I haven't done a Bagging Area Book Club post since June and have several things lined up to write about. Previous posts took in the Weird Walk fanzine, a quartet of Benjamin Myers novels and Richard Norris' autobiography. One of my summer holiday reads was Revolutionary Spirit: A Post Punk Exorcism by Paul Simpson. Paul was a Liverpool face, in an early bedroom band with Ian McCulloch and Julian Cope (A Shallow Madness) and in a band with Will Sergeant before that (Industrial Domestic), one of the Eric's crowd, friend of the Bunnymen, a member of the early Teardrop Explodes, worked behind the counter at the Armadillo Tea Rooms on Matthew Street, flatmate of Pete de Freitas (and briefly Courtney Love) in the Devonshire Road flat that Cope vacated after the break up of his first marriage, founder member and singer/ guitarist of The Wild Swans, and half of Care with Ian Broudie- and that's a very potted history of the highlights.
His book is a delight. He writes in the present tense, a deliberate decision to give the prose immediacy and to avoid reflection perhaps, everything happening on the page in front of you. Paul is a witty, eloquent, and elegant writer, a storyteller and has the gift of bringing the past/ his past to life. There are parallels between his early life and his friend Will Sergeant's (who has written the first two volumes of his own memoirs). Both have overbearing, emotionally unavailable fathers, men from a generation suffering from undiagnosed post- war stress. Both seek out others who share their outsider interests- music, Bowie, dressing up- seeking refuge in the burgeoning punk scene in Liverpool city centre. Paul recounts the violence of life in Liverpool in the mid- to- late 70s where looking different was genuinely dangerous. He has a pin- point memory for the importance of clothes to him and his friends, the army surplus shops and charity shops that provided him and them with their post- punk look- jodhpurs, leather flying jackets, pleated pegged trousers, a candy striped ambulance driver's shirt, army boots from the Spanish Civil War, the barber's down by the docks that do the ultimate 1940s short back and sides. For a while, everyone on the scene is competing to have the ultimate short back and sides.
It's clear from the book that Paul has suffered from repeated episodes of poor mental health. He describes a childhood mental breakdown under a bridge and he self- sabotages bands repeatedly, walking away from the Teardrops, abandoning Broudie and Care at the verge of success, as well as having the first incarnation of The Wild Swans abandon him and form The Lotus Eaters (and according to Paul stealing his chord sequence and having a hit with it- First Picture Of You in 1982). His life in his flat on Rodney Street is described in epic detail, deep nights in with Will Sergeant and psychedelics, the world of 80s Liverpool vividly drawn. .
The book opens with a short chapter about The Wild Swans and their legendary 1982 single Revolutionary Spirit, a song that came out on 12" only with a beautiful minimal sleeve design on Zoo. It was recorded and produced by Pete de Freitas, at his expense, and for some reason it was accidentally recorded in mono with barely audible bass. Revolutionary Spirit surges, the guitars urging the song on, a whirl of drama and at- the- edge dynamics, Paul's highly charged, romantic lyrics skirting the line between pretension and poetry- 'Lost in the delta of Venus/ Lost in the welter of shame/ Deep in the forest of evil/ We embark on a new crusade', a sort of pre- Raphaelite psychedelia.
It's a phenomenal piece of post- punk pop, inexplicably great. In the hyper- competitive Liverpool scene Cope and McCulloch are dismissive of it, obviously. As Paul notes in his book though, as far as he's concerned it's not even the best Wild Swans song- that honour goes to a song only recorded for a Peel Session and not released until 1986, No Bleeding.
Care, Paul and Ian Broudie, only recorded a handful of singles. Paul doesn't even seem entirely sure in his book why he walks away from Care. Flaming Sword, a 1983 single, is on the verge of going mainstream. Radio 1, TV, videos lined up, interviews being conducted and Paul runs away back to Liverpool, breaking his contract and skint. Care's debut was My Boyish Days, a perfect slice of 1983 pop.
The Wild Swans gain a second and then third life. A version from the late 80s spilt in 1990. They reformed in 2009. Bizarrely, they were massively popular in the Philippines. The book opens with Paul and a new version of the band including old school friend and ex- Bunnyman Les Pattinson on bass, a hurricane about to hit Manila as the band prepare to play a huge outdoor gig and Paul paranoid that members of the band are grumbling about payments. From there his autobiography goes backwards and then forwards in time, Paul eventually reaching some kind of equanimity, a reckoning with his past and the his depression. In 2011 Paul and the then version of The Wild Swans released an album called The Coldest Winter For A Hundred Years, Paul re- united again with fellow founder Wild Swan Ged Quinn. It is a beautiful piece of work, in part a tribute to the late, great Pete de Freitas who died in June 1989, Paul's flatmate in the 1980s, a man who everyone who knew him describes as being a beautiful soul. This is English Electric Lightning, literate, chiming guitar pop. The album is in some ways a musical and poetic version of the book, a reflection on his life. I can't recommend either highly enough.
