Liverpudlian indie hero Paul Simpson: ‘I could have made a masterpiece but I was too damaged’

The Wild Swans frontman also formed bands with Ian McCulloch, Ian Broudie and Julian Cope – and was Courtney Love’s flatmate – but admits to being a peripheral voice in Liverpool’s music scene. A new memoir could change that

‘Honestly I’m terrified,” says Paul Simpson. “I don’t know what I’ve written and I’m far too close to it.” The singer, musician and frontman of cult 1980s Liverpool group the Wild Swans is speaking from a residential room in the Rubrics, in Trinity College, Dublin, where his partner, the theatre director Gemma Bodinetz, is currently working. The oldest residential building in Ireland and also, by many accounts, the most haunted building in the country, it is a suitable setting in which to discuss his book Revolutionary Spirit, a music memoir and social history of the 80s Liverpool music scene that is steeped in learned erudition and infused with the ghosts of an old port city.

“I’m a peripheral voice on the scene,” admits Simpson, with self-deprecating honesty, his Mersey sibilances adding a necessary softness to this statement. “Louder voices than mine have always had control of the narrative. When my agent initially approached publishers they were very honest. They said: ‘We love your writing but you’re simply not famous enough to make this project viable.’”

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