Bill Drummond (manager / A&R) interview

Early days: BBC sessions and making the album

Q: How did you first hear of Strawberry Switchblade?

I knew that was going to be your first question. While you were putting the tape in I was thinking, ‘fuck, when did I first hear of Strawberry Switchblade?’. I think – and I may be wrong – that Dave Balfe, my partner in different things, may have heard a session.

Q: The BBC Peel and Jensen sessions?

I think it was the Jensen session. Dave Balfe told me about that and maybe he’d got a tape of it, a tape that included Trees and Flowers [Trees and Flowers was on the Peel session, not the Jensen one recorded the same week]. I remember as soon as I heard that song I thought it was fantastic. Absolutely genius song.

So the two of us went up to Glasgow to meet up with them and I think they had an American woman as a manger at the beginning. I think there was some problems there, but I didn’t enter into finding out the detail.

On meeting them, the fact that they had got the whole fuckin’ look together, the whole package, in that sense added to it. Not just from a cynical commercial point of view, but they just knew what they were about, they were expressing themselves on a lot of different levels other than just writing lyrics and tunes. It was working in a lot of different ways and obviously it was working in a way that could reach out there.

And that look had a genuine artistic depth but also at the same time you knew it could work in a then-Smash Hits way as well. They were the genuine thing, they were real genuine artists.

That said, initially Dave Balfe, I think he put a band together round them, an acoustic band with Simon Booth who was the guitarist who then went on and did Working Week. And that didn’t really work I don’t think, particularly. Their talent was a very delicate talent and could easily be broken with what was around them, and I think on the whole that a traditional putting them on a tour playing small rock clubs around the country just didn’t work. It was too fragile, their thing. Their voices are very fragile voices.

There’s been bands before that have had that problem, there’ll always be bands that have that problem, you put them into a thing where you’ve got a drum kit and a guitarist going through an amplifier and it just starts….

I think the record that Dave and I produced, Trees and Flowers – and I don’t often say this about records I’ve been involved in making – but I still think it’s a fantastic record. And I think we were able to capture that fragility on that first single. There’s a friend of ours who played cor anglais, Kate St John, and that really worked well.

Q: Roddy Frame’s guitar works really well to get that blend of richness and fragility.

I can’t remember him being on there! I’m not denying it. I can’t remember him being in the studio.

Q: How did it get so many notable musicians on it?

The rhythm section from Madness were friends. Roddy was a sort of friend at the time, and I guess he was a friend of theirs [Rose and Jill], but I knew him anyway. The thing is I can’t remember him playing on it!

I’m really really genuinely a hundred percent proud of that record. Then the trouble started, I guess.

Q: Did the 92 Happy Customers label exist outside of that single?

92 Happy Customers was Will Sergeant’s label. Dave Balfe and I had stopped doing Zoo Records and I was working with the Bunnymen at the time and Will and I are mates. So we said, ‘do you mind if we put a record out on your label, we’ll actually pay for the stuff,’ and he was really into the record anyway so he was up for it.

Q: The catalogue number is HAPS 001 which implies a first release.

He’d done an album on it already of his own stuff [Themes For Grind, released March 1982], and I think the plan was he was going to do more things. I actually think there was some stuff of his that he was recording about that period that’s just coming out now, in the next month or so, but it won’t be coming out on 92 Happy Customers I don’t think. It’s also a brilliant name for a record label I thought.

Q: For a small label it’s fantastic. Was the plan to keep Strawberry Switchblade putting stuff out in an indie way or was the plan always to move them on to a major after an indie single?

I think Dave would have been keen to get them on to a major. Rose would have been keen on it.

I had got myself into a position where I had to get some money, so I’d taken on a position as an A&R consultant at WEA records. They actually got signed to WEA records before I got there, but when I got the A&R consultancy position they said, ‘you know these people Bill, you look after them within the record company’.

Q: The stuff came out on Korova, which was Rob Dickins’ imprint wasn’t it?

It was Rob Dickins’ imprint when he was the boss of Warner Brothers Music, but then he became the boss of WEA records. Rob and I were friends at the time and when we made the deal that I’d become an A&R consultant it sort of became my imprint, sort of, for as long as I was there.

Q: Was there any effective difference between being on Korova and WEA, or was it just a different logo on a WEA record?

It was just WEA. I just had an office at WEA which I went into sometimes cos the phones were free instead of using it at home, cos the taxis were free.

I knew from the outset that in the fullness of time – and that time wasn’t going to last very long before it was full – that them being on a major label of any sort would break the back of them. Not only the music was fragile but everything about it. The demands that were made – and they were nowhere near as heavy as I guess they must be now – on an act to go out, do things, make records in a way that’s supposed to be for the market place.

As much as I like the idea of electropop I’m not sure it was right for the album. What was the album called, by the way?

Q: Just ‘Strawberry Switchblade‘.

That’s why I can’t remember it! I really really like early 1980s electropop. Vince Clarke period Depeche Mode for me is the best, when it gets heavier and [throws a sledgehammer-wielding pose] wallop, I don’t like it. So I could see that that very light synthpop stuff could really work for Strawberry Switchblade as much as acoustics and stand-up bass.

Q: They did start it with live musicians, they did a couple of songs with Robin Millar and he was slated to do the album.

I didn’t like that. I’d forgotten about that. Have you heard those?

Q: Yeah, they’re really good.

Are they?

Q: Yeah. It’s not as smooth as you’d expect for Robin Millar, there’s quite an edge to it.

Then I made a mistake. Because I do think on the whole that the album the songs didn’t work out. The songs were too delicate, they weren’t given enough space, the electro thing didn’t have that lightness that, in my head, Vince Clarke had right at the beginning of Depeche Mode.

I really like some stuff that Robin Millar had done, so that’ll be the reason why we’d work with him. Even though I’d completely forgotten about that.

Q: With him having done Everything But The Girl and Sade and stuff, he’s not coming from a rock angle, and it’s important with Strawberry Switchblade that you don’t put them in a rock environment.

No, no.

Even though it seems I’m giving these negatives about the album, I also think the Since Yesterday single, it worked. And maybe there’s a couple of other ones that did work, when it was very sparse electro and stuff.

Q: There’s a lot of weird sounds on there that give it a darkness, it’s not just straightforward push-button electropop on there.

Maybe I should go and listen to it again. With Since Yesterday, I remember when I first heard it I didn’t think ‘that’s a hit single’, but it was fantastic as a pop record.

After Since Yesterday: Jolene, remixes and split

Q: Knowing the impact that a major record label would have on the way the band worked, did you try to steer that away from them? They were given a tremendously heavy workload by the promotion department, they were doing interviews with absolutely everybody.

I know they were. It’s easy for me with hindsight to say that shouldn’t have happened. I don’t think we were as aware – in the position I was in I wasn’t aware enough – of the problems that Jill had, the fact that Jill found some of these things incredibly hard and difficult. Whereas Rose was a very very driven woman. I don’t know what she’s like now but at the time she was very driven.

Q: She’s still going at it, she so prolific that you can’t get a proper discography together for her cos she’s worked on so many records. Hugely prolific.

She was ‘I am going to be a star, I am going to be a star’. Although she wasn’t saying that, you could see that that’s what was inside her.

It’s rather ironic that you’re here today cos about half an hour ago I was walking back down here and I passed a woman who was very short, and I was thinking, ‘I wonder if she’s as short as Rose?’, and I was thinking about Rose and about a time we went down to Exeter together.

This is a classic example. We got on a plane, I wasn’t supposed to be there, I don’t know why I was doing it, maybe it was cos Balfe had a word with the promotions department or whatever. But we had to go down to Exeter of all places and she had to do some cable TV stuff there. I was thinking and remembering that as I walked down here just now.

It was only a matter of time before it would implode.

Q: Did you consciously realise that at the time?

I suppose not. I suppose it’s easy for me to see things after the fact. But with the difference in character between Rose and Jill and what they needed out of life…

Q: Had that difference always been like there or had the working arrangements created or exacerbated it?

It may have been always there, but I wouldn’t be as exposed to it, to whatever was going on in their heads whenever they’re off by themselves. It just became more and more apparent, Jill would need protecting from things.

Q: Did you see this in the working relationship between them, did relations change or was there a shift in the power dynamic?

I genuinely thought they were both equally as talented. What was really good in the blend of their voices, Rose’s voice had that cutting edge to it that Jill’s didn’t. It was a classic Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel thing with the two voices together, even Lennon and McCartney’s voices, when you get those voices that can blend in a certain way, that have different textures and then work together in harmony and you get great pop music out of it. They had that. But they had that kind of delicate thing which meant it would always be kind of limited in it’s appeal to a big audience, I guess.

Q: As it went on with the commercial pressures coming in, was there any feeling that there should be a let-up in pushing them? At what point did you realise this was happening to them, that it was doing them harm?

Probably too late. And also from a record company point of view there was no big commercial upside. If an act sells a fuck of a lot of records then the record company are gonna go, ‘hey, take your time, as long as it takes, that’s the most important thing, you as an artist’. If an act isn’t selling that many records then a major record company isn’t really going to give a shit.

Although Since Yesterday got to number five in this country, it was obvious that was the only track on the album that in that day and age could actually be a big hit. There wasn’t anything else there that could then take the album to create the financial return for a major record company.

Q: Was it seen like that at the time?

It’s just an unwritten thing.

Q: It’s just that Let Her Go came out as the follow-up and to me it sounds like such an natural successor. It really quite surprises me that you got such a huge hit with Since Yesterday and Let Her Go bombed when it’s got a lot of the same kind of brightness and drive with a dark underside, and yet it’s not just Since Yesterday Part Two.

Well I’m not surprised. It didn’t have what Radio 1 would want. Even though it has a dark underside, it’s now perceived as mainstream pop. If they had been on a Glasgow indie record label and evolved like Belle and Sebastian or something like that, to live in Glasgow without having to move to London and all those things then a cult following could really have built up around them and what they do, and that would have been far healthier. If their careers could have evolved, maybe not having a Since Yesterday top five record but they could have had a genuine evolution which didn’t happen. And you can’t realise it and go, ‘shit, this is bad, let’s go back to Glasgow and pretend we never had that hit single and try and start evolving again’.

Q: One of the reasons I’m doing this website is to reclaim the band from the image of mainstream pop. A lot of people I mention it to just remember Since Yesterday and think of it as disposable froth. But now there’s been some time since all the publicity overkill, and now people have come across Rose for her subsequent work and find Strawberry Switchblade as her backstory, people are seeing it as the unsettled bittersweet thing it always was. I remember them at the time and I twigged there was more to them than Top of The Pops and mainstream popularity.

This is me being defensive in a way, but they really really wanted that. And yet again, it was more Rose. It’s not that I’m blaming her, because to have pop success you have got to want it, and right then Rose really really wanted it. I don’t know about now, maybe she’s shifted her drive once she realised that it wasn’t a possibility for her anymore, her whole thing’s shifted to Psychic TV and that whole area of stuff.

Q: How much control did they have over it all?

At the time they weren’t doing anything…they were asked ‘would you want to do these promotions?’ or whatever. They weren’t forced to go and make the David Motion record. It would be a joint thing.

Q: They both talk in terms of things being traded off, of, say, being allowed to make videos with Tim Pope if they’d do some more blatantly commercial promotion.

I think that would be hindsight on their part, maybe feeling embarrassed that they have done those promotional things. They were generally up for doing that sort of stuff, which now looking back I think [winces]. I was once in a band called Big In Japan, I was in my early twenties then, about the same age as Strawberry Switchblade when this stuff was happening for them. I can imagine if we’d been signed to a major record label I would’ve gone, ‘OK, yeah, we’ll do this, we’ll do that’ and I would have done all those things and regretted it afterwards. Later on I would’ve thought, ‘why did I do that?’. It’s very easy to get sucked into that thing. And when it’s happening you think it’s never going to go away.

Everybody does it who’s an artist or creative person of any sort, when the spotlight moves on to you it’s very easy to think, ‘this is my just rewards for all the work I’ve done, and now that the world can see that I have certain qualities why would the spotlight ever move away?’

And it does, of course it does, cos the world’s not particularly interested in you as a person or your artistic worth. It’s like, ‘we know what Strawberry Switchblade are about now, they’re the girls in polka dots, what can we be interested in now?’.

Q: Jolene; how did that happen?

That was a definite record company thing. It was that classic thing of get them to do a cover version, they don’t seem to have any other songs right now that can be hits and if we don’t get a hit soon the whole thing is definitely over.

Q: Rose said it was you that had the choice of song.

She really liked Down From Dover. She came to me and was talking about Dolly Parton, she was a big big Dolly Parton fan and I think they already did this version of Down From Dover themselves, it was a cover version they would do. [In 1993 Rose released a cover of Down From Dover on the Spell album Seasons In The Sun].

So it was borne out of the fact that she was really into Dolly Parton and they did this Down From Dover song. So we said, ‘do you want to do Jolene?’. So that’s how that came about.

I really enjoyed that record. I tell you what I enjoyed the most about that record, getting Larry Adler in to play harmonica, that was fantastic. Have you got the twelve inch version? I don’t know how it stands up today.

Q: The production sounds really dated, but yeah, the harmonica is fantastic.

I remember being in the studio thinking it was fantastic. For a moment I must’ve thought it could be a hit.

Q: The 12 inch remixes, that mid-80s thing where singles had to have an extended version. Who did the remixing?

Fuck knows.

Q: Rose and Jill both say they had nothing to do with it, they’d be working on something then they’d get a call saying, ‘that thing you finished several months ago, we’re putting it out as a single and we need a remix by Monday’, and someone else would do it. The one that’s closest to listenable is Let Her Go, which is the only one that has any credited names on. Five names are listed, you, Balfe, Youth and two others.

Fuck knows.

Q: Do you remember doing any of them at all?

No.

Q: You definitely did at least one.

If you told me I did all of them I could think, well, maybe I did. But I don’t think I did! At that time the whole idea of a remixer as being somebody special and somebody you pay a whack of money to go and do it, and this is an actual job, it just didn’t exist in those days. You made a record and, as you said, you had to have a twelve inch and so you’d just sit around and think, ‘OK, we’ll double the length of that drumbeat, double the length of that,’ and you’d got a twelve inch. It’s like asking me who made the cup of tea.

Q: The weird thing is that the purpose of a twelve inch is to have a longer version for playing in clubs, so having an extended version of Trees and Flowers makes no sense whatsoever.

No, it wasn’t done for club play.

Q: Was it just gratuitous cos it was on a big bit of vinyl and that meant there were twice as many formats available to sell?

Yeah, almost. Obviously the existence of 12 inch singles came about because of clubs, but then it became a marketing thing, all records had to have more than one format to milk whatever fan following is out there. So nobody would ever be thinking Trees and Flowers could be a club record, it’d be more like, ‘this is a great song so let’s have it so it plays for longer and you don’t have to put the record on again,’ something almost as stupid as that.

[On further investigation, it seems that the extended versions of Since Yesterday, Trees and Flowers and Who Knows What Love Is? were specially made for The 12″ Album, a Japanese release compiling extended versions and non-album tracks. The extended mix of Let Her Go was released on the UK 12″ single of Who Knows What Love Is?. Jolene was the only UK single that actually had its extended mix on the 12″ release.]

Q: Do you remember how far plans got for the second album?

No idea. I was with WEA for three years. I don’t know if they were dropped before I left or I left before they were dropped, I don’t know which way round it came.

Q: What was the first you heard of them coming apart as a partnership?

It was a gradual thing. Obviously, there must have been a point. I just think it was a gradual thing in the difficulties they seemed to be having in their own personal lives. I can’t remember an actual point. I can’t remember the last time I saw them. I must have just been too involved in other things.

When they split did it seem like it had been a long time coming or was it sudden?

I wouldn’t have been surprised. I think Jill’s situation was that she was becoming more unhappy with the whole being in London, and everything about her situation. I think it was kind of natural, but I can’t remember actual dates and things.