Glasgow Evening Times
26 Feb 1986
STRAWBERRY PAIR
Switchblade duo sweep into Japan
Rose McDowell’s two ambitions in life were fulfilled at 18 when she married to become a mother one year later.
The fact that she is a pop star, too, is simply the icing on the cake.
Along with Glasgow Art School graduate Jill Bryson, little five-foot Rose is Strawberry Switchblade, the electro-pop duo, who next month fly out to Tokyo for a two week concert tour of several 2000 seat theatres.
February has been a hectic month for the girls, a daily grind of rehearsals to make perfect the songs required to fill a 75 minute gig.
Japan is Switchblade’s biggest market. They give us Datsuns and we give them two lassies from Glasgow. The punk-mad youth of Toko and Nagasaki just go crazy for anyone who sings and looks crazy. They don’t come freakier than Rose and Jill.
Two years ago the girls got a top five hit in Britain, yet the one album and several singles all released in Japan all charted in the international Top Ten.
Most nights this month Rose got home late to her London flat zonked-out b the hard graft of rehearsals. Waiting for her was daughter Keri, aged six, babbling incessantly about the ‘brilliant day’ she had at school.
Rose listens and then talks through her day.
Keri will go to her grandmother in Glasgow while her mum travels half way round the world for a helter-skelter fortnight of radio, television and pop magazine interviews, the exhausting part of the tour.
‘They are just mad over there,’ says Rose, sounding confused and excited. ‘They love us. And we love them’.
This is Switchblade’s second Far East tour, the first cementing a solid base of popularity upon which they can now only capitalise.
Jill has never been out of work because she has never had a job. ‘I missed my graduation show at art school because I had to be in London signing a recording contract’.
The two met at the Silver Thread Hotel in Paisley. Jill had gone there to listen to a punk band, the Poems, with a girl called Rose on the drums.
From it a four piece band called Strawberry Switchblade was formed. Commercially a disastrous enterprise, Rose and Jill reverted to a duo format.
‘We started to take it seriously,’ says Rose.
Rose left school at 15 without a qualification to her name, and took a string of crummy jobs.
The girls eventually got up enough confidence to send demo tapes to guru of punk, John Peel, and Kid Jensen, both disc jockeys sufficiently impressed to play tracks on their alternative music radio shows.
The girls now have their own flats, Rose with her musician husband and Keri, and Jill with a live-in boyfriend.
Neither are over-indulgent on life’s little luxuries, although Rose treated herself to a telephone answering machine, which is permanently on, allowing her the advantage of hearing first who is speaking before picking up the phone.
After Japan, Switchblade will work at improving their modest success at home, and knock out that dent in their egos caused by the last single failure, a disastrous disco interpretation of the Dolly Parton hit, Jolene.
They strike a weird profile in black lace, leather, plastic and polka dots. Part-vampish, part-Kate Bush, part Morticia of the Adams family.
‘I’ve got this old sewing machine that my auntie gave me,’ says Jill. ‘We run up quite a lot of our costumes on it’.
Once, they walked out like that in Glasgow, scuttling along Sauchiehall Street past the wise-guys in cloth bunnets and beery noses who would shout ‘it’s no’ Hallowe’en yet, is it?’