The 1982 4-Piece Demo

What it is and how it got released

The very first Strawberry Switchblade recording, before they’d even done any gigs, was a three song demo tape.

Recorded at Glasgow’s legendary four-track studio the Hellfire Club, it featured Trees and Flowers, Seaside (Go Away), and Spanish Song.

In 2017, indie label Night School Records pressed 1000 copies on a 7” single. At the time it was an intriguing item, a curio for the cognoscenti.

But then in late 2024, Trees and Flowers somehow went viral on TikTok and within weeks became the band’s most-streamed track ever.

What’s the story with this release? In April 2025 we spoke to Night School’s head honcho Michael Kasparis.

He’d initially heard the demo on the ‘unreleased tracks’ section of this website. We’d got it from Jill when we interviewed her back in 2001 and she’d been amazingly generous about letting us borrow and digitise her tapes, videos and photos.

Not Actually the 1982 Demo!

For the release, Kasparis used the same phrasing we’d used on the site, ‘1982 4-piece demo’. We now know that’s not accurate – the Hellfire Club’s owner David Henderson still has the studio ledger and has been kind enough to share it with us.

You can see the vibrant early 1980s Glasgow indie scene reflected in the studio’s busy schedule. It lists a dizzying mix of bands, some of which became household names, alongside some cult heroes and total obscurities.

The book shows that Strawberry Switchblade recorded their demo there on Sunday 22 November 1981. It’s actually the 1981 demo!

But with the tracks now firmly established in the outside world as ‘1982 4-Piece Demo’, that’s it’s name. It’s kind of like Bob Dylan’s legendary Royal Albert Hall live bootleg – though it was later discovered to actually be a recording of a gig in Manchester, the title had become so attached to the recording that even a subsequent official release says ‘Royal Albert Hall concert’ on the sleeve.

As Kasparis is too young to have been into Strawberry Switchblade when they were releasing music, the first question for him is obvious.

Michael Kasparis Interview

Q: Where did you first come across Strawberry Switchblade?

MK: I think I found the album in Missing Records or another second hand record store. It was pre-internet so the way you found out about music was by cool album covers suggesting something. The album’s got such an amazing sleeve, I think I bought it for £1.99 or something, and from that period on I was transfixed by it.

As I got older, I realised there’s a big history behind the record and you get the context of it. I started meeting a bunch of people in the Glasgow scene who were contemporaries and friends with the band, and my love of it deepened from there.

Then I think I found Trees and Flowers on the 7 inch. You can see the development and it’s natural, but compared with the album it is a bit of a shock in terms of production values.

What’s quite interesting is that the aesthetic is consistent. When you see the 1981 and 1982 photo sessions, it’s already there. The aesthetic’s really punk isn’t it? As a band they really exemplified that move from punk to whatever the mid-80s became. There’s more too, their songs have loads more layers and complexities to them than you’d think initially.

I’d collect everything I could find and buy more on eBay and second hand websites. I was searching for more information about Strawberry Switchblade. Then, and to this day, if you want to find out about Strawberry Switchblade the fansite is the best place to go to. When I found the website, around 2007, I just combed it and sent it to everyone I thought would be interested.

Q: Kasparis was really captivated by the 1982 demo. He feels that it’s not just the songwriting that connects, it’s the lo-fi authenticity of the recording that also enchants listeners.

MK: One of the things that caught people’s imaginations is the vulnerability in the music. In an age of everything being fixed in Ableton and made perfect, it’s refreshing to have something so unguarded and vulnerable.

I hate using the word naive in these situations, but there is a kind of naivety to it, which is understandable if – apart from Rose – it’s their first time playing in a band. At that age, that part of your life, there’s such an innocence to it that I think people, especially younger people, have cottoned on to; ‘this beautiful song was done by someone my age’. There’s a timelessness to it.

Label Backstory

Q: How did you start Night School Records?

MK: I moved to London in 2010 and I’d been working in record shops for ten years. Even though by that point DIY labels were ten a penny, I always thought it was something that was quite difficult to do, but working at Rough Trade I saw that the mechanics of it were easy, I figured out that it’s not secret knowledge.

I had two sets of friends who were artists that didn’t have record labels, and I thought I’d make a record label and put their records out. So I knew the rough basics of it, and then I learned by mistakes for the rest of it! And it’s fifteen years later now. It’s a bigger operation now obviously, but it’s still not my full-time job. It’s between a hobby and a proper concern!

When I started the label, it obviously started very small, and I always had this fantasy about what I could eventually release. The idea of having Strawberry Switchblade on my label was one of those, just a fantasy.

Then I put a record out in 2013 which was the first real success, by an artist called the Space Lady, it’s outsider lo-fi synth music. I sold quite a lot of copies of that and did a really good job with her legacy and documenting what she was doing.

Once I knew I could do that and I’d started becoming friends with Stephen Pastel who’s good friends with Jill and Rose, I put two and two together – these Strawberry Switchblade recordings exist and it’d be a good introduction to a different side of the band that a lot of people don’t know about.

Stephen’s working on the Another Day release of BBC sessions and other tracks. That project started about the same time as I started talking to the band about the demo. We had a similar idea at the same time, that this stuff should be more widely available.

Getting It Ready

Q: Was everyone involved enthusiastic to see the demo come out?

MK: I spoke to Rose and Jill first. They were both interested, but they weren’t blown away by the idea. By that point, 2013 or 2014, I think the band was quite far away in both Jill and Rose’s – and definitely Janis’s – pasts. Both Jill and Rose were still doing new music.

But they both had a desire for people to regard the band as something other than a glossy 1980s synthpop band. They both wanted to acknowledge the roots of the band, that it was a band very much like the Pastels or Orange Juice, it was from that same Glasgow scene, and they’d started out as a drums-bass-guitar-vocal band and then developed into something else. I think they both had a desire to represent that side of the band more.

Jill passed me Janis’s contact, and from there I got through to Jamie who’s Carole’s son. I spoke to them mostly on email. Janis was really excited about it because she didn’t really have a career in music afterwards. Jamie was really happy about it as well.

Q: The four-piece existed for about nine months, it’s something they did as teenagers for less than a year, 40 years ago! With that and not having a career in music afterwards it’d be easy to think Janis wasn’t that musical but you listen to her basslines, she’s really melodic and intricate.

MK: I don’t want to cast any aspersions on Rose and Jill who are two of my favourite songwriters of all time, but Janis is probably the most accomplished musician on the EP. The thing that really sticks in your mind from that version of Trees and Flowers is the bassline.

Even though it’s just a three track 7” there was quite a lot of work in it in getting some masters together, and interviewing both Rose and Jill for the sleevenotes.

I wanted it to have a proper time capsule feel, I didn’t want to do a big release where the narrative was mixed up. I just wanted it to be like a postcard from the eight months or so of these four people getting together, figuring it out and writing their first songs.

Then there was getting the tapes mastered from Jill’s cassette. I sent it to Sean Pennycook to master. There were some slight audio imperfections in the tape that were corrected, but other than that it’s a faithful reproduction.

Designing The Look

Then the design work had to be approved by Jill and Rose, and I sent it to Janis as well. The contact sheet of photos was interesting. The vast majority of Strawberry Switchblade photos, especially of that era, is Peter McArthur’s photography. Some of his photos are just iconic. He’s been generous letting his archive be used everywhere.

But the sad thing about that particular session with the 4-piece is that the negatives don’t exist any more and we couldn’t find any prints. The only thing Jill had was the contact sheet.

I have an in-house designer for the records and all he could do was blow up the contact sheet, a Xerox-type punk thing blowing them up on a photocopier and then scan them in. That’s why all the photos on the sleeve and the booklet are so rough looking.

I was a little bit disappointed by that. Looking at those scans it’s a little bit like peering through the mists of time, and listening to the record is like that as well, it’s a bit fuzzy. The idea was that it was to be like finding an 80s demo by this long-lost band – which it is, really. So the whole aesthetic was built around necessity, which is what punk is.

These things take longer than you think. When you’re releasing a new artist, or an artist that’s still active, they’re very hands-on so the whole process can happen in six months, but when you’re piecing it together from three different people who are all at different points in their lives and they’ve all got different memories, it just takes longer.

So there was a lot of work behind it coming out. Like anything when people do these labels, it’s a total labour of love. With any release that I put out, if I break even I think that’s a total success!

Release

We released the record and it did really well. We pressed 300 coloured vinyl and 700 black. And every couple of years I’ve seen that it goes for big money on Discogs and I don’t like people paying over the odds for stuff so I press some more.

The label is hand to mouth in a way – if I overpress something and have loads of copies left over it means I can’t afford to do something else, so everything has to pretty much sell out in order to progress on to the next release.

So we’ve done quite a few pressings of it. Rose, Jill, Janis and Jamie have been really happy about it.

[It was initially released in 2017 on 700 black and 300 clear vinyl copies.
Reissued later in 2017 on 500 white copies.
Reissued again in April 2022 on 500 black and 250 pink  copies.
Reissued once again in May 2025 on 300 ‘coke bottle green’ and 700 black copies]

Going Stratospheric

MK: Of the three tracks, Trees and Flowers was always the most popular one but it never stood out in the label’s catalogue. And then there was one month in late 2024 when my distributor was ‘have you noticed this is more than usual?’ And that was a tenth of what it is now, but even at that point I thought that was weird.

And then the next month they sent me the report and I had to email them and ask if this was right. Because if it was wrong and I’d paid the royalties money out I didn’t want to be chased by people wanting it back! And to be honest the distributor was bamboozled by it as well.

I’m a records guy, but I try to be open to how people perceive and enjoy music. Even though I don’t use TikTok, the song’s connected with loads of people through that medium, and there’s something really beautiful about that.

Jamie emailed me around November 2024 when it really started picking up steam. He was just on TikTok scrolling and one of the songs that came up was Trees and Flowers. He said he had a really emotional moment listening to his mum who’s no longer here, listening to her play that music when she was a teenager. If music’s around for anything it’s for moments like that.

Then people started sending me the videos that had been made on TikTok of Trees and Flowers. Some of them are really great and some of them are just weird! And I guess that’s the whole point of ‘influencing’ and how these things become viral, they start off cool and then catch fire, and then people who’ve never heard of the band, who don’t even like music, start using them because it’s what other people are using.

It was mostly being used as background music rather than the subject of the video, but there were others where people were actively engaging with it. I got sent gardening videos!

Conveying the Contrasts

I’ve spoken to Rose about the lyrics of Since Yesterday and she feels that people can take what they want from it. But if you listen to the words it’s not a happy song, and it’s the same with Trees and Flowers.

Q: Their old manager David Balfe said recently that the band got misunderstood and seen as this sweet twee thing. Given attitudes towards women musicians, especially then, it was always likely to lean that way.

Balfe said they should have called the song I Hate The Trees. That would have made people listen deeper than the soft melody and harmonies and really see the full spectrum of it and get a more accurate understanding of the music. Mind you, you wouldn’t put I Hate The Trees on your TikTok gardening video.

MK: I think that almost Trojan horse approach to songwriting is really cool though. It rewards people who engage a little bit more. Calling the song Trees and Flowers is exactly that.

Q: But it’s a sweet sounding song, full of delicate harmonies. I’m actually with Balfe on this one. You’d see that title I Hate The Trees then hear that sound and it would encourage you to dig into it.

That said, with the resurgence from the demo version, so many people have really understood it. You look at the bedroom covers being put up on YouTube, these people have really listened and got it. Jill said she gets quite emotional about it, seeing another person singing her words and getting a significant degree of identification and comfort from it, reducing their alienation.

MK: I wouldn’t want to apply a kind of undergraduate cultural studies take on this, but I think maybe there’s something to be said about how people these days are inside more, the way social media has affected young people. They’re much more insular, more likely to be afraid of big crowds and in the external physical world, and it’s a song about that.

Q: Also, mental health issues are much less stigmatised. You can just say ‘I have agoraphobia’ and people will accommodate you in a way that you couldn’t bank on in 1982. In a way, the song was ahead of its time. Jill wrote it as a teenager and now in her 60s she’s watching it really bloom. A thoughtful song that accepts mental health issues as an ordinary fact of life – no wonder it clicks with Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

MK: With any record or music success, you’ve got to see that it has a constituency that’s quite broad. With this song there’s a big international indiepop fanbase who love the EP because it’s a missing piece of the early Glasgow indie scene Postcard Records puzzle. But then the whole thing’s been fuelled by teenagers on TikTok.

One thing that made me think this idea might have a bigger appeal than I initially thought, I was in a punk band and I played a gig in Brooklyn back in 2010 or 2011. It was a real dingy cool punk spot with all these kids, like something out of a film. One of these guys had a jacket with all these metal band patches on and he was really cool looking, and he had a massive back patch of Strawberry Switchblade on his battle jacket!

It turns out he was in a band that I liked, I spoke to him and said I loved the patch and he said ‘yeah, I did it myself, I couldn’t find any merch and they’re my favourite band ever’. People had done their own T shirts and stuff, all at this one gig, and I thought, this has got a bigger appeal.

Q: When you first told the band Trees and Flowers was taking off beyond expectations, what were their reactions?

MK: I speak to them all every month to pay them royalties and things. Janis was blown away. For Rose and Jill I think it’s mixed in with this resurgence of interest in the band. They were both heavily involved in the Since Yesterday film. Rose is not online as much, and I’m not sure she knows how much of a cultural phenomenon it’s become. Jill’s pleasantly surprised.

I think once the campaign kicks off for the Another Day album I can imagine there being loads of mainstream press about it, I think the demo EP will become just another chapter in this late renaissance of the band.

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Michael Kasparis was interviewed on 11 April 2025