The Wild Swans - About

about a new version of what has been your favourite single of all time for over 20 years, of course, and I still do think the band made the right decision in choosing the mono version for release. So the stereo version is only the second best single ever made, if you see what I mean. OK, you'll have to forgive the odd little sonic problem but remember that this was taken from an acetate - a form of vinyl designed to be played a few times for test purposes and then discarded, not kept for 20 years and then used as a master source for a compact disc. But you won't mind that, will you? Think yourselves lucky to have this at all.

Anyway, after recording this masterpiece the band managed to hang onto Rolo (different drummer though. As far as these boys were concerned a stable line-up would be something used by the police to identify a guilty horse) and went out on tour with the Bunnymen in December 1981. When we were hunting for material Will Sergeant happened to mention to Paul that he had a mixing desk recording from that tour... So what you have here is basically a full Wild Swans live set. Yes, I know there are only 6 songs. But they only HAD six songs at that time. They did pad out their set to a whopping seven numbers by doing Now You're Perfect twice: once fast, once slow. We've included just the slow one, as the fast version is represented by the studio version on CD1.

Returning to Liverpool, there was a wait before the single was released and, in a burst of astonishing and never-to-be-repeated creativity, they actually managed to write as many as two new songs. Then David 'Kid' Jensen asked them to do a session for his BBC Radio 1 show in May 1982. They recorded two of the strongest tracks from their live set, Now You're Perfect and Fruits Of The Earth - now rechristened Flowers Of England - plus the two new ones, The Iron Bed and Opium. Only a couple of weeks later they were asked to do a session for John Peel's show. Ah. Bit of a problem there: they didn't have any songs left at all. Not finished ones, anyway. And you wouldn't get these boys making life easy for themselves by merely re-recording