33 f
just how much time and energy people waste on cultivating negative feelings about music. In hindsight, I should’ve just taken an interest in their guitars rather than [puts a diva-ish back of hand to fore- head] ‘Oh no, this couldn’t possibly be for me! I know what real music is.’ Fuck off, Simpson. Get a hold of yourself.”
With time, his appreciation of the music of his generation grew. He recalls getting into Hendrix and The Faces (“Bril- liant band! Arse-deep in attitude and influence!”), and a formative moment when he went to see Steeleye Span at Gainsborough Town Hall in 1970. “Fuck me, they were loud. Carthy was playing through something like a Dual Showman or something. A massive guitar sound. I thought, ‘Woah! We’ll have some of that!’ But I didn’t want to do any of that stuff myself. Playing electric seemed to me like another thing. It’s only now that I’m will- ing to spend some time with it.”
His own initial ventures into public performance began back in the Good Companions Hut. “They were incredibly supportive of me, because I was really, really terrible to start with,” he recalls. He’s told me before that he used to make up chords. “I used to ignore chords!” he corrects himself. “The first thing I ever sang was Mary Hamilton – utterly ridicu- lous! A million verses of tragic behaviour, all at the age of thirteen. It had an F-sharp minor chord in it, and I still wake up in the middle of the night screaming. I left it out, obviously.”
“But the Good Companions Hut… it was seriously like an apprenticeship. It moved into the pub when I was fourteen, and I just followed it.”
To his side, amongst piles of note- books, old blues vinyl, liner notes and old concert programmes, sits a cardboard file. He opens it carefully and pulls out two photos of a young schoolboy, vaguely recognisable as the man himself (it’s all in the nose), and a press cutting – the first professionally written piece he ever appeared in. Understandably, he passes them to me with the utmost care (“Don’t let the cat anywhere near them – she’ll shred them in a second”) and I jump back through time to witness The Clegg Hall Bogarts (the band name pronounced bogg-erts, coming from a book of Lin- colnshire ghost stories) performing their Foggy Mountain Breakdown from an open-topped car plastered in Bonnie & Clyde posters. There in the seventh para- graph, young Simpson makes his debut, not on guitar but on his other beloved instrument. “He’s only fourteen, but boy can he play… with the speed of light!”, enthuses the reviewer. “Probably not,” the grown-up Simpson mutters, “but I don’t think they’d seen many banjo players around Scunthorpe at that point.”
There’s no point leaving the Simpson
the Younger in the past without touching on his less old-timey influences, and I’m particularly interested in his fascination with Bob Dylan, something which fRoots covered in the aforementioned 1982 arti- cle, and something which continues to this day. “He’s one of those lifelong admira- tions. I feel like I’ve been schooled by him.
However you approach Dylan, if you’re realistic, you can’t fail to be completely overawed by just how incredible his cre- ativity was, and his singular approach to what he was doing. It’s mind-fucking, what he achieved. Even now, occasionally he’s utterly staggering. There are songs of his that people dismiss, but if anyone else had written them they’d be saying, ‘Fuck- ing hell! What a song!’ It’s because of this canon of early work that’s unbelievably powerful and unbelievably shifting.”
H
e recalls a holiday in South Wales, when he spent his holiday pocket money on Like A Rolling Stone, backed with Gates Of Eden. “I still
have no comprehension of how a record like that is made,” he says, shaking his head in wonder. The fanboy overrules, and he lunges for a book of Dylan lyrics on the shelf above his beanbag, mutter- ing, “There’s always one of these to hand around here.” He flicks through at speed and lands on a well-thumbed page. “The one thing of late that I’ve been listening to of his is this live version of Chimes Of Freedom. That comes from that period right between ‘I’m not writing as a politi- cal writer any more’ and whatever the fuck happened next. If you look at the lyrics from that point where he was begin- ning to be surreal. [Reads second and fourth verses aloud] I mean, fuck me! What is that?!”
This suggests itself as a neat segue into discussing his own career as a song- writer rather than a musician, but before we leave Dylan behind, I can’t help asking him what he makes of Dylan the guitarist. He mulls the question over carefully. “Well… he changed from being a very active guitar player with some really very good traditional chops and fingerstyles, using a lot of traditional input, to being someone who much of the time played in standard tuning and played with a plec- trum. He became a rhythm guitar player. But then you listen to Blood On The Tracks, and he went back to being a serious guitar player. There’s some killer guitar on that. I think he’s a total curate’s egg when it comes to being a guitar player. I think he’s done some wonderful stuff. Not massively demanding, but that’s not important. It’s about how it’s done. I think he’s a pretty fine guitar player.”
‘Pretty fine’ is a phrase that peppers Simpson-speak. I’ve come to realise it’s an understated way of saying ‘fantastic’, ‘amazing’ or ‘mind-fucking’ – words that he’s just as likely to use in his enthusiasm for a subject anyway. I think he’d quietly like to be able to admit that his own songs are ‘pretty fine’, but there’s a bashfulness or politeness that stops him. He tells me the tale of the first time he ever heard anyone covering one of his own songs, a version of Dark Swift And Bright Swallow that drifted out of the speaker stacks as he
That first press cutting – The Clegg Hall Bogarts. Martin on the right.
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