Revolutionary Spirit: A Post-Punk Exorcism is part memoir, part social history, highlighting a poignant, and often hilarious story of a cult Liverpool musician’s scenic route to fame and artistic validation. If Morrissey was the Oscar Wilde of the 1980s indie scene, Paul Simpson was its William Blake, a self-destructive genius so lost in mystical visions of a new arcadia that he couldn’t meet the rent.

Simpson’s career begins alongside fellow Liverpool luminaries Julian Cope, Ian McCulloch, Bill Drummond, Ian Broudie, Will Sergeant, Pete Wylie, Pete Burns, and Pete de Freitas at the infamous Eric’s club, where, in 1976, he finds himself at the birth of the city’s second great musical explosion. Along the way, he co-founds and christens the neo-psychedelic pop group The Teardrop Explodes, shares a flat with a teenage Courtney Love, and forms The Wild Swans, the indie band of choice for literary-minded teens in the early 1980s, who burn bright and brief, in the process recording one of the all-time great cult hit singles, ‘Revolutionary Spirit’.

Marriage, fatherhood, and tropical illness follow, interspersed with artistic collaborations with Bill Drummond and members of The Brian Jonestown Massacre, among others. Following an onstage reunion with Cope at the Royal Festival Hall, Simpson discovers that seven thousand miles away, in the Philippines, he is considered a musical god. Presidential suites, armed guards, police escorts—you couldn’t make it up, and, incredibly, he doesn’t need to.

Revolutionary Spirit marks the arrival of an original literary voice. It is the story of a musician driven by an unerring belief that artistic integrity will bring its own rewards—and an elliptical elegy to the ways it does.

Available from Jawbone Press

Paul Simpson is a musician and artist. Across four decades in music, he has released critically acclaimed singles and albums with The Teardrop Explodes, Care, and The Wild Swans. In 2000, he completed a Visiting Fellowship at Liverpool School of Art and Design at John Moores University, where he worked on the spoken-word project The Dream Diaries. Today, Paul paints and creates collages from his home in Glasgow. He is currently working on a novel.

 

 

About the Author

Bryen Dunn is a freelance journalist based in Toronto with a focus on tourism, lifestyle, entertainment and community issues. He has written several travel articles and has an extensive portfolio of celebrity interviews with musicians, actors and other public personalities. He’s willing to take on any assignments of interest, attend parties with free booze, listen to rants, and travel the world in search of the great unknown. He’s eager to discover the new, remember the past, and look into the future.