Daily Record

11 April 1985

…and what goes on behind the screen

by Gordon Irving

SWITCH TO BEING DOTTY

Some call them the ‘dotty duo from Glasgow’. Pop addicts know them as Strawberry Switchblade. But to their folks in Glasgow they are simply Jill Bryson and Rose McDowell [sic].

The girls, delighted by the success of their single Let Her Go, are on Studio One, the border pop TV show, angered slightly tonight at being likened to a Scottish copy of Bananrama.

‘We’re so far apart,’ says Rose. ‘We started out together, we began writing our own songs, and we can actually play our own instruments. It’s an unfair comparison.’

The girls – Jill is 24, Rose 25 – learned to play their guitars from listening to classic Velvet Underground songs such as Femme Fatale and Sunday Morning.

Small, and colourfully garbed, and always striking, Jill and Rose have been described as ‘like Macbeth’s weird sisters, something sprung from the dark mists of Celtic fairyland.’

Their quiet, haunting ballads are sung ni the best harmony voices since the Mamas and the Papas.

Jill worked in her mother’s flower shop before tackling the pop music world, and Rose had a job in a baker’s shop.

Happy in their new and busy life – ‘We have very little time for social activities, we’re so busy playing gigs and recording and writing songs’ – they are still starry-eyed enough to admit they have memories of childhood heroes.

‘Mine was the movie actor Cary Grant,’ says Jill, surprisingly.

‘And mine was Batman,’ says Rose.

With lots of television lined up, and hopes of success in the charts, the dotty twosome from Scotland seem on the right track to stardom.

We’re grateful to the generous people at Zounds Abound for finding us this article. They do such a brilliant job of trawling vintage newspapers for music articles that people want to read today. They’re raising funds and awareness for Teenage Cancer Trust in memory of their son Noah. You can read about Noah, the care the Trust enabled him to have, and make a donation here.