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Anyway Simon Potts wouldn’t budge on the live issue, and we refused to be dictated to, so that was that. The Wild Swans imploded shortly afterward and I’m still trying to find out why. Subsequently Arista went on to sign the two bands that The Wild Swans split into. Paying twice the price for half of the magic. Looking back on it now I can see we acted like complete idiots. We were too young, too stubborn and too stoned to see what we had.
Ged: We were rightly circumspect about the dangers of signing a major deal. The attraction was that, sure, you could afford a load of expensive new equipment - we’d always survived on old borrowed equipment. Apart from Jem, who was the only one with a job, the rest of the band owned next to nothing. Without a few labels chasing us we had no lever with Arista to improve their terms. In a way although this inertia did lead to our break up, I’m satisfied with hindsight that we didn’t do the deal. Even though they had bands like Patti Smith in America, Arista in the UK was a crappy set up. Look at who else they had on the label - Haircut 100 and so on. These were all signed by the same A&R man - terrifyingly he must have seen something of that in us too. It was probably the best thing for us that a bland Arista-produced version of The Revolutionary Spirit didn’t appear. It would have been too awful to contemplate.
Jem: Isn’t it always the case that a media frenzy has to be whipped up in order to extend the creatives’ notoriety beyond an audience that can identify quality to one that has to be told? The Wild Swans were caught in a microcosm outside of which nothing and no-one seemed to matter much, least of all journalists, DJs and record company personnel.
Ged: In a way we were over-confident. Already assured of a status, we thought. We were blind to what we had to some extent. I suppose it was bad luck. I wish we had recorded that album with Pete DF because I think it would have been an underground classic. But I’m happy that a major never got their hands on it.
