f32 B
orn in Scunthorpe in 1953, Simpson was the youngest of three brothers. His older sib- lings were passionate music fans, and it didn’t take him long to pick up on that influence. At the age of twelve, he got wind of a folk club taking place at the Good Companions Hut, just a stone’s throw from his house. He grabbed his guitar, marched through the front door and never looked back. “I was so fortu- nate to be able to walk around the corner to see Hedy West,” he recalls. “It just blew my head right off my shoulders. I could not believe how great that was. And equally, to see Finbar Furey right up close playing the pipes. He was an absolute monster, and it was fantastic. There were so many different opportunities.”
What, I wonder out loud, was a
twelve-year-old boy doing listening to Hedy West and Finbar Furey in 1965? Did The Beatles pass him by? “I was listening to The Beatles, but I had these two elder brothers,” he says, almost as though he’s offering up an excuse. “I remember this really auspicious day when the first Rolling Stones record came out, and my middle brother, Simon, ordered it. It arrived, he picked it up, brought it home and played it. He played it once and we thought, ‘That’s a bit limp’. So we took it back and traded it. [Laughs] We got a record called Folk Festival Of The Blues, which had Muddy Waters on it. That’s what my household was like. We were snobs. ‘Whaddayou mean, Kenny Ball is a jazz man? That’s not jazz!’”
Simpson The Younger
time alone with his thoughts is intricately bound up in music. It’s his safe space, metaphorically and physically. For the length of this four-hour interview, we’re either sat in his music room, borrowing space from his army of patiently waiting banjos (me, all Zen and cross-legged on the floor; him, like an upturned turtle in a rattling beanbag), or we’re out walking his dog along Porter Brook and up over the foothills of the Peak District. Music and melody are only ever a thought away. That the pieces he is working on for his coming album have dwelt a while in mem- ories of Roy Bailey is inevitable. The poignancy is palpable.
As we talk, he plays, regularly reaching for one of countless instruments that line the walls, eager to illustrate points and demonstrate arrangements. As far as gui- tars and banjos are concerned, he’s a fan- boy that refuses to grow up, and this makes him all the more approachable, and all the more human, as he sits and picks. Regularly cited as one of the finest and most influential acoustic guitarists this country has ever produced, it would be very easy to watch in awed silence as he thumbs away, but there’s no room for that. The guitars are passed around and it’s very much a two-way dialogue. He’s a homely chap with an endearingly low-level ego. The adjective he uses most often to describe himself is ‘lucky’. The suggestion that he might be seen as anything bigger and brighter than that seems to baffle him.
“I’ve never considered myself to be a flash guitar player,” he says, clearly dumb- founded that anyone might think other- wise. “I think, despite the fact that people go, ‘Oh, it’s Simpson… loads of notes, very flash’, what my guitar playing is mostly about is atmosphere and emotional con- tent. It’s the emotional content and the musicality of the songs. I absolutely love hearing people play in a way I consider well. I love the instruments, I love every- thing involved with this [gestures at the room we’re sitting in]. All this stuff influ- ences me. When I think about it, all the people who have influenced me are jaw- droppingly good. I just wanted to be a really good player. But it has never been consciously flash at all. There’s just a joy and an expression.”
I poke him a little more. Has there never been anything he might concede as ‘flash’? “OK,” he grins, “there are things that I’ve done when I listen back to them… [laughs] The introduction to Clerk Sanders on Kind Letters… people get in touch with me and ask me, ‘Can you please transcribe that?’ [Laughs] Can you fuck off!? I listen to it and think, ‘What was I doing? What was that about?’ It’s monstrous, it’s com- pletely insane. But I don’t think it’s flash. I just think it’s expression. I’m very proud of it, too. I listen back and I think, ‘Woah! I was having a good time!’ [Adopts his best Freddie Mercury impersonation, which is really quite something to behold] Don’t stop me nooooow!”
Did the rock revolution taking the country by storm not have any impact on him at all? “I appreciated what was going on in pop music, but I was far more inter- ested in a traditional, not-very-big version of House Of The Rising Sun than I was in The Animals’ version of it. I was really interested in this relationship between a single person and an instrument.”
“That said, I remember being incredi- bly wound up, in a very good way, by some of the singles that came out in the mid- 60s. The Pretty Things’ Don’t Bring Me Down. I thought that was fantastic. I abso- lutely loved how raw and nasty it was. I was very little, but that really got me. But it was unusual that rock music would get me until a bit later, because I was neck- deep in banjos, blues guitar and the stories of those songs… the really dark stuff, which is omnipresent in folk music.”
“I remember going to see an electric band playing at my brother’s school, where he was a teacher. I’d never seen anything other than people playing acoustic guitar in the folk club. I went to see this band, and I was massively underwhelmed that this assemblage of people were doing this thing which, to me, didn’t feel like any- thing. I was absolutely involved in the emo- tionality of music – in the telling of stories and the expressing of dark feelings. I just thought this pop stuff was fluff. And in a sense, I was right. I can’t remember a single song they played, but it certainly had a for- mative influence on me: it made me avoid it like the plague! Of course, I was a com- plete fucking snob. I wasn’t always right at all. These days I think it’s very interesting
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