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Q&A with The Wild Swans
Q Whose idea was it for Revolutionary Spirit to come out as a 12"? It seems right for two such epic songs to be complete statements on each side of a 12".
Ged: I think the idea of releasing a single at all came from Pete De Freitas - we didn’t have the finances to be able to consider it. Each of the Bunnymen had received a windfall of £2000. Pete took an interest in our work from the start and wanted to invest in a record.
Paul: I don’t think we were ever consulted about the format. Bill Drummond and Dave Balfe, who ran Zoo Records, were keen to enter the 12-inch single market. It was the only thing they hadn’t tried yet. A hundred or so 7-inch promos were also pressed up of The Revolutionary Spirit with the last verse edited out. Producer of the single, the late, great Pete De Freitas (Echo and the Bunnymen’s drummer, credited on the single as Louis Vincent), in an effort to improve the sound quality, took the master tape to New York and worked on a different mix of the track with Talking Heads’ live engineer. Although sonically it was a slight improvement we still insisted on putting out the original version. This despite the fact the track was in mono and sounded like it was drifting up from the ocean bed. It just had something.
Jem: The structure of The Revolutionary Spirit was particularly suited to a 12" version as we weren’t in the business of writing 3-minute pop songs. Also, the quality of the 7" edited version is appreciably worse than that of the 12", which is a usual difference between the formats, but the quality of the original recording carried distortion that the 12" format seemed to balance out.
