I’ve written a feature in the June issue of MOJO about Pete De Freitas, the brilliant, inspirational drummer who helped make Echo And The Bunnymen one of the all-time great bands, and who died in a road accident on June 14, 1989, aged just 27.

The MOJO piece was a joy to write. Each person I spoke to – his friends and bandmates, and members of his family – was extremely generous with their time and memories. So many wonderful stories: some inevitably sad, but all of them touching and often very funny. Pete De Freitas seems to have been loved by everyone who ever met him. I wish I’d had time to talk to more people, and I ended up with far more material than I had space to use. Maybe one day I’ll put together a longer version.

During the course of writing the piece, I had the pleasure of talking to Paul Simpson, whose band The Wild Swans played with the Bunnymen many times; their wonderful single Revolutionary Spirit was produced by Pete, who also paid for its recording and played drums on it. “Thank God he did,” said Paul, “because it’s the dynamics of the drumming that give the song its exoskeleton.”

Hearing Revolutionary Spirit now takes me back to 1982 and my 16-year-old self listening to John Peel, when every record felt like a signpost to a new world. Like the Bunnymen, I imagined The Wild Swans were embarked on some noble truth-quest, and as Peel played the record (“Hmm… fades in…”) you sensed this was auspicious music. Both bands were from Liverpool, a city that because of The Beatles and its football teams had a mythic resonance, and this music only enhanced such romantic notions. Even then, I suspected the reality was a lot more mundane, but at that age it’s easy to feel you have nothing but dreams.

Paul reactivated The Wild Swans around 2008 and in 2011 they released an album, The Coldest Winter For A Hundred Years. I’m ashamed to say it passed me by originally, but in researching the Pete De Freitas article I bought the beautiful vinyl edition and I thoroughly recommend it. This new version of the band featured a drummer named Steve Beswick, who had played in The Heart Throbs, a late-’80s group that featured Pete’s sisters, Rose and Rachel. Paul told me he wanted him because Beswick had based his playing style on Pete. Paul then recruited Les Pattinson, Echo And The Bunnymen’s bass player, with whom Pete De Freitas had formed such a distinctive and indomitable rhythm section.

The album takes its title from a song Paul released as the B-side of English Electric Lightning, a terrific Wild Swans single from 2009. It evokes the period during 1981-82 when Paul and Pete shared Julian Cope’s old flat together in Liverpool’s Princes Park: all freezing cold bohemian squalor, homemade bongs, listening to The Pop Group and Dr John, and the neighbours complaining about Pete driving his motorbike up three flights of stairs. As Paul says in the song: “I’m tired of living like a degenerate and I’m going to get my act together starting right now… Well, starting tomorrow, because I’ve just found the note Pete has left pinned to his door: ‘Paul, Jake riding up from Bristol tonight, I’ll knock for Mike and Paul on my way home. Ring Ged, Jerry and Hot Knives. Get milk and skins – gear’s in the tin. Love Pete’.”

Thanks to Paul, The Coldest Winter… put me right into their world.

The June issue of MOJO is still available.