Diary

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It’s spring fever…. You don’t quite know what it is you DO want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!

- Mark Twain

Sunday evensong in Bleak House and I am completely scribbled on whisky sours, a tipple my late father turned me onto in the mid-eighties. Norfolk Rhapsody No.3 by Vaughn Williams is playing softly on the steam powered gramophone and an urban fox is yelping from somewhere in the bushes of my overgrown garden. My study is trashed; I only sorted it last week but already it looks like the aftermath of a grenade attack on Carmen Miranda’s zoophilian scat party.

I was just thinking about my old headmaster at secondary school, the misnamed Mr. Jolly, who, when my mother defended me from his accusations of being ‘a dreamer’ at a parent’s evening sarcastically asked my mother if she thought I was a genius. I still take solace that my straight thinking, non-magical Victorian Oberist and one of his Oberleutnants - the sadistic Mr Seddon will be long dead now. Secondary school for me was five years of brutal, repetitious purgatory, I learned more hearing ‘Virginia Plain’ through the secreted earpiece of a transistor radio during a chemistry lesson and with my first library ticket than I ever did with endless smacks upside the head, lessons on coffee production in Brazil and the Roman conquest of Britain. 
 
Last night I dreamt that I was in a large, dark and empty room cutting the air with a magikal knife made from pure silver, a purification ritual for expelling negative entities and creating sacred space. At the point in the dream where a poltergeist or ferocious demon would normally reveal itself and psychically attack me, dawn broke, the darkness cleared and the room was clear. A welcome change from the endings of my ‘classic’ good versus evil dreams. That’s what bunking in to see the Exorcist at the age of 14 does for you. That and a few bazillion microgram’s of LSD a few years later. What larks Pip.

Spring has sprung the garden is full of snowdrops and bluebells and the fruit trees are exploding in blossom. After years the sparrows have returned, not in the numbers they once flew in but it makes me happy to see them back and busy, a bit like rediscovering a lost toy from childhood.

Like an early birthday present May brings my playwright friend Jeff Young back to his Liverpool home for good and I am thrilled. I’ve missed him while on his southern sojourn. Jeff and have led parallel lives; we lived nearby, went to the same school, attended Eric’s punk club and summered in Amsterdam in the 1980s but only physically met a few years ago. Despite this I think of him in the same respectful and  affectionate way as I do my oldest friends.

Speaking of…a surprise present in yesterday’s post, a beautiful Italian translation of my old friend Julian Cope’s latest book - Japrocksampler. I love what Ju’s doing but I wish he’d slow down and stop being so fcuking prolific for Odin’s sake and let the rest of us at least try and catch up. Every month I beat myself up about my late web diaries and the lack of ‘events’ on my various web sites and My Space pages and of course my once a decade CD releases. The thing is dear reader, I am older than a giant redwood, my heart beats at the same rate as a Galapagos turtle, I am all about slow motion and it hurts me to be impressed by people who actually achieve stuff.

This month I am reading The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane (Granta 2008) Life And How To Live It by Daniel Mayhew (Quickbrownfox 2007) - mine is number 319 out of a limited edition of 500 - each copy has a different personal inscription, mine is ‘Give Center Parcs To The Homeless’ an old Penguin edition of Rogue Male (written in 1939) by Geoffrey Household, The Garden of Tortures by Octave Mirbeau (Tandem) and Deeper (Chicken House 2008) the just published sequel to Tunnels by Roderick Gordon and my old mate and fellow scouser Brian Williams.
I am listening to Carla Bley’s 1971 triple album or ‘chronotransduction’ as she describes it - Escalator Over The Hill.

Check out Swan associate Nick Halliwell’s blog and hear versions of his upcoming album project The Granite Shore at www.thegraniteshore.com.
 

Tis time to close the five ports of knowledge…

Until next month, thanks for checking in…
Fold back wings to full extent.

Paul Simpson

When I asked the fugitive hypnotist about the time he tried to kill Michael Dean, he said, echoing the words of Lana Turner’s book, There’s his truth, my truth, the real truth and the mythological truth. John Ivan Palmer ñ General Semantics and the Chicken Suit Murders & The Hypnotic Realities of Dr Ronald Dante and Dr Michael Dean. Drunk on a freebie bottle of £96 Roberto Cavalli vodka I smashed my head on the mantelpiece and did something really stupid, I returned to Birkenhead & the congested lower colon of Merseyside. If I wanted to be unkind I’d say that Birkenhead is famous for it’s population of deeply unattractive malnourished fighting dwarves in branded sportswear, but I am feeling generous so I’ll just tell you about its profusion of charity shops, pound stores and the pleasant half hour I spent in Skeleton Records searching for the deleted John Peel Sessions of Peter Hammill on Strange Fruit. Actually, thinking about it, that’s all there is to tell about my Blakean eternity in smack Hell other than I came back empty-handed with a migraine. I have told you about Skeleton Records before, it’s completely wonderful but it makes me feel sad and hungry for a way of life that is gone; a bit like when you stumble upon an old-fashioned chandlers shop that still displays their galvanized buckets and wooden brooms outside. Walking back toward Hamilton Square, past the Perspex and neon fronted bars, sex shops and slot machine arcades to the underground station, I felt like the last healthy man trying to escape a medieval plague village. Be afraid. Here Be Dragons. I have just discovered Martin Newells hilarious online blog The Wild Man Of Wivenhoe. Bitter as prussic acid and caustic as fuck. Check out brilliant lost e.p. track I Will Haunt Your Room on the Cherry Red Records website. If you have never heard of Martin, put equal parts John Cooper Clarke, Robyn Hitchcock and Julian Cope into a blender, add poor sales and dashed dreams and serve with crushed glass. Is anyone out there surprised to see that bloated shaved pig - Suggs of Madness selling his soul on the Birdseye TV adverts? Stomach churning or what? I remember how a little piece of Eric’s (Liverpool’s seminal punk club) died forever when pork-pie hat wearing newbie ‘mods’ (God forgive them) came to the club wearing Madness and Selector badges. I plucked my eyebrows and wore a radiation suit back in the day but thank fuck I can go to my grave safe in the knowledge that I was never a Goth or an 80’s Mod. Easter weekend and I’m exhausted from lack of sleep caused by winds howling through the house and the waking nightmare of realising that my art, your art, ‘our’ art is inessential, superfluous and ultimately sterile. In a 4 am stinging slap to the face I realised that a man’s life is worth nothing if it is compromised, and mine is compromised to the hilt. Pushy Time and mean Money stand behind my back pulling my hair as I try to work. I aim to spend the remainder of my life searching for, recognising and celebrating the remarkable. I have squandered the first half of my life in trying to remember what I once knew, indeed what I was born knowing.  Now, once more in possession of that knowledge I can’t allow another compromised work to escape, and that is why all work has ceased on the great work until I find the grail. Until then allow me to fill your head with trivia. Apparently there is a shop called in Chiswick called Wild Swans, weirdly it is situated in Devonshire Road. Now back in the day Devonshire Road - Liverpool was the H.Q. of…. The Wild Swans.  I’m obsessively listening to Peter Hammill - Fools Mate (1970) to Singularity (2006) one the few informed and dignified musicians I can think of, Stuart McConie’s Freak Zone Sunday afternoons on Radio 6 and reading Omraam Michael Aivanhov and Actung Schweinehund! By Harry Pearson.

Tis time to close the five ports of knowledge….
Until next month, thanks for checking in
Fold back wings to full extent.
Paul Simpson

‘Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.’
- Charles Mingus.

I wake shivering in the darkness at 6:50 am. The bedroom is poltergeist cold and after silencing the alarm clock I lay back staring at the lengthening cracks in the ornate plasterwork of the ceiling. How can it be so breathtakingly fcuking freezing in here? Built in the late 19th century, Bleak House has eight large and draughty rooms, none of them capable of supporting life between November and March. Throwing on a t-shirt (garish and too small, bought on the 2005 Van Der Graaf Generator tour) and stumbling into the kitchen in just my underwear and Emu boots I make a pot of Yorkshire Gold and drink it while reading an arousing chapter from The Decadent Handbook (Dedalus 2006). Half an hour later, now fully dressed I make coffee - this weeks blend is from Papua New-Guinea and I take my breakfast somewhere weird with toasted date and walnut bread. Once in the luxuriant gloom of my study I start reading my mail while listening to the second Caravan album. Although a prog fan, I always avoided delving too deeply into The Canterbury Scene as I never found it strongly flavoured enough, but I have to say, I’m loving this, their 1969 effort and the albums chronologically either side of it.

Mid-morning I drive to the library on Allerton Road to return some books and to pick up a CD rental copy of proto-ambient aura cleanser 11,000 Virgins – Chants For The Feast Of St.Ursula written by the 12th century mystic, Hildegard Von Bingen. I don’t hang around for long however as there are about 20 demonic/cherubic toddlers, high on Calpol and rusks sitting in a tight circle enjoying a playgroup singsong. The Wheels On The Bus sounds incredibly cute but it is not conducive to the choosing of fine literature.

Later and I’m in the third circle of hell, the Costa Fortuna coffee shop where I undergo an epiphany while pouring crème into my too strong, too expensive coffee. This uninvited illumination brought on a creative dam burst resulting in a frenzy of scribbled hieroglyphics that I am still trying to decode from my notebook a week later. I suspect that the half-dozen densely written pages are an idea for a film or radio script. Now this is just what I’ve been looking for, yet another half-arsed, unfocussed writing project to further dissipate my energies with and eventually abandon just as its nearing completion.

Its been an expensive month, I had my beloved Nick Drake boots re-soled and heeled in leather (£35) and I reversed the car over my new driving glasses (£185) add to that family birthdays, Valentine’s day and a whole truckload of internet purchases that I can’t afford but ordered whilst drunk. Still, mustn’t grumble, March sees The Wild Swans back in the studio to record the album’s epic title track The Coldest Winter For 100 Years. Just waiting for guitarist Ricky Maiyme to return from his own epic psychedelic walkabout in the Australian dreamtime.

Thank you for being patient with the diaries. March 2008 and last years missing six months worth of entries are before me on screen, being given a last minute wash and brush down to remove any stains and crumbs before posting.

‘Tis time to close the five ports of knowledge…

Until next month, thanks for checking in…

‘Get my swan costume ready’
- The last words of Anna Pavlova (1931).

At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s eve, the Liverpool skyline explodes with multi-coloured smoke and fire, its as though the Luftwaffe are bombing the shipyards again. For me the fireworks are somehow both incredibly beautiful and utterly depressing. I detest this time of year, and the bronchitis tearing through my lungs isn’t helping, but the twin pleasures of eating Sainsbury’s lemon and stem ginger loaf cake while listening to Peter Hammill on New Year’s Day go some way to redressing the balance.

Uncharacteristically things are looking up for The Wild Swans. In the past, every step of my journey with the band was over broken ground, so it is with some surprise I find my path has been smoothed with a luxurious layer of warm tarmac. Mojo magazine are including The Revolutionary Spirit on their March (out in February) cover CD and Wounded Bird Records (how apt!) are about to re-release both Bringing Home The Ashes and Space Flower as separate albums with extra tracks in the U.S.
I am currently taking business advice and mentoring from some trusted friends and the musicians I have chosen to work with are feeding my vision rather than poisoning it.

Giving birth to albums is never a quick or easy process for me and raising the finances to pay for studio time drains my energy like nothing else.
 
Ricky Maime (The Brian Jonestown Massacre) and Mike Mooney (Spiritualised) and myself have already begun work in the studio. Ex-Wild Swan Ged Quinn is back and playing keyboards. Album negotiations are going well and I have a crack team of good people fighting my corner.
It may be a painfully slow process but it will be worth it in the end. I am determined to never again release a compromised work that I am not proud of.   

The working title for the album is - The Coldest Winter For 100 Years.

‘Tis time to close the five ports of knowledge…

Until next month, thanks for checking in…
Fold back wings to full extent.