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PRESS
An Interview with The Wild Swans' Paul Simpson
By D.C. Harrison
I wasn't there, you know. When the Wild Swans played their first gig in Liverpool, I didn't even exist. Yet I've heard of them, a name mentioned in articles about other people. Searches in record stores would prove futile, until recently when Incandescent was released on the Renascent label. Finally a chance to see what all the fuss was about. "It's very strange seeing The Wild Swans sections in the record shops again after so long," muses Paul Simpson. "Apart from Incandescent and Japanese import copies of the second Wild Swans album Space Flower all my back catalogue is now deleted. I am like a ghost whistling through the CD racks." Simpson himself is a name known to anyone familiar with the Liverpool scene of the late 70's/early 80's. Founding member of the Teardrop Explodes with Julian Cope, he left after a handful of gigs and the recording of the Sleeping Gas single as "We wanted to sound like a car smash of Captain Beefheart, Pere Ubu, Television, Suicide and The Fall but with each rehearsal we became a little more mainstream so I left after the first single to start my own band." While they - Cope in particular - would go on to brief teen idol status before it inevitably collapsed in drugs and debt (see the Head On book by Cope for details), Simpson followed his own musical path ("Screaming gulls falling from the sky with their wings on fire" in his own words) by forming the Wild Swans alongside keyboard player Gerald Quinn (who had also very briefly been in the Teardrop Explodes) and guitarist Jeremy Kelly. Simpson, organist in all previous musical endeavours, took centre stage as singer.
