because we know their stories. The best stories come from the peripheries.’”