Blitz

March 1985

A Strawberry Switchblade interview is a fairly irrelevant task, as both Jill Strawberry and Rose Switchblade will testify. After a gruelling photo session, the best plan seemed to be to ease myself into the taxi with them and shelter somewhere in the shower of rubber and polka dot.

What percentage of you is female hormones?

Rose: ‘About 40 per cent.’

Jill: ‘I’m all woman!’

I hear you want to cover Randy Newman’s Short People. Do you think short people have any reason to live?

‘Oh, definitely. Short people overrule tall people and the only way to go about it is through pop music’.

Why do people always want to take pictures of you lying down? Are you helpless sweeties?

‘They don’t. We’re like poison Mars bars’.

Are you fashionable?

‘No, who wants to talk about fashion?’

Are you unfashionable?

‘In the truest Dolly Parton sense of the word. If us and fashion ever accidentally collide, it wll just be a passing phase’.

From Hammersmith to Paddington, the Switchies on day jobs, art, food and God:

‘During the week Jill is a surgeon and I (Rose) am a male model. The rest of the time I work in a mortuary’.

‘I like cutting eyes and tattooing them’.

‘Och, you’ve seen too many surrealist movies’.

‘No, only Quincy. It’s one of Bunuel’s weirder ones. You have to see it ten times to know what he’s getting at’.

What about TJ Hooker?

‘That’s the one with Captain Kirk in a hairpiece. No, that’s too Dada’.

‘We’re great art lovers. My favourite artist is Lou Reed’.

‘We love potatoes cos we’re a veggie band. The potato is God’s gift to the tummy’.

Are you religious?

‘No, I don’t like that kind of music. God is another word for torture. I was in a hotel in London once and I saw God. I said “Get lost you old bastard”. I felt quite strange after that’.

‘Churches are lovely when they’re empty but gong on a Sunday is like going to Camden Palace and finding Clive Dunn doing the DJing!’

Did I get to the heart of things OK?