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.
