David Balfe (manager) interview

First recordings

Q: How did you first hear of Strawberry Switchblade?

It first began with Bill having heard something being done that came out of John Peel, I think. Bill got hold of a tape and brought it to me and we liked it. I think that was Trees and Flowers but I’m not absolutely sure.

Q: They’d done two BBC radio sessions in the space of a fortnight in late 1982.

I dunno, was it that? It might’ve been that. We got in touch and we offered them a publishing deal. Bill and I had a publishing company, Zoo Music, that had been set up and we’d been doing Echo And The Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes with Warner Brothers music. So we did the publishing deal with them. I was at a little bit of a loose end, the Teardrops having just split up, and I suggested I manage them, and that all seemed to go very well and that’s what we did.

Then we decided to put out… I’m just trying to get the order in my head… we put out a single, and the idea – as you still do these days – is to put out an indie single, get the ball rolling, get a bit of a vibe. Bill had got a job then working as an A&R man at Warner Brothers.

We put out the single. Did we put out an indie single or did Bill decide he’d sign them to Warners?

Q: Trees and Flowers came out on 92 Happy Customers.

Oh! That was Will Sergeant’s thing. That’s right! I was big friends with most of Madness in those days, they were part of my social group in London, and we got the bass and drums from Madness, Woody and Mark, to play on it. We recorded it and we put it out and it got reaction, a good vibe, and then Bill signed them for a fairly reasonable deal – by no means a big deal – to Warners.

Q: So the plan was always to move them on to a major label?

Yes, yes. Well we had no money.

Q: What were your first impressions on meeting them?

They were a very diverse pair of girls; Rose was very hard, not nastily hard, but she had a very hard working class upbringing and was a tough cookie. And Jill was incredibly soft and quite fragile and had a very nice middle class upbringing.

Rose, when we first met her, was living in this horrible horrible kind of estate made up of blocks of flats on the outskirts of Glasgow, most of the roads weren’t built and it was as desolate as you can imagine any East European housing estate to be, and she’d already had a kid very young. But it all went together, this soft and fluffy side with the dark and edgy side which I liked the combination of. I liked it artistically and I thought it would be commercial. I thought the name perfectly embodied those aspects, in that Jill was the strawberry and Rose was the switchblade.

They also had this image which was very distinctive and very focussed, which I thought would work well and it did work well, but it also had the problem in that very quickly people could see… I mean, it was the classic one-hit wonder in that they had a light and frothy gimmick image, got attention initially but then it didn’t look like it had any depth. And it didn’t really.

So that was it really. Although Bill and I had managed the Bunnymen and the Teardrops together, with the Teardrops ending I was kind of low in self-confidence at that point and it just seemed to be a thing I liked a lot and could get on and do.

Q: When you and Bill approached the band it appeared as if you were going to jointly manage them, but it turned out it was much more you than Bill. How swiftly did it become that way? How much of an interest did Bill retain?

When Bill and I approached them – as my memory has it, but who knows – we were just trying to sign their publishing, we had a company through Warner Music called Zoo Music. I think it was just me who wanted to manage them, cos Bill had got a job as an A&R man for WEA. Though I don’t remember it, it is possible that we were going to manage them together, then Bill got the job and dropped out.

Bill and I were officially joint publishers and he was the A&R man and I the manager. But because Bill and I had a close relationship we did a lot of things together, not defining the boundaries too strictly.

Q: What was the working relationship like between Rose and Jill?

When you’re new to a relationship people tend to club together. They were in the group, they knew each other, whereas I was this guy from the music business who’d been in bands that were successful and stuff. I think they were a bit intimidated by it. So they present a front to you, so you’re never quite sure as the front evaporates over time and you start to see the way things are; is that the way things have always been or is it the way things have gone over recent times?

They worked very closely, it was a bit of a classic sort of Lennon and McCartney thing insofar as when they started I think they were very much excited by working together and fresh, and then as they progressed it became that it’d be one person’s song or the other, I think. The initial songs were, as much as I could see, worked on together. And they were so friendly with each other, there was not a lot of differences you could generalise about. While Rose was far more the tougher character, they both kind of wanted to do what they did.

Q: It took ages from signing them to putting the album out. In the meantime there was a band put together behind them.

We got a guy called Simon who went on to be slightly successful with – what were they called? – Working Week. He was a very capable musician. We got a drummer who went on to be successful with Fairground Attraction, and a bass player I can’t even remember.

Q: Robin Millar suggests Phil Moxon from Young Marble Giants.

That’s right, that’s right.

[Jill is now absolutely sure it was John Cook, who played bass with them live at that time, and says she’s never heard of Phil Moxon. Cook himself has confirmed this.]

They were nice people and we went and did some recording. It was kind of the obvious thing to do, you had these nice acoustic songs and it was a very capable band, but the sound was just a bit too gentle, a bit too soft, a bit too wimpy. It didn’t really have anything, it didn’t have any oomph to it. The girls were playing guitar live and stuff. It just wasn’t working. We were coming up with recordings, we went to Robin Millar, but it was like everything was too wimpy; the girls didn’t have the voice like Everything But The Girl and the songs weren’t as sophisticated as that.

Q: They played live a bit with the band didn’t they?

Yeah. We did lots of shitty places all round the country, I remember going to Brighton, I remember going to Bath. When I say lots I don’t mean tens but at least half a dozen to a dozen at a guess, but I’m totally guessing.

The idea was build up a bit of a fanbase and a bit of awareness. Also the girls were still very young and they hadn’t really got a lot of performing under their belts, they were still very shy onstage. Well, Jill more so. They could do with the experience to get a bit better as well as building up a bit of a following, get a few journalists down to check them out, just getting those little things that help.

But it costs a lot to put a band together, you’ve got the rehearsal time, paying the musicians, the transport for gigs, every gig costs money. I’d be driving them most of the time. It was a lot of hard work and we weren’t really achieving much because it’s always a bit chicken-and-egg; you put out a single to get a few gigs, you need another single to build on that.

Q: Was there the inclination to put out another single in that year or so after Trees and Flowers?

There was, but we really felt that we had to put out something that we thought would do something. I mean, it’s typical; most bands you’re involved with you go through long periods with real difficulty trying to find a way it’s going to work, this one was the same thing.

It just wasn’t working, so I had the idea of doing something a bit more electronic with it, contrasting their gentle acousticness with something a bit more oomph. Basically we were looking for somebody who’d take the songs and really give them arrangements which would work, and we found David Motion. I can’t remember how we found him, he’d obviously done something and been recommended by someone.

When we went to do it I can’t remember whether both of them were into the idea of electronics. I always loved electronic music so I know I would have argued for it. I can’t remember whether Rose and/or Jill would have argued for it, but generally you’re bound to respond more to personalities. You get them in a room with someone and they get on with them and they start saying nice things about the music and they’re up for giving it a try, and that’s what I imagine would have happened with this.

Q: When you heard what they’d been doing with David Motion what was your reaction? It was so very different from what they’d done before.

Again, I haven’t got a great memory of it all, but my memory is that everybody – myself and Jill and Rose – were equally extremely excited in a positive way about it. It was different, but that wasn’t a problem with me, I’ve always been into things radically changing as you work with them. And it suddenly made a lot more sense. It sounded commercial, the record company were excited about it and everyone felt strong.

Almost a part of the band was Rose’s then-husband Drew, and Jill’s then-boyfriend Peter. They’d all got the flats in Muswell Hill in this one block of flats and lived together, and they’d practically be at every meeting so it was a weird arrangement where the domestic was linked in with the professional. But I got on well with them, towards the end sometimes better with Drew and Peter than Rose and Jill.

I think Drew got a little keyboard, one of these TR808s and I started playing with them on some session we did and I think that might have been the thing that kicked off the electronic thing. What did Rose and Jill say about David Motion?

Q: They both really emphasised how much they liked him and how easy it was working with him. They said they were shocked when they initially heard it and were quite sceptical, but they could veto things and voice their opinions. But still there’s a clear feeling of it being a bit too brash and sequencery and a bit less human than they would have liked, and in retrospect they’re not sure it was the right way to have done the album. There’s no guitars!

Well, there are some guitars.

Q: But they’re very very buried.

Yeah. Both Jill and Rose played very very poorly, very basically, and what they did do a lot of the time was a bit lame when they did it. The problem is that all musicians imagine they way something could have been, because they way it could have been was never done or judged. Believe me, I thought that was a far better album than at times preceding it I was expecting the first Strawberry Switchblade album to be. Yeah it’s got it’s weaknesses, but name me an album that hasn’t.

Q: It’s still not by any stretch a soulless fabricated pop album, it’s not Westlife, there’s a lot of darkness and weirdness on it, you can feel the dark underside musically as well as lyrically.

There’s idiosyncrasy, Being Cold and songs like that. Often I’d go in there and say ‘too strawberry and not enough switchblade’, or vice versa. I always wanted it to be an edgy group.

But groups are strange things, I’ve done it a zillion times and it’s very hard to get something, everybody involved would always alter the balance slightly, and very often you’d say ‘this is the stronger song even though I’d rather that song was the single because it’s got a better balance and is more representative of what we want to do, but it’s nowhere near as strong a single as this’. We’d end up with stuff that was to some degree… not a compromise, but a best choice at the time.

So I was pleased when we did that [the album], we had very high expectations. The single got to number five even though it took a long time. At that point we were all very excited and all thought everything was going totally fine.

Q: You say their image may well be seen as a gimmick and be a bit of a blip; were you aware of that at the time?

Yeah! Oh totally! But then you never knew, nobody knew whether Elvis would have one hit and throwing his hips around would be a bit of gimmick and he’d be obviously a one-hit wonder. You could have said the same about the Beatles. You never know. You do a lot of thinking, you do a lot of theorising, you do a lot of guesswork, but it’s all a big throw of the dice at the end of the day. But we had a top five single, and that was a real result. It took twelve weeks of going up the chart, and it went down two weeks on the way up!

Q: It did have a tremendous promotional push behind it, with it being WEA’s only glimmer of a big new hit in the new year, so they kept it running from November into January on its way up. Apparently there were even TV adverts for the single between Christmas and new year.

That’s possible. It rings a vague bell now you say it, although I would never have mentioned it. We thought we had a good pop hit. But, you know, it ended up being what it ended up being. It was a great result – you don’t get to number five just by putting TV ads out.

I often use it as an example to how much different the charts are now. Ninety-nine percent of singles these days have their highest position in week one. Musicians find it hard to believe when I say I was involved with a single that spent twelve weeks climbing up and two of those weeks it actually went down.

Let Her Go, Jolene and money trouble

So we’d got that and then we put out Let Her Go.

Q: Was that expected to be as big a success as Since Yesterday?

Yeah. We didn’t think it was quite as strong, but we thought it was strong enough to be a top ten hit. But again, you learn as you go along. Looking back now it obviously isn’t as strong a pop single, although I really really liked it then.

Q: It sounds a worthy successor to me, I’m surprised it didn’t do pretty much the same thing as Since Yesterday [when the band signed to WEA in summer 1983 Let Her Go was thought to be a great song and was planned to be first single].

People thought it wasn’t quite as strong, it didn’t have the hook daaa-da-da [fanfare motif from Since Yesterday], it didn’t have quite the same rhythm intensity. If you can imagine playing records at a school disco, Let Her Go is a bit too gentle for that.

Q: It’s one of the two tracks that were re-recorded to make them more smooth though. Let Her Go and Who Knows What Love Is? were originally recorded with David Motion, then re-done with Phil Thornalley who did a gentler job on them.

Maybe that was what went wrong. I also always thought of Let Her Go as being more of a Jill song and Since Yesterday as being a bit more of a Rose song because it had a bit more oomph. And Rose’s voice generally had a bit more of an edge to it, Jill’s was a little more rounded and a bit more soft. But anyway, I can’t remember what position it got to but it was a major disappointment.

Q: Something like number 40. [It peaked at number 59, during five weeks in the top 75]

And then basically, when you face that kind of thing you’re all over. They had an album that got put out, there was a third single that got put out.

As a pop band we lost all indie credibility with the top five single, and the video which was totally down to the girls. It was done by Tim Pope who was an incredibly trendy video director and did the Cure’s singles and won awards for them. The girls and he fell in love and ended up doing what I consider to be a far too lightweight video; very entertainment, very good for kids TV. I thought it was a very big mistake we did.

I thought it was a good video in terms of being entertaining, but it was just wacky. If you’re The Cure and you do something that wacky it’s one thing, but if you’re girls who wear polka dots and ribbons and you do something that wacky, it just looks wacky, it doesn’t look a kind of ironic-wacky, it just looks lightweight-wacky.

I think that more than anything made them see it’s just all about pop, and once you’re a pop band that doesn’t have hits it’s all over. I think we gave it one shot after we couldn’t work out what was wrong with the second single, and then we were into desperation mode for I don’t know how long before Jolene came out, and that was just a real desperate thing. If you could get back in the top ten you were back in the game, and if you can’t, we knew it was all over.

Q: Whose idea was Jolene?

Jolene had come from the girls and their boyfriends. I think it was Peter, Jill’s boyfriend, said ‘why don’t you do Jolene with an I Feel Love backing thing?’. We had a John Peel session or a Kid Jensen session or something like that, and we went in and I programmed a thing to go dududududu [I Feel Love bassline] and you can actually sing Jolene to that and it worked great, and we did it. [BBC Radio 1 session for Janice Long, recorded 27 September 1984].

Then we took it into the record company and said ‘this could be a good single’ and we got a guy [producer] Clive Langer in to do it who’d done the Teardrop Explodes and was famous for doing Madness and he’d done the big Come On Eileen Dexy’s thing. I got hold of him, I was doing the programming.

For some reason – which I argued with him about but he insisted on it – he changed it from that I Feel Love thing that could have worked in a disco to this dun-de-dundun-dun thing. It sort of sounds like some programmed hopalong cowboy beat. I think he was probably too scared of doing a straight pastiche of I Feel Love. It’s quite a modern phenomenon now, bunging two things together, and we liked that.

He did it and then Bill and I went and did some additional production on it, and one of the most memorable recording moments of my life was when Bill had the idea of getting the harmonica player Larry Adler. We were in the studio and he came in, and he was famous in his day for telling anecdotes. Within fifteen minutes of arriving he’d already dropped incredibly famous names – ‘oh, when I did this with Jacqueline Kennedy’ – almost compulsively he would be mentioning these people.

We said we just wanted something to weave in between the lyrical lines and he went and did this stuff that I just love. It was one of the most amazing times in a studio with a musician. He played all this stuff, he did it first take. We did another take just to have a choice, and that was it.

We put that out, we worked it hard, and I think it got to number twenty something or other.

Q: It was further down than that [it peaked at 53 during 6 weeks inthe top 75].

It was a flop anyway, and that was that.

Now we get to the difficult more controversial bit. Things were still running on and the record company were losing their faith now, I think. Time goes on and you’ve budgeted for a year or 18 months of costs. At some point I had to say to the band, ‘I’m going to have to stop your wages in however many weeks, and also paying for your flats. You’re going to have to think about what you want to do cos we’re running out of money and I can’t get any more money out of the record company’.

They were saying ‘we really really don’t want to do this, what can we do?’ They had some money put aside for tax, and I said ‘you can spend your tax money if you want, but it’s a big risk; you wouldn’t have anything put aside to cover everything’. And they insisted that they did that, they didn’t want to go on the dole. I advised them strongly against it.

The idea was that something would come together and we’d get a new deal and get some more money out of them in the end and it would work out and we’d avoid the horrible thing. But nothing did come through.

The girls would be arguing and I wasn’t sure if they’d always had this tension between them and as they’d gone on they’d introduced me to it, or whether it was something new. As I said, Rose was quite a hard nut, not in a particularly nasty way but just very tough, I think she’d come from a background where you had to be tough, whereas Jill was very soft and very neurotic and agoraphobic and had real difficulty coping with everyday life.

They started arguing about things – I can’t even remember the specifics, it wasn’t any big musical differences. Although Rose was hanging out with people like Genesis P-Orridge who I found a little bit too weird even for my taste. They were each complaining of the other, although mainly Jill complaining about Rose.

Q: About what?

I can’t remember specifically. It always happens, when things start going wrong people start having plans for how to fix it and people are less likely to agree about it. When things are going well people always have ideas but they don’t really get upset, everybody says yes to everybody’s idea. When things turn to difficulty then ‘ideas’ become ‘solutions’, and solutions are something you desperately have to get everybody on board for.

I think Rose always had the vision of herself going on and doing whatever she went on to do. Jill I think always felt that Strawberry Switchblade was her thing and that would be it. So Rose had a slightly different perspective, and also Rose was happy to go off and do weird things. Rose was also pretty unreliable, she would say she was going to do something and then change her mind at the last minute.

Jill was very different. We had some success in Japan, we did gigs there. It costs a lot of money to go to Japan and put somebody up and we did take her boyfriend. It was a weird relationship because although he was her boyfriend he later came out as gay, or declared himself as gay although he wasn’t having any gay relationships, he was a bit of a Morrissey character in that respect. [Peter says this story was a wind-up that Balfe took seriously]. She kind of relied on him, but we said, ‘look, he can’t come with us to Japan, the record company won’t pay for it’. Rose wasn’t taking anybody, Rose was completely independent.

We tried to go and at the airport she had a freakout and wouldn’t get on the plane and we had to organise for him to come and lost the flight and all this mad stuff. That was kind of typical of Jill, that she’d be panicking and having fits about things. I mean, she was a lovely lovely girl, and she was trying her hardest, but she was very very very neurotic and had real difficulty with panic attacks and stuff like that.

I think because of these different attitudes they started rubbing each other up the wrong way. There wasn’t any specific big issue. As I said, in general Rose was into a more angsty indie gothic thing and Jill was doing soft and fluffy cats. But I liked both of them a great deal.

The Japanese success made them think, ‘well maybe we can have something going on there’, that’s what also led to the record company carrying on beyond what they might have done if it was just a UK situation.

We did a first promotional trip, then we went back to do some dates. They were massive dates, 2,000 or 3,000 capacity theatres. I think we did two nights in a theatre in Tokyo and one in Osaka and one somewhere else. They were all two and a half or three thousand seater places, all sell-outs.

That was when I hired [Farmers Boys bass player and Jill’s future husband] Frog in and a guy who later became one of M People [Paul Heard]. I hired a couple of keyboard players, musicians to play with them just to make it look more like an act, although a lot of it was on tape and stuff. In those days that was quite a normal act, you’d have two musicians who played various things and then the focus in the middle. It worked really well, we had a bit of slide show that had been organised by Peter who was also a musician. It worked, it was a great thing.

Also Peter – who I liked a great deal but he was a very irritating personality, very opinionated, he had nothing going for him in life except that he was Jill’s boyfriend – he was a smart guy and had some really interesting ideas but he could be very very opinionated and irritating.

We were organising these dates and I got this tour manger in who I knew was a great tour manager, he’d done lots of big bands. I’d said, ‘look, this’ll be a week in Japan, it’ll be really fun’, and he organised it, got a quick crew together for lighting and sound and all this. I was going to be there as well to do work as part of the crew. He went off to the first rehearsal to meet the band and get everything organised, and he ended up – I can’t remember if he punched or headbutted – Peter!

I’d warned him, I’d said, ‘watch out for Peter, he can be a bit irritating but don’t let him get to you’. I still don’t understand what happened that made him do it, this big tough Irishman. He had to get the sack then and this was about three or four days before we left so I had to take over his duties, it was a real nightmare. But they did these dates and they were big in Japan, as the old saying goes. I think they always thought if they could get another good single they could get another deal together in Japan alone. I think that was always hanging over them.

Jill and I had a little bit of a fling romantically towards the end of the band. It started off that Peter was her boyfriend, but he announced to everybody that he was really gay, and I said ‘haven’t you guys had a physical relationship?’ and he said no [Peter says this was a wind-up that Balfe took seriously in error]. Some drunken evening I’d ended up snogging with Jill and something had happened then, although I was living with a girlfriend at the time so it was all kept quite secret. We started having this thing that whenever we were away at work we’d share a bedroom.

The big problem that happened was they split up. They turned up at Eden studios one day – I can’t remember what we were doing in the studio, mixing or something – and they said they were splitting up. They’d had a big discussion the two of them the night before and they announced it to me, and I started saying, ‘well you’re gonna have big problems you know, you’ve spent your tax money’.

I was telling them they were running out of money, they’d spent their tax money, and it is their money. A manager is a very weird position in that you’re essentially an advisor. You can’t tell them you can’t spend this money. Following on from this situation, I wouldn’t even mention tax money to bands, I would tell them ‘you’re out of money’ and not even mention what’s aside for tax. You put the right percentage aside for tax and you’d always get some deductions for various things and that would end up covering the accountants bills. This was a big lesson I learned from Strawberry Switchblade was that I should never have let them decide about their money. Basically it all went dreadfully wrong.

Jill, who ended up being fairly stationary in one place and a very good middle-class girl, ended up being hit by the accountant’s bills to sort it all out and doing deals where they were paying off the VAT and various tax bills for years. Rose just ended up being a kind of gypsy and disappeared and wandered round all over the place and paid bugger all as far as I know.

I got very annoyed with Rose cos my management company had signed off on the leases of their flats because they were company lets. They needed a company director because the law was slightly different at that point about the rights of a tenant on a company let than the rights of a tenant who dealed direct.

So I signed off on them and they used to pay me the rent and I’d pay it on. Then Rose stopped paying. She had a very good flat and she just kind of left it, she left stuff in there, locked it all up and just went wandering round. I’d be writing letters to her and ringing her for months, literally sitting outside the flat for hours waiting for her to come back when I didn’t even know if she was living there or off on her travels. I was paying out a fortune and I ended up getting taken to court by the landlords and having to pay all the back rent, even though I said, ‘look, this is the real situation’. And I never got any of the money back off Rose.

But I think Rose, being a tough cookie, would think, ‘fuck it, Dave Balfe’s got money, I’ve ended up out of pocket for this thing, he can have his problem’. Whereas Jill wouldn’t do anything like that, so she was a nicer character who ended up with, I think, a lot of financial troubles for years.

I think that was also a difficult thing because it ended. Rose had left Jill in the lurch more than Jill had left Rose in the lurch and there was all this money owed. I was still organising, but essentially I wasn’t going to pick up any of the bills, which might have been ungenerous of me but I wasn’t that well off at the time and they’d made decisions against my advice which had left them in this situation.

I think Rose and Frog, who Jill ended up having a romantic thing with after the Japan trip, always blamed me. It’s an easy blame to make, a manager. Musicians are always likely to say it, rather than ‘oh I should have spent a little bit more time thinking harder about financial things’, it’s very easy to say ‘the manager ripped us off’ or ‘the manager left us in the lurch’ – it’s a very easy thing to say to yourself and to the people around you.

And who knows – if I can accuse other people of kidding themselves maybe I’m kidding myself. But the logic I employed at the time was that I’d advised them not to spend this money and they’d spent it. They owed tax money, they owed money to accountants. I tried to organise it for a long time, I ended up leaving it direct between the accountants and the girls themselves.

I don’t know how I discovered this, I think I spoke to Jill three or four years later, one phone call, and she was fairly embittered and Frog was very embittered. I think Frog was doubly annoyed with me cos I was somebody who had slept with his wife and left her with all these financial troubles, as far as he was concerned.

I didn’t really have any communication with them after that, which I’ve always been sorry about. Maybe I should have done more. I really genuinely mean that, maybe I should have paid off the bills, maybe I too easily accepted that they had the responsibility for using the money I’d put aside and maybe I shouldn’t have let them. At the time I just didn’t want to take responsibility myself financially and on a straightforward level I did tell them it was their choice.

Commercial pressures, different directions

Q: They both shudder when they talk about some of the stuff that was done just for money near the end of the band, the Ecstasy single, the car adverts in Japan, the jingle for the Shock Waves hair gel radio advert. They’re really embarrassed about that and say it was you cattle-prodding them into it.

Yeah, but we had financial problems.

Q: The level of the financial problems didn’t come over in the interviews with Rose and Jill, the emphasis was on ‘Balfe was pushing us to make money all the time’.

There’s a zillion types of manager, and there’s an argument for nearly every way of approaching it. One of the things I was doing was saying, ‘OK we’ve got enough in the bank to pay everybody’s flat and wages for however many weeks’. OK, I earned 20%, but if they earned two grand I wasn’t going to get a fortune. That’s all it’d be for, doing that Shock Waves thing.

Literally, my neighbour invited us over for a drink one evening and she happened to be an advertising executive. She found out I was in the music business and said she needed a radio jingle for Shock Waves. I said I’d got this top five band who could do it, thinking, great, how much can we make out of it, a couple of grand. It’s not as if it went out with their names on it.

Q: Ecstasy did go out with their names on it.

What is Ecstasy?

Q: It was a song done for a Subaru advert in Japan, it’s this excruciatingly squeaky cheesy sanitised Motown pastiche which was given to them that Rose rewrote the lyrics for. She was doing a lot of ecstasy at the time and it’s written so if you know that’s what it’s about then you spot it, otherwise it just looks like it’s talking about being happy.

Oh it rings a bell now, I’d forgotten that.

Q: It’s this abrasively cheery bouncy thing that wasn’t written by them, it came out as a single in Japan with a picture of a Subaru on the cover and everything.

I remember that now, yeah. I think at that point it was totally desperate financial straits and we were cashing in whatever we had going for us. Also, the record company really wanted us to do it in Japan, and Japan is a weird and wacky market.

Q: Over here doing a TV ad for cars in those days would have severely messed with your credibility.

It’s totally different over there. Well, I don’t know, but Japan was sufficiently different and we were in sufficiently difficult straits that that I wasn’t going to say ‘we’re not going to do it’. Especially as we got paid a lot, I think. I can’t remember. We were living from hand to mouth for months and months, and literally they might have had to pack it all in and go home to their mums and dads, and that was the difficulty.

They were mortally scared of losing their wages, not that they were on a good wage. In actual fact, when the shit did hit the fan they did manage to get social security to pay for the flats, so they’d lost a lot of money but it wasn’t as bad. They thought they’d have to leave London and by that time they didn’t want to leave London. So that was that.

I’m surprised they haven’t mentioned the tax problems they had afterwards. I don’t think Rose ever had to pay any of them, whereas Jill did, I think.

Q: That is a bit weird. They were both really open and candid, I think they just lump the financial stuff in together with the other Stuff They Didn’t Like, like the record company pressure to be more commercial, pressure from the promotions department to be a bit more cutesy or go out with Mike Read cos it’d get a picture in the tabloids. I think they throw in with that, ‘oh god, and we did these adverts as well’, things that they were never in a band to do any of.

I was never managing them to do those things. If every single had been number five we wouldn’t have had to do it. We’d probably still have had to butter up to Mike Read but we wouldn’t have had to do those advert things, it would have been considered beneath us. But at that point I had no other group who were earning me much money. I wasn’t getting them to do it for the £400 commission I’d get on a two grand thing, I would be getting them to do it so they would have wages for another couple of months.

You’ve got to know what kind of energy you’ve got, and a pair of pop girls making pop music – and I don’t say pop music in a totally trivial way, I mean, the Beatles made pop music – they weren’t the Velvet Underground. I think they liked the idea, though there were elements that were Velvety.

They totally loved it, they were Smash Hits kings at the time. There were all these hits magazines, Smash Hits, No 1, aimed at teens and pre-teens, and they loved doing all those things. They did all the ‘tell us about how you do your hair, tell us where you buy your ribbons, let’s take you out shopping’, and we did tons and tons and tons of those press things and they were brilliant at it and they loved it. It was a real poppy-pop thing.

Once you’ve started playing that game, that’s the game you’re in. You don’t start playing netball and then suddenly decide you’re going to switch to Premiership football or something. That’s a very bad analogy but you know what I mean.

Q: Did it ever occur that it could have taken a different route, that it could have stayed as an indie thing or something? You’ve got Jill having the whole agoraphobia thing, psychological problems about pressure and having to do stuff against her will; you’ve got this dark intelligence to the music that’s going to be largely negated by being in Look-In magazine a lot.

The problem with being an indie thing is that it sounds good but the budgets you’d operate on within an indie framework wouldn’t even be able to pay the band to play live with them. We would have had to go in and record stuff with just them doing it, and it would be so fey. I mean, you should have heard a lot of the demos. The demos were quirky and interesting but very very fey, and I just think we could probably only have expected to sell 5,000 albums or something like that.

Q: Some people do do it with very quiet simple records, such as Cowboy Junkies.

It’s very hard for me to explain. I thought they were always a pop act. I thought they were an interesting pop act rather than a boring pop act. It had a darker side to it and that’s what interested me – if they had come to me and they were called Strawberry I probably wouldn’t have got involved. From the name, from the onset, it’s what pulled me in. We made no big decision that it was all going to go pippetty-poppetty, we were just trying to make the songs sound good, and it would have not sounded good. They ended up sounding, for me, mediocre a lot of the time when they did them in a more than vaguely indie-ish way. They just ended up sounding… Cowboy Junkies are darker, a lot more darker.

A group that are living with their mums and dads and signing on the dole are a group and they can go out and do a gig if they can raise the money to hire a van, but these couldn’t even do that. They could hardly do a gig, and the same goes for recording. So you have to start saying, ‘if we’re going to hire a load of stuff and try a load of gigs, what expectation have we of any income? Will we play for the big game of the pop thing where we can expect hundreds of thousands of pounds so you can risk £100,000 doing it, maybe a couple of hundred thousand’.

If you’re thinking, ‘we’re just going to put it out on an indie level’, I wouldn’t invest £10,000 in that because I wouldn’t be sure of getting it back. That means nobody can move to London, it means they can’t hire a group, it means you can just about make the record and then how do you advertise it? It all becomes very difficult.

But ‘what if?’ is one of the big questions. I’ve never felt… See, the problem is they didn’t have the real musical ability. They had something, but they weren’t strong enough singers, strong enough performers, strong enough players to have really gone and done a Simon & Garfunkel type thing.

Q: For me, the way their voices worked together is as magical as Simon & Garfunkel or anyone else you can name.

But did you see them live?

Q: No.

An awful lot of studio work goes into making it sound that good. We were very happy with David Motion for making it sound that good, and Robin Millar.

Q: It’s been really interesting listening to tapes of Jill’s – there’s very early stuff where they’re not doing the harmonies yet and Rose can’t quite sing, but it’s definitely there on the BBC sessions, it’s there on Trees and Flowers and on Go Away on the B-side. It’s certainly not just a studio thing.

I got the first band together and we got them out and it was all sounding nice but nothing special – if you were a fan you’d think it was alright, if you weren’t a fan you’d think ‘so what?’. I really don’t think it would have succeeded to any extent.

What its merits are is always completely arguable. My job was always to say, ‘this is worth something, if we do it like this it will succeed, if we do it like that it won’t’. You never really know why you’re making those calls or whether they’re the right calls or whether you’ve buggered up the whole situation by doing those calls.

It’s perfectly possible that what you say is right, that they could have gone on to be the Velvet Underground and Nico and written Sunday Morning and dark indie stuff that – while never crossing over to the mainstream – was still so vital that it went on to be a big thing on a smaller level. But I just don’t think they were that, you’d be surprised at how even moderate-selling moderately successful groups can be struggling to earn a living.

Anyway, that was the way I decided to push it, that’s why they went the pop thing, really.

Q: Did they ever voice any discontent about pressure from the record company on the promotional aspect? They said that they did a lot of good interviews but a lot of really dire ones too and that there was a lot of pressure to be cute. Did they complain at the time about that?

No. Well, yes – there’s an awful lot of inane stuff, it’s pop music, The Beatles had to do an awful lot of inane things, you name a band who didn’t. You don’t realise quite how inane it’s going to be until you turn up in the interview sometimes. But they did an awful lot of inane stuff incredibly enthusiastically. They complained a lot because everybody wanted to stay in bed a little longer, everybody got bored with it, but a lot of the game is just a sheer numbers game.

Many an act that I’ve known in the music business, like Take That or Adam and The Ants are two that jump to mind, achieved an awful lot of success through doing incredible sixteen-hour days of work, always going and visiting two or three more radio stations, always popping into the offices.

Yes, they complained a lot, but that’s the norm.

Q: It’s not so much the schedule as the content that they were talking about.

I think it’s unfair for them to complain about the content. They enjoyed it. When they were in the top ten everything was a joy. Later on it was more, ‘why are we doing these stupid things?’

Sometimes it was just the sheer hard work, ‘we’ve done this thing this evening but before we go to bed we’ve got to go and visit this or that, and I know you’re knackered but tomorrow morning you’ve got to go shopping with Pop Hits magazine, shopping round Camden Lock saying how to get the Strawberry Switchblade style for some Little Miss Teen magazine, or Little Miss Teen Japan magazine or whatever.

But people would be absolutely staggered at how important it is, just the amount you do. It’s not the quality. If you’re just a punter you don’t read that many magazines. I might buy an album because I see something in the Independent On Sunday arts section and it has a little interview with Nick Cave and I think, ‘oh he’s got a new album out, I’ll buy it’, and that’s often the way you or I buy records. You don’t realise that if you do a hundred things you don’t catch people a hundred times, cos they only read one of those things. OK, there is some 13 year old fairly well-off pop fan whose mum buys her every magazine she wants who’ll see you in every single thing, but for most people it’s not like that.

Most musicians tend to imagine that if you put out a record and it’s on Radio 1, everybody in the country hears it and decides at that point whether they like it or not. But we’re not listening to the radio all the time, if something’s on ten times a day all week – which is probably the most played record on Radio 1 – then I’ll hear it probably once. And generally, even with my favourite singles, I didn’t realise I really loved them until I heard them the third time, so that’d be three weeks. The same goes for the media, you notice a band cos you’ve read two articles but the band might have to have fifty articles for your average music buyer to have seen two of them and think there’s a bit of a buzz going.

There’s an awful lot of that, there’s an awful lot of regional radio, satellite TV. Some things are wrong for some bands and would damage their cool, but I never saw Strawberry Switchblade as a band whose cool could be damaged more than, say, the first video damaged it, which they loved! See if you can get hold of the Since Yesterday video.

Q: I’ve got it, I actually like it.

I quite like it, but in terms of pitching them somewhere, it pitches them at the Little Miss Teen market.

Q: I think there’s a lot or weirdness in it with the stop-frame animation and the monochrome, it doesn’t look sleek or sweet.

I think it’s too cutesy, I think it pitched them too cutesy. At the end of the day I always had a love-hate relationship with their image because I always knew it was very strong and it could get them to come across, but I always knew it was too cutesy and it would really work with Little Miss Teen magazine.

Q: I think it always showed more than that. I remember it as a 15 year old into REM and The Cure and it came across to me as something shiny and poppy but also twisted and gothy, and all my mates recognised that as well.

That’s what we were striving for. But who knows what went wrong. Maybe you’re right, maybe we should have made them into a goth band.

Q: The writing credit for Black Taxi is Bryson/McDowall/Balfe/Mulhearne. Neither Jill nor Rose have any idea who Mulhearne is. Have you?

I cannot remember that writing credit or the song at all. But Jeanne Mulhearn was my girlfriend at the time, so I presume we wrote something together and gave it to Jill and Rose who developed it into something. But that’s a total guess.

Q: You mentioned in passing that Rose had been hanging out with Genesis P-Orridge and folks like that, which you found weird. How much did she change with that, and what specifically did you find weird?

When I first met her she was into fairies and things, that was her big thing. Jill was into cats and Rose was into fairies. Then it darkened into the psychic magic thing. I thought it was all fairly interesting. I knew Stevo who managed Soft Cell and, I think, managed Psychic TV for a while, and I’d heard a lot of stories via there. It was a bit too dark for me, all kinds of weird ritualistic stuff going on at his flat, things that were far more innovative in its day like body mutilation that’s probably considered to be fairly standard these days.

But in those days there were all kinds of weird stories about what goes on with Genesis P-Orridge. People getting tied down to dentists chairs and having various sado-masochistic things going on. I took it all with a pinch of salt, and it wasn’t an issue for us. I always saw it as something quite amusing and interesting but I think Jill saw it as something else.

They’d been best mates when I got involved with them, they’d been best mates for a while having met up at some indie club and totally gone off on this massive polka-dot stylistic thing where they were the only two girls who looked like that in the whole of Glasgow and everywhere they went they looked the same. These things happen, people come together and form this incredibly close relationship and then in the tensions of a shared project a slightly love-hate relationship develops, and that definitely happened with Rose and Jill. They start to be seen as the enemy in your project rather than the friend who you’re going to make the project with. It really got very difficult between them towards the end.

It was weird cos I kind of agreed with Jill’s point of view more. There was no big issue, it was just that they were always totally getting on each other’s nerves. Mainly Rose would do things that would get on Jill’s nerves, but the only thing of Jill’s that was getting on Rose’s nerves was that she was getting on Jill’s nerves. Rose is one of those people who I’ve got to admire even though I got on better with Jill. Rose always did what she wanted to do and didn’t think twice about it, which you’ve got to admire, really. Whereas Jill would worry about everything.

Q: Jill mentioned that Rose had some Nazi memorabilia. Do you remember anything about that?

It doesn’t ring a bell. I wouldn’t put it past her. She was into quite heavy stuff. And I think it was a bit embarrassing to Rose the way Strawberry Switchblade was this frothy poppy thing and all her mates were into weird stuff.

Q: Rose said they’d sacked you as manager just before they split.

No, I don’t remember that. It’s possible.

Q: If you remember being told of the split you must’ve still been around, surely.

Yeah, definitely; I was in Eden studios with them, I can even remember what room it is. They weren’t getting on with each other, but then they went along for a long time of organising. Oh yeah, I remember what happened!

As I said, I’d had a problem with the tax thing, I was sorting it all out and I said, ‘look guys, this is the problem’. I was trying to say I can understand why you want to pack it in but you’ve got a lot of financial troubles and stuff.

A few weeks earlier I’d listed to them what the situation was, asked the accountant to tell us what the problem is, to tell us how much they’re going to owe in tax and how much they’d got, and I sent them all off a statement about it.

Then they came in and said this is a big problem. I said I don’t know what the taxman could do; with the taxman if you tell him you’re fucked, you’re broke and you can’t pay it then sometimes they take you to court and sometimes they just say ‘tell us when you can pay’. I said I don’t know which way they’re going to react.

And it was really weird cos [Rose’s husband] Drew, who had been this really sweet nice guy, said ‘you’re going to pay for it’. I didn’t quite understand and said, ‘I’m not paying for it, I told you guys it was a good thing to put money aside’, and he goes, ‘No! You’re gonna pay for it!’, basically saying, ‘you’re gonna pay for it or I’m gonna have ya’. I was absolutely shocked and didn’t know what to make of it.

At that point relationships really started to break down because I couldn’t deal with it. ‘I’m not paying for this, you knew it was owed, you knew I’d put it aside and when we discussed it you decided you’d rather risk using it’.

At that point either they sacked me or I said I’m not working with Drew or something. I can’t remember ever being sacked, though it’s possible. At that point things got very very tough because their view was ‘why do we owe this money?’. But they knew why they owed this money! But it was ‘we owe this money and Dave Balfe should somehow take responsibility for it’. So it all fell apart at that point.

I dunno, it’s hard to remember the details, but I remember that meeting now. It was really weird cos I’d got on so well with Drew all the time and then I met him again quite a few years later and he was incredibly friendly to me and really nice. I said, ‘what happened that day when you got really weird and heavy with me?’, and he couldn’t even remember it.

I don’t think I’ve seen Rose since that meeting. I still had to speak to them for ages cos I had the flats situation. I think that meeting might be why it finally ended. I was trying to remember and work it out in my head what happened, I knew it petered out somewhere around that time, but maybe that meeting was why I said, ‘well if that’s the way you’re going to be I’m not dealing with this any more, it’s between you and the accountants’ or whatever.