Interviews by topic

General opinion, looking back

Q: How long since you last did an interview?

Jill: So long I can’t remember. It must be at least 15 years.

Q: Generally, how does it feel looking back at Strawberry Switchblade?

Rose: Brilliant. I think it was a totally fantastic exciting period of my life. We were just kids really. I mean, OK, we were twenty-something, but we were really just kids, and it just snowballed out of nothing, just wanting to form a band and have fun.

And suddenly we’d got John Peel sessions and we only had eight songs, and we had to finish the eighth for the session cos we had a Kid Jensen session as well. We were getting these gigs, and then we were to do an album and we still only had eight songs! It was fun and it was really exciting, to the point that we had no clue what was going on because things went so fast.

Jill: Yeah. It was a good thing to do. It wasn’t planned and it wasn’t expected, but it was a good thing to do. It was fun.

Q: Got the credit it that it deserved?

Jill: [considers] erm, yeah.

Q: Was it understood properly?

Jill: No, probably not.

Rose: Once things started to snowball it went really really quickly, which was also the demise of Strawberry Switchblade, because the more that’s going on the less control you have over what you’re doing, and the more other people are making decisions for you.

Inevitably it ends up being not what you started out for it to be, so I didn’t think it was worth continuing because it wasn’t fun any more. It was arguing with the record company about everything, and I thought ‘this was not what I wanted’.

Jill: Being with a major label and being female, they push you down one particular road. I don’t think they quite understood where we were coming from.

Q: What do you mean by ‘one particular road’?

Jill: They want to push you to be glamorous and they want you to be poppy and sell your stuff. I don’t mind pop music, I wanted it to be poppy, and it was the 1980s. I’m pleased with it. I think it was more the publicity machine behind the big record company that pushed us, there was a lot of fighting against that.

Q: Would it have lasted longer if you hadn’t had that kind of constriction?

Jill: It might have done, but I think it was difficult because me and Rose had quite a strange relationship, we weren’t really friends before the band started up. We were acquaintances and hung about in that particular group of people, and people would say why don’t you start a band, that’d be great, it’d be a laugh, it’d be funny; do something together, maybe because we were the only two girls in this gang of people and we liked similar sorts of music. So I didn’t really get to know her until we got together.

Q: Looking back now at the songs and the work, are you generally happy with it?

Jill: Yes. I loved it at the time and I still love it now. There are parts of it that I think are fantastic. I don’t listen to it that much, but at the time I loved it, really really happy with it.

Q: What are your favourites?

Jill: I love Being Cold. The guy who arranged the strings was appalled when I played the melodica over it, absolutely appalled. He was like, ‘you can’t do this, it’s not even in tune’, and I was, ‘that’s the way it is’, and I love that, I love the fact there’s a melodica over these lush strings, a huge string section. ‘No you can’t put that on’, ‘Yes I can, it’s my bloody record and I’m going to put it on! It’s our record and we’ll do what we like’. We’d decided we’d do that; you can’t completely erase everything quirky from it.

I like that, I like Deep Water and I like Go Away, I think that’s good. There’s not many that I don’t like on it, I was pleased with it. We really had a lot to do with it, if we didn’t like something we said, so stuff didn’t go on that we didn’t like.

Q: That’s true of most artists, though – nobody thinks ‘let’s go and make a bad record’, but many still do it. Is there nothing on there you don’t like?

Jill: A little bit, with the production and some of the, er, over-enthusiastic programming, I don’t really think it’s very us, I think sometimes it obscures the songs, but generally I quite like it. You’ve got to make a decision about some things sometime and generally I think it’s OK, I think it stands the test of time.

I like Trees and Flowers, I really like Sunday Morning, they have a kind of charm to them that the album doesn’t have. And I often listen to the [Radio 1] sessions. I quite like listening to them cos they’re much much more naive, there’s something quite nice about it.

Glasgow Punks: Rose and Jill before Strawberry Switchblade

Q: What started you in music? What music did you grow up with?

Rose: The stuff I grew up with was a lot of 1960s stuff, like The Byrds, The Beatles, Tommy James and the Shondells, I really loved stuff like that. I was really into the Velvet Underground. I liked Roy Wood [giggles] from the 1970s. Not a lot I liked from the 1970s apart from punk, when punk set me free from my chains.

So I grew up with a lot of that [1960s stuff] cos my dad was really into music and he liked Johnny Cash and Buddy Holly and all that sort of stuff as well. Mamas and Papas, Simon and Garfunkel.

I had three sisters and they all liked different kinds of sixties music so I got to hear quite a wide range of stuff and picked out the things I liked the best, which tended to have lots of harmonies which were a bit psychedelic or the Velvet Underground – Lou Reed was just a total genius songwriter. He is god!

Q: Were you close to Jill before the band?

Rose: Oh yeah, Jill and I were really good friends, and we were pretty notorious around Glasgow for going around all dressed up. Not really so much in the early days, but when I was in The Poems I used to be overdressed, outrageously dressed all the time.

Q: A lot of people forget what that meant then. Nowadays you can work in offices with multi-coloured hair and eyebrow piercings, people forget what it was like up until the 1980s.

Rose: It was, like, dangerous! It was actually dangerous, we got beat up sometimes and stuff like that. Bikers beat me, my best friend, my boyfriend and her boyfriend up pretty severely. We all ended up in hospital just because we were punks and we were quite outrageously dressed.

Some guy wanted to dance with me and tried to pull me off in a corner, I pushed him out the way, and he went off and told all his biker friends. I was five foot nothing and wearing flat shoes and these great big bikers come up. One had my boyfriend and put him against the wall and he was going to put a glass in his face, and I jumped on his back and was hanging on to his shoulders to try and pull him away, and another biker punched me on the nose and I was out for the count. Then I woke up and bouncers came and threw us out.

Q: It’s a really weird thing, that rigidity of fashion at that time, how scared people were of anything that was different. It was something the 1980s really broke down and gave individualism the chance to come through. It’s got to be emphasised that almost everyone was not a punk on the late 1970s, and those who were ran real risks.

Rose: Exactly. And especially in a place like Glasgow which can be a bit violent anyway. I suppose if you were in a little village you’d probably get talked about and whispered about but probably not beaten up so much.

But if you’re in a big city like Glasgow you have to watch where you go. There were certain pubs you wouldn’t even dare walk into. I couldn’t really go into pubs anyway cos I was always thrown out cos they didn’t believe I was old enough. Being thrown out of pubs when I was 27, that was quite funny!

But it was a really big deal being a punk then.

Q: Jill said you had to go out to Paisley to find somewhere where someone would play the records.

Rose: That’s right, yeah.

Q: A city the size of Glasgow and nowhere would play the records, it was that much of an outsider thing.

Rose: Right at the very beginning there was a couple of little clubs. There was one on Buchanan Street – there’s a big centre built there now – and the DJ had two albums, one was the Damned and I think one was the Stranglers, and a few singles and he just played them over and over again all night. But that closed down because nobody wanted to put punk things on, it was an affront to society.

When punk happened it totally saved my life. I was a really fucked up teenager who really did not want to conform to the norm, never had even when I was a kid. I didn’t want to be like everybody else because I didn’t respect them. But I was at that age where I felt ‘what am I supposed to do?’, and then punk happened. ‘That’s what I’m supposed to do! I’m supposed to be me!’

Punk allowed me to be me without feeling like a fake. It totally liberated me. I didn’t have to be a girly girl and it wasn’t expected of me, or if it was it didn’t matter. I would probably have done the same thing anyway but been really outcast or locked up for being a nut. My mum was always telling me I was a bit crazy. Punk really was my saviour. It sounds like an extreme thing to say, but for a pubescent teenage girl who’s totally fucked up about life, it was really really really my saviour.

Q: You came out of art school didn’t you?

Jill: Yeah.

Q: What were you doing there?

Jill: Fine art, mixed media. Which meant just doing a bit of everything. I did a lot of photography and film, painting.

Q: What did Rose come out of?

Jill: Just the punk scene. She got married very young and she had a child at, I think, about nineteen. Her child was quite young when we started, only about a year or two old.

Q: You say a teacher didn’t have much time, but having a year old kid?!

Jill: Yeah exactly, it’s quite amazing. But I think her husband wasn’t working at that time so he could look after her as well, and she had quite a big family and they looked after her, so it was OK.

Q: How did you and Rose meet? How long did you know her before the band started?

Jill: Not that long. I met her through the punk scene in Glasgow which was tiny at the time, around 1977. There were so few, you knew everybody who was a punk. It was the first thing I’d ever been involved with, I was 16. But I didn’t know Rose well, I just saw her around and knew her, she was quite a character.

Q: There has been this revisionist history that everyone in 1977 between 15 and 20 years old was a punk. It’s a comparable lie to the one that says that everyone of that age group in the mid-late 60s was doing loads of drugs.

Jill: Yeah, it’s a complete myth. It did expand quite quickly after, but by that time we weren’t really interested in punk anymore.

Q: This is ages before the band isn’t it? We’re talking 1977 and your first record was 1983.

Jill: The punk time was before Rose got married and had a baby. I saw her then, I didn’t really know her, but I knew of her. Basically, there was a coachload of people into punk in Glasgow. Punk was banned in Glasgow, you couldn’t hear it anywhere.

We used to all meet outside this record shop in Union Street in Glasgow with people looking at us disgusted. We’d all get on this coach to go to a club in Paisley outside Glasgow where – I think it was every week – they just played punk records and you could go and dance.

And occasionally they’d have bands. Generation X played there, and a lot of the Glasgow bands. I didn’t go that often because at that time I was recovering from agoraphobia. I’d been agoraphobic for a year and missed a year of school. I was 16 and I’d left school and started going to college.

I tentatively tried to go [to the club], I didn’t often go, it was a bit far for me. It shows you how much I wanted to go that I actually did it, I wanted to go out so much and hear this music.

Q: It’s incredible that you had to go outside the city to find somewhere to hear this music.

Jill: You could hear records you liked and meet people who liked the same kind of music you did. It was so rare to find anybody into it. You could spot them a mile off! You kind of knew everybody, and there was a couple of record shops that we used to go and hang about in, we were that desperate.

Most of us were quite young, around 16, 17, so we couldn’t get into pubs. But we used to get into the Silver Thread Hotel in Paisley, near the Coates thread factory. It was the most unlikely place you could possibly imagine.

Q: Was it the punk thing that made you start playing guitar?

Jill: Yeah. Before that I would’ve thought you’d really have had to play it, be able to play solos and rock guitar and, shit, I’m not going to do that am I? Women didn’t really form bands did they? At that time I really liked Patti Smith. I’d got Horses when it came out, it was incredible. It was before punk, wasn’t it?

Q: 1975.

Jill: Yeah, I was 15 and had agoraphobia. I’d heard it on the radio and got a friend to go out and get it for me. It was just amazing. I wanted to be her, I wanted to look like her. I knew there was no way I could ever look, you know, wasted. I was always going to look, well, healthy.

I thought Patti Smith was fantastic but she looked like a boy and her band were men. But then when punk started there was X Ray Spex and Siouxsie, and The Adverts had a girl bass player, just loads and loads of women started appearing in bands like The Slits.

I thought it was great. It was about enthusiasm and not about ability, it was about ideas. And also I thought, well, if I just hammer something out and have the confidence to get up and scream into a microphone I could do it. At the time I was a bit too young, I didn’t have a guitar or anything, didn’t know anybody else who was in a band. After that there were two or three punk bands in Glasgow and I remember singing with some of them in rehearsals and stuff.

Starting to write music

Q: When did you start writing yourself?

Rose: There was a big concert in Glasgow at the Apollo Theatre, which doesn’t exist any more, I think it was a Stiff tour or something. There was loads of different bands playing, and the Ramones were playing. I was there with my boyfriend at the time and we just looked at each other and thought ‘if they can do it we can do it!’.

They were really trashy but really really good cos they had a real pop sensibility, and I just love melody. So we formed a band and he was the singer, I was the drummer, and we had a guitarist and someone else who would occasionally play violin.

Q: Is that The Poems?

Rose: The Poems, yeah. We released a single and we recorded an album, we even mastered the album, but before the pressing the master went missing.

Q: Are there any copies anywhere?

Rose: I must have a cassette copy somewhere, but I’ve got sooo many cassettes. I’m going to go through them all and see if there’s anything salvageable on that cos it would be interesting for me to listen to it again. The music was quite interesting, the instruments we used were quite interesting, so I’d quite like to hear what it sounded like now.

Q: When did The Poems get together?

Rose: The Poems got together in ’79, I think. My first daughter was born in ’79 and I played a gig when I was pregnant, so it must’ve been ’78 or ’79. Strawberry Switchblade got together in 80…I don’t remember awfully well!

Strawberry Switchblade and The Poems did gigs together, cos I used to organise a lot of the gigs in those days.

Q: So you’d be playing in both bands?

Rose: Aye, and I’d get paid twice so it was quite good! And a quick change of outfits from The Poems to Strawberry Switchblade, which weren’t really that different anyway; black lace frilly things for The Poems and then polka dots for Switchblade.

That was good fun, but then The Poems fell apart basically cos Switchblade got busy.

Q: So when did Strawberry Switchblade get formed? How come one band wasn’t enough for you?

Rose: I was sitting on a bus with James Kirk from Orange Juice. He was coming out to my house and he’d done this fanzine called Strawberry Switchblade. He said he wasn’t going to continue doing the fanzine, I said that’s a fantastic name, it can’t just die, and he said ‘have it’. I went ‘really?’ and he said yes, have it. So I went, that’s it, and basically I had the name Strawberry Switchblade so I had to form a band cos it was such a good name!

Q: There’s so much in this story that’s the other way around from normal – having a Peel session without sending in a demo, having sessions booked without having the songs, having a name but no band.

Rose: I know! And then I said to Jill ‘I’m going to form a band’ and she says ‘can I be in it?’, I said, ‘yeah, what do you want to do?’. She said ‘sing’, I said, ‘nah, I’m going to sing’

Q: You’d been playing drums with The Poems hadn’t you?

Rose: I’d been playing drums, yeah. So I bought myself a 12 string guitar and taught myself to play a few chords – which is all you need to do to write a song – and Jill bought a guitar. So she was going to be the guitarist and I was going to be the singer. I’d do rhythm guitar and she’d do frilly bits.

Q: How did the band actually get started?

Jill: I suppose we started getting together at Rose’s house. I bought a guitar with the little money that I had.

Q: Had you been playing guitar before that?

Jill: No! My sister had a classical acoustic guitar that she knew a few chords with, and she had a ‘learn to play guitar’ book, Burt Weedon or something like that. A classical guitar’s got such a wide neck and I thought, ‘never!’, the action was so high you were like [straining face] even to play G.

So I saved up and bought this semi-acoustic, it was the heaviest semi-acoustic guitar I ever picked up. But it was great cos I could play it, it had a proper neck and a decent action.

So I learned a few chords – literally about three – and thought, well we can do it, I know three chords. And we thought we should have something else; I think Rose knew the bass player, the teacher, and I knew the girl from the Student Union and her brother was in a band and he had drums so that was how it had to be. She’d obviously practised on his drums, maybe he’d shown her a few things. We were all really limited in abilities, you could say.

Q: Did you play any instruments in any bands prior to Strawberry Switchblade?

Jill: No, just did some shouting into the microphone and that was about it. It was good fun. Rose and her husband had a band, she played drums. Quite badly, I have to say, but that was fine, in the punk tradition, you know? She just hit them. I remember going over to see them. They were called The Poems. I remember going to see them when she was about 8 months pregnant; she’s out here and she’s not very tall so she looked huge. That was quite something.

Q: When did you start writing? Were you writing before Strawberry Switchblade started?

Jill: No.

Q: So you decided to start a band and then started writing songs?

Jill: I was at art school when we started to do it, so I was a bit older. I had a flat round the corner from Alan Horne, the guy who ran Postcard Records in Glasgow. They were just a real strange bunch of people who shared a flat. They were just great. They shared a flat, a very neat flat with a Polish girl called Krysia Klasicki who was an artist, and this guy called Brian Superstar who ended up being in The Pastels.

It was such a weird, strange, great place to go. And then Edwyn who was the singer in Orange Juice lived round the corner, and David McClymont who was the bass player lived up the road. The drummer in that group worked at the dole office.

We all tried very hard not to work so we could rehearse – they all did, I was at art school – but nobody wanted a job in the holidays when they were at college, so him and Edwyn I think, both of them, got grabbed and made to work in the dole office. We’d go down to sign on and they’d be behind the counter going ‘you bastards!’, a really resentful look on their faces.

We used to go through to Edinburgh a lot, I remember having to sit in the station all night when we’d missed the train back. A lot of bands would play Edinburgh but they wouldn’t play Glasgow for some reason. I think there were smaller venues in Edinburgh, so people like Siouxsie & The Banshees would play there rather than Glasgow.

Knowing Orange Juice and that lot, because I lived nearby, they were just like, ‘oh yeah, you should be in a band, you should do this, you can do demos with us’. It was actually the guitarist in Orange Juice that came up with the name Strawberry Switchblade. I think it was going to be the name of a fanzine or something, which he’d got from a psychedelic band called the Strawberry Alarm Clock, and it was just his punk version.

At that point the guy I was going out with, Peter, he was a photographer, him and Stephen from the Pastels and Edwyn and Alan Horne and all those kind of people, they used to do fanzines all the time. I remember one fantastic article that Peter wrote called How To Fail At Job Interviews! So classic, such a stupid punk thing, such a dropout thing. One of the things was have a really filthy old snotty hanky and pull it out, wipe your nose a lot. The first question you have to ask is ‘how much money do I get?’!

There were all these different fanzines. One was called Juniper Beri Beri [see Press section for Strawberry Switchblade feature in issue 1 of JBB]. Strawberry Switchblade, I don’t think they ever printed any of it. They were just interviews with people. I remember going with Edwyn to interview The Slits. I wasn’t that keen on them, they had this attitude, ‘hey we’re real London trendies and you’re just hicks from the sticks’. They kind of tolerated us.

Sorry, this is unstructured rabbiting.

Q: No, this is great! It’s not something you normally hear of, punk and indie roots for a poppy band on a major label, this is a really good scene-setting thing.

Strawberry Switchblade early days

Q: Weren’t there four of you to begin with?

Jill: There was four of us to begin with. We wanted to be a girl group and rehearse as a group and play as a group. The first few gigs we did in Glasgow were as a four piece. But one of the girls was a teacher and she didn’t have much time, and the other one was studying to be a marine biologist, so I don’t think it [the band] was high on their list of priorities.

Q: Who were the other two?

Rose: The other two were Janice [Goodlett] who played the bass and Carole [McGowan] who was a drummer, her brother taught her to play drums. She had two rhythms she could play, one was for the slow songs and one was for the fast songs. Which was OK, cos if you’ve only got eight songs it means you don’t have time to get bored!

Q: Where did you know the other three from?

Rose: Jill I met through her boyfriend, I used to hang about with him before she went out with him. The bass player I got through meeting her in clubs and stuff, I didn’t know her that well. And Jill knew the drummer a little bit, so we got together that way. We didn’t know them that much when we came together but we thought we’d try it out anyway.

Q: Did you know straight away that you were really going to try to make a go of it with the band, or was it just arsing around in rehearsals?

Jill: Well, it was funny, people were encouraging going ‘yeah yeah, you can support us and support the Pastels’ and at that time there were a lot more smaller places to play and there were a lot more groups who needed somewhere to play.

Q: So we’re talking, what, 1982?

Jill: Earlier than that, I think it’d be about 1980, that sort of time. Me and Rose thought we’d get a band together. The drummer was someone who ran one of the Student Unions. You weren’t allowed to get into the Glasgow University Men’s Union, but there was a Women’s Union, the Queen Margaret Union.

Q: What? Did they have men-only gigs and stuff?

Jill: Well, at the women’s union men could get in, and it was run by this girl Carole McGowan who was our drummer and she used to let us in. You weren’t supposed to get in if you weren’t a student, but she just let anybody in. She used to book the gigs and everything.

They put on a lot of local bands and they also had discos, we used to go and wait till they finished playing Hi Ho Silver Lining and then we’d all get up when they played their one punk record, fling ourselves around and then get off again. They would intersperse punk records throughout the night, but there was that little to do in Glasgow you would put up with it, you know?

Q: Hi Ho Silver Lining in 1980?

Jill: It might have been a bit earlier

Q: What was anyone doing with that record after 1975?

Jill: It was alive and well in student unions, probably all round the country, not just Glasgow. We’d have to get suitably, like, [disdainful face with theatrical sigh] for those songs. You know, Freebird by Lynard Skynard. It was really funny, it was just so rigid then, whereas now….

Q: Whatever you’re into there’s somewhere to go.

Jill: Exactly. People are a bit more tolerant now. They used to throw things at you if you were a punk in Glasgow. They were so intolerant, you took your life in your hands, especially if you were a guy. If you were a girl it was just insults. Several of my friends were chased through town and punks had the living daylights thumped out of them.

Q: People don’t realise how marginalised punk was. There wasn’t independent music properly yet, punk invented it. Fashion was a very rigid thing, which is something the 80s broke down completely.

Jill: Absolutely.

Q: How quickly did it develop?

Jill: Really quickly. We got together, wrote a couple of songs then booked a gig! We had to write enough songs to do this gig in The Spaghetti Factory in Glasgow.

Q: What kind of venue was that?

Jill: It was actually just a restaurant called the Spaghetti Factory. You can imagine what it was like, a pizza place in the West End. They had a little stage at one end and they had people play there, but not usually bands, I think it was more usually piano and stuff.

Q: You go out for a pizza and what you really want is an inept indie band at the end of the room!

Jill: A really really bizarrely dressed up inept indie band. It was in December this gig and we managed to write six songs, which was quite something.

Q: Which year would that have been then?

Jill: It might have been 1981 I suppose. 1981 or ’82. [It was definitely 1981]

Q: How do you know it was December?

Jill: Because it was snowing and nobody could come, the buses were off!

Q: And you did it anyway?

Jill: Yeah! And there really was hardly anybody there. And I remember that, cos it was in the West End where we lived, Alan Horne came and Edwyn and basically they were the only people! It was so funny. And Peter took some photos of us standing there looking like Christmas trees.

Q: Were the band any good at this time?

Jill: I don’t know. People liked us, but I think it’s just because we were women and we did little short pop songs. It was the same songs, Since Yesterday and stuff.

Q: So the very first stuff you were writing was the stuff that ended up on the album?

Jill: Yes. Most of them. They went through change as we progressed and learned an extra chord. The lyrics got a bit more refined. Some of them changed even at the stage when we were doing the album, and we had a producer saying ‘work on that bit there’. But to begin with it was still those songs.

Q: You’ve just picked up a guitar and you’ve just started to write songs and it’s those songs!

Jill: It was literally, ‘we’ve got to write some songs! How many have we got now?’. We started doing a few little gigs around Glasgow which kind of pushed us each time cos we’d have to rehearse for them. I remember sitting at home, at my parents, sitting in the back room till god knows what time just strumming, trying to come up with something. I’d come up with a tune and sing the melody to Rose, she’d have to write the lyrics, then we’d sing it to the band and they’d play along.

Q: Is that generally how they were written? Everything’s credited equally to the two of you.

Jill: Yeah.

Writing the songs

Q: How did you write the songs? You were already writing with The Poems.

Rose: It was mostly vocal stuff I was writing with The Poems, I wasn’t really playing any instruments except the drums. I taught myself to play twelve-string guitar. Basically either Jill would come up with a guitar line and I would put a vocal melody on it and the words, or I’d come up with both and occasionally she’d come up with both.

The majority of the time it was… well, it’s difficult because if you actually looked at the whole thing, the whole album, I probably tended to write most of it as a whole, but Jill wrote quite a lot of the music. She’d write one song, I’d write another song, but when I did it I tended to write the vocal melody and the lyrics as well, with a couple of exceptions. We used to write like that and then come together with an idea.

Working with Jill was great, it was really really good because our personalities together were perfect for writing songs. She’d do something that would really excite me and I’d do something that would really excite her. The enthusiasm that came off each other was completely electric, it was so exciting and so much fun. And all we ever did was laugh. We were just really happy and we worked together really really well. I haven’t ever worked with anybody like that since then.

I kind of miss that, I miss our working relationship. It was really good for most of the time, it’s just that there became stresses towards the end. It was actually really good fun when we were sitting down and one of us would come up with an idea. We were good for each other, I think.

We were good for each other’s confidence – we were learning guitar as we wrote the songs, ‘I’ve learnt this new chord’, ‘Oh that’s really nice, let’s see if we can fit it in with the other ones we know’. It was like everything drew out of the same pot. We worked well together, we worked really well together.

Q: Although it was really collaborative, you were writing the lyrics on your own. Did you ever do much explaining of what they were about? In a format like the three minute song there’s bound to be so much left unsaid, but yours tend to be really uncontextualised. It feels like being dropped into the middle of a situation, like a snapshot of a relationship where although there’s clearly history and consequences, the lyrics have just picked a moment and described the feeling and feelings of that moment. Did you ever explain to Jill where the lyrics had come from and what they were describing?

Rose: A lot of the lyrics were just straight out of my life, basically. It was a memory and I’d just put it into words like a poem. Little parts of my life that were stuck in my head, I’d write songs about them. Things like Little River, the reason I wrote that song is because it was one of my favourite story books in school when I was a little girl.

Things like Go Away, my cousin had taken me out into the countryside and he used to play really nasty tricks on me. He’d take me for great big long walks – cos he lived in the country and I’d go and visit them – and then he’d dump me somewhere. He’d tell me to sit on this wishing stone, close my eyes and count to ten and make a wish. I’d close my eyes, count to ten, make a wish and open my eyes and he’d be nowhere to be seen, and I would have no idea where I was. That stuck in my head, and that was what Go Away was about, basically.

Q: And yet there’s a couple of references in interviews to the fact that lyrics were never written together. I think you said you wrote By The Sea together and that’s about it. Who did what in the songwriting?

Jill: When we started off I used to just do the melodies and write the music and she did the lyrics. I wrote Trees and Flowers on my own. Sometimes if I was playing I’d come up with something [lyric-wise] to fill it in, to help with the melody and the flow, and we’d just stick with it. And if I liked it I’d go ‘I’ve got some words’. And as we went on Rose decided she would learn to play guitar as well – if I could do it in three months she could! Then she started to write her own music as well.

Q: So did it get more collaborative or did it make you develop ideas separately?

Jill: It did get more that one of us would come in with a finished thing. To begin with I came in with the tune and the melody and she’d tape it and go off and write the lyrics, but as soon as she learned to play a few chords she did her own stuff. But then we’d kind of get together to rehearse it, thrash it out a bit.

Q: Is there any stuff you wrote the lyrics for apart from Trees and Flowers?

Jill: Being Cold, and Who Knows What Love Is? which is totally terrible and was supposed to be kind of, er, ironic. But it didn’t really work out that way.

Q: But set it to music and it just floats, it’s gorgeous.

Jill: I did that one, and the words and music for Being Cold and Trees and Flowers. I think that’s the only ones I wrote words for, because I’m not really a lyrics person.

Q: Did you decide right at the beginning that everything would get credited to the two of you?

Jill: Yes. Well I just thought we were signed as a duo and we just decided to credit it to the both of us.

Q: With writing the lyrics, was there much explaining the meanings to each other?

Jill: No, nothing. None.

Q: So Rose turned up and said ‘here’s the lyrics’ you just did it? Were you not curious about what she was writing about, and were you not wanting to explain your lyrics?

Jill: I used to ask sometimes but she never did explain. I never really asked.

Q: Lots of them are like snapshots, taking a segment of a situation between two people and the obvious thing is to ask ‘where did that come from, what did it come out of?’

Jill: I think it comes out of not thinking too much cos you have to kind of come up with it now, you know, and so it often wasn’t thought about to much. She was never very forthcoming about what any of the things were about.

Q: There’s such a good marriage of the mood and descriptiveness of the lyrics with the melodies, so many of the songs are really of-a-piece, it’s really odd they’re coming out of separate minds that aren’t explaining to each other.

Jill: Absolutely. I think it’s that kind of instinctive thing, it’s not thought of. Sometimes it’s better if you just do that. After we’d done that album it was most of the songs we’d come up with – we weeded a few out and obviously we refined them a bit – but basically it was those songs. And once we got ‘oh it’s serious isn’t it? It’s like a job, we’ve got to do this’, it kind of took the edge off it.

Q: There’s an extra pressure and weight when you know you’ve got to do something and you know where it’s going to go.

Jill: Yeah, and it was awful, that’s not really what it was about, it had been a really instinctive spur of the moment thing and that’s why it worked. Cos it wasn’t high art or anything, it was pop music.

Q: Well yeah, it is ‘just pop music’ and you can just hear it on the radio as you go past and you don’t have to give it your full attention to get something from it, but the great thing about pop music is that you can go as deep as you want with the good stuff, it can communicate and move you on a level as deep as any other art form, especially when it’s the performer’s own work. You can’t do that with Hear’Say but you can do that with, say, T. Rex, and certainly with Strawberry Switchblade.

Jill: Yeah, yeah I know. It’s interesting to find out what people are about when they’re writing stuff. If they’re not writing stuff then it’s just a case of performing it and do you like the performance of it or not.

Q: Which of your contemporaries did you like and feel part of a scene with? It was a really great time for bittersweet melancholy indie music being huge with the likes of The Smiths coming through and Soft Cell just gone. Which of it were you listening to at the time?

Jill: The Smiths. And Orange Juice, we knew them and I liked them. I didn’t like their recorded stuff, but I liked the weird jangly stuff, I’ve got loads of demos of theirs that are fantastic but, again, when the record company got hold of them they kind of sanitised them. They tried to make Edwyn into a soul singer which he clearly isn’t! I mean, he’s got a great voice, but it’s weird, it’s not Al Green. I remember wondering ‘why are they doing [Al Green classic] L.O.V.E. Love? Who put that in their heads?’.

I was listening to Aztec Camera. I listened to John Peel a lot, all the stuff on John Peel. I liked a lot of the Glasgow bands, we’d spent a lot of time going around to see them. I really liked the Pastels, I thought they were just fantastic, that real spirit of punk bizarre mixture of people, just great. Always good going to see them; they were hit and miss but I always thought that was great.

Q: They’re still really acclaimed now, their name crops up a lot in indie zines.Jill: I really rate them. Bry Superstar the guitarist, he looked like he worked in bank and he actually did work in a bank, but he was really….he didn’t have a bank mentality! I don’t know how he did it. The Smiths were always on, always playing.

Q: It’s difficult to overstate the importance of the Smiths in music at that time. Every album track, every single, every B-side of their was great, no other band had done that. And at such a rate – an album a year plus a few singles not on the album, all with new tracks on the B-side too.

Jill: The Smiths are one of the bands I can remember seeing on Top of The Pops really really well. But yeah, all that kind of indie guitar bands. I recently found loads of tapes a friend made just after that point and they’d put a lot of electronic stuff and Janet Jackson type stuff and I can’t actually listen to it. I remember thinking at the time it was quite funny, but I just can’t listen to it now.

Q: It was a music press inspired thing to pretend to be into soul music more than you were, and so to take any contemporary Black artist and try to pretend they were as good as Marvin Gaye.

Jill: It makes bad listening now. I put a tape on and thought ‘this might take me back’. It did, but it wasn’t good.

[Change of tape – comes back in on…]

Q: It was like this when I talked to Jill, four hours of tape!

Rose: We’re a pair of gabs, I tell you!

Q: Totally! It’s uncanny, it’s so obvious that you worked together. And when you were talking about writing the songs, you used almost identical words to hers about the process.

Rose: Really?

Q: Yeah, really emphasising how much of a laugh you had doing it.

Rose: Yeah, and bouncing enthusiasm off each other was just great.

Q: And, as with her, I’ve got a list of questions but I just need to look at it once in a while and cross off the ones you’ve answered in the course of just talking.

Rose: It was great, we used to get together and think, ‘the theme is red and black today’ and throw everything that we possessed on the floor – beads, jewellery, earrings, everything that was red and black – put it all on then go out, jangling everywhere we went! People would hear us coming from half an hour before we got there!

Development: exit the rhythm section, getting a manager

Q: There’s a tape of one of the really early gigs and there’s a reference to being there and missing the World Cup on TV, which would make that summer 1982. How long did Strawberry Switchblade last as a four-piece?

Rose: God, not very long at all. Until Strawberry Switchblade started getting really busy actually. We became a two-piece when we started doing the Peel sessions [it was a little earlier – NME dated 7 August 1982 said it had already happened]. I was still going to do Poems things but it was getting a bit silly cos I was practising all the time with Strawberry Switchblade. And also I had a daughter so Drew, my partner at the time, he would be babysitting while I was doing Strawberry Switchblade things.

Eventually The Poems thing just kind of fell away, cos also the guitarist got married and stuff and it just dissipated really. Drew had wanted to carry it on but it just didn’t work, we wouldn’t have had enough time to do it all. Didn’t have time to do all the Strawberry Switchblade, never mind anything else!

We sat down and thought ‘we really want to concentrate on the band now, and practise a lot and do gigs’. And we sat down with the other two girls and said ‘would you be willing to give up your job if we get really busy?’ Jill was at art school at the time, and she was willing to give that up, but the other two girls weren’t willing to give up their jobs.

Q: What were you doing at the time?

Rose: Me? I was not doing anything except being in Strawberry Switchblade and The Poems and listening to bands and being a mother and having fun and going out a lot [laughs]. I wasn’t working, work already was music, I was writing, spending a lot of time doing that.

So they decided they didn’t want to commit themselves to the band, so we thought there’s not much point in continuing [with the other two] cos we now have to continue on our own if we’re going to take it a bit more seriously. And within weeks we had got a call cos Orange Juice had mentioned ‘look out for Strawberry Switchblade’.

Q: How soon did you realise it was going to get that busy? Did you think at the start you were going to make a go of it as a really serious thing?

Rose: No, we just thought ‘let’s join a band and have fun’, cos Orange Juice were our friends, all our friends were in bands, I was in The Poems at the time and it was just really easy. Punk made it really easy to be in a band as well.

When I was a kid growing up that’s what I always wanted to do. I remember in school when the careers officer came round and was asking everyone what they wanted to do, and they were saying they wanted to be a nurse or work in a steel factory or a shipyard, and I said I wanted to be a brain surgeon or a pop star, and everybody in the class just started laughing. I remember when we were first on Top Of The Pops thinking ‘I wonder if any of them are watching now?’

But I remember when I was younger thinking you have to have a manager and you have to do all those kind of things, I hadn’t a clue how you became a pop star or really thought about what that meant, I just wanted to sing cos I always liked singing. I was always singing at the top of my voice along to all my records that were blasting really really loud. None of the neighbours complained, in fact they used to borrow all my records cos I had the best record collection in the street.

My dad started taking me out to buy records when I was 12 years old. He was so much into music he was glad he had a daughter he could take out and buy music for. My first seven inch was Monster Mash! I love it!

Q: The other people in the band: when did they leave and why?

Jill: We didn’t actually play that many gigs with them. I think we must have been together about six months, nine months maybe. I can’t actually remember what happened.

I remember an American woman got involved called Barbara Shaw. I think she was a Postcard fan and she’d come to live in Glasgow and she must’ve known Alan Horne, and Rose got to know her and she said she’d like to be our manager and we thought well, if you want to do that, fine. But then it all started getting a bit weird as soon as she was involved, it all started getting a bit strange.

Q: What kind of strange?

Jill: Well, her and Rose were quite friendly and I think she wanted to get rid of everybody except Rose, basically. At one point she was coming along to rehearsals and playing along with me and I started going ‘what? That’s a bit weird! Why’s she doing that?’ That kind of freaked me out a little bit.

Q: Did you ask what she was doing?

Jill: Oh, she was ‘just learning to play guitar’. At that point she said that the other two weren’t committed and they weren’t going to do it full-time.

Q: Was that true?

Jill: I don’t know. I don’t think so, I think they were pretty pissed off actually. I can’t actually remember what happened, it had come to a point of ‘do you really want to do this?’, we were going to take it up a gear. I can’t remember exactly what happened, I know it wasn’t very nice.

Q: You’ve said you had problems with not being taken seriously because you weren’t blokes. Would that not be even more of a problem if you’re not a full band playing instruments?

Jill: Yeah! But there was the whole thing that we were writing and we [Jill and Rose] were committed and they [Janice and Carole] weren’t really putting anything into it. But that’s kind of how bands work, really, when I look at it in retrospect. There’s usually ‘just musicians’. And it’s not as if we wanted good musicians! It coincided with this woman being involved, and it set alarm bells ringing with me.

Q: Did you mention it to Rose?

Jill: I did mention it when there was this bizarre moment when Barbara came round to my house and said ‘I think we’ve really got to talk. I really have to talk about the image of the band’. The other two had gone by this point. She said, ‘I think you’ve got to get your own image’, Rose had said ‘Jill’s copying me and I don’t want that’, which was just crap, and also I thought very petty. Obviously she hadn’t really known me and Rose cos anyone who had would’ve known different, I remember telling Orange Juice and us all howling with laughter and thought it was so funny. It was such a silly petty thing to do.

Q: Was that being exaggerated by Barbara or was that how Rose actually felt?

Jill: I think that’s how Rose felt. It’s tricky cos she was brought up in a really kind of deprived area of Glasgow, really deprived. I remember going round to hers and I was actually shocked, there was a mattress burning in the street outside. No cars, people didn’t have cars, just a mattress on fire in the middle of the road and that was just normal.

She’d grown up in that and it was quite scary. There was nothing in the house. She hadn’t stayed on at school or anything, she worked in a cake shop, and because she was hanging round with people who were at college I think she felt at a disadvantage, which nobody else thought. They all thought there was street cred, you know?

I see now that she had a problem in that she felt she wasn’t as well educated or as well read. She wouldn’t know who the Prime Minister was, if you asked her to point out Australia on a map she wouldn’t be able to do it, she’d no idea where countries were. Which is not her fault, it’s not because she wasn’t smart, it’s just because she wasn’t well educated and she’d just left school and gone to work in a cake shop. For some reason she thought that made her less of a person I think, in retrospect. I think that made her very defensive.

As soon as we got that bizarre trying to oust me, it was, ‘well this is our thing, this was our idea’, the whole thing is something that we cooked up together and pushed on and everybody encouraged us as a couple, as a duo. To start ousting somebody before you’ve even done anything’s a bit bizarre. To start telling tales and trying to belittle them is sad, but I think it’s because of her insecurities. I don’t know if she’d think that, but I think that’s probably what it was. And she used to say ‘don’t tell people you’re at art school’ because she’d think that they’d think I was responsible for more of what we were about. She said ‘I don’t think you should mention it in interviews’.

Q: Did she say why she thought that?

Jill: No, no. She said ‘I don’t want to mention that I worked in a cake shop’, which I’d thought was fantastic. All the punks in Glasgow used to go to the shop she worked in and she used to give them out free pies and things. Her and her friend Linda worked there and they were sacked for having blue hair. Nobody had blue hair then, nobody. They took them to a tribunal and got their jobs back and so they had to be reinstated! That’s fantastic, you know! And yet she’s, ‘Don’t mention I worked in a cake shop’.

I was, ‘it’s up to you what you say about your life’. She was quite happy to talk about being brought up on a council estate and all that sort of stuff, but not the cake shop. Why? She was 16, she’d left school young, there’s nothing wrong with it.

Q: Especially when you’ve got a cool story to go with it!

Jill: It was legendary, The Wee Scone Shop, cos there was a pair of punkettes working in it which was weird enough. You’d get all the wee wifeys going in. They could’ve been sacked for giving the pies away but they weren’t, they were sacked for having blue hair which meant they had to be reinstated. It’s fantastic isn’t it?

By the time I knew Rose she’d stopped working there and then I think also having a baby and being stuck out in Paisley and being married, all of a sudden that’s everything gone at 19. After she did the gig with her pregnant stomach sticking out she was out of circulation for ages cos she had a baby to look after. And really until Keri, her daughter, was a bit older she couldn’t do anything. Then she started to come out again and by that time I was living up in the West End and I was at art school. And I guess she thought everyone else is doing OK and having an exciting life .

Q: That’s a phenomenal amount of drive isn’t it?

Jill: Absolutely. She did not lack drive.

Q: With that sort of background, if you feel insecure from it, and then having a kid and everything when you’re still in your teens and finding yourself, and then you’re responsible for the kid as well; to get out there and do a band on top of all that is utterly phenomenal.

Jill: Absolutely. Also with the lack of education, yet she was writing lyrics and doing well. I wish I’d been a bit more understanding at that time. But by the time we’d moved to London and it got huge I just wanted to punch her! It just went to her head and she just wasn’t equipped to deal with it. She wasn’t equipped to deal with success, and it was very difficult to handle.

I spent most of the time in tears once we were signed and had to do stuff. It was no fun, I didn’t want to do it any more. I was ‘what’s the point? I don’t care whether I’m on TV, I don’t care about that crap’. I wanted to do it because I liked her and I liked writing with her and it was funny and we had a laugh, we had a really good laugh. And yet we still managed to do stuff that meant something to us and that we enjoyed doing. There were some great times, some really good times. Playing live.

Q: You’d gigged as a four-piece, but with the other two leaving did it put gigs out of the way?

Rose: We started using backing tapes.

Q: Did you start doing that straight away or was that after the records had come out?

Rose: It was before the records came out, we had a reel to reel with basic bass and drums on it. My husband would take care of the reel to reel, he was quite technical, and Jill’s boyfriend’s a photographer so he’d do slides and stuff like that. So, the first tour we did with Orange Juice and we used a reel to reel.

Later on we started getting people in, when we were doing bigger gigs. After the records we’d get musicians in to play, which was a nightmare, I used to hate having the whole audition thing. But we found musicians who we went on tour with and it worked out quite well. And some of the later sessions we did are with those musicians. It was good. We worked with the Madness rhythm section.

Q: What about later touring, didn’t Balfe play keyboards?

Jill: He played keyboards when we played another support tour. We did a support tour with [giggles] Howard Jones! He was on Warner Brothers as well, and we’d signed to WEA [Warner Elektra Atlantic] so they said ‘you’re going touring with Howard Jones’. The only good thing about that was we got to play places like the NEC. Balfe would play keyboards and change the backing cassette.

Q: There’s a reference in one press interview to playing the Royal Albert Hall. What was that?

Jill: [laughs] that was on the Howard Jones tour! [laughs] That was on the Howard Jones tour! It was good in some respects – we got to play the Glasgow Apollo before it got flattened, I’d been to see so many bands in the Apollo, it was great. We did that and we did the NEC which was a bit scary.

Q: The idea of Howard Jones being that big is a bit mad.

Jill: I know! The Albert Hall was the London gig, which was just wild. I’d just recovered from chicken pox as well, so I was a bit spaced out anyway. Backstage in the Albert Hall’s quite a strange thing as well cos it’s really elaborate and there’s lots of space for when it’s used by choirs and orchestras. I’d only done some of that tour cos of the chicken pox.

Q: What happened without you?

Jill: Rose just went out on her own. She went out and said I wasn’t well, and I think she just played songs with a guitar. I think everybody was really nice because she did it. The record company sent a bunch of flowers and said ‘at least you got polka dot disease’.

Q: Were you always using backing tapes and programmers?

Jill: We also had a band at one point. I think Madness had split up or they weren’t working or something cos I remember rehearsing with the rhythm section of Madness but it kinda didn’t work, it didn’t sound right. And so then we had this jazz guitarist, a really nice guy Simon Booth he went on to be in a band called Working Week. The drummer Roy Dodds went on to be in Fairground Attraction or something, and there was a bass player, really jazzy kind of players, kinda weird.

Q: I can sort of see it, cos it would be important with Strawberry Switchblade to have musicians who don’t rock.

Jill: That’s it, yeah, that was it.

Q: Not just because it’s important that your records don’t rock but whilst maybe you’d get away with a bit of a noisy guitarist, having a rocking bass player and drummer would kill the subtlety and delicacy. The jazzy thing, at least it’s not rocking, it’s about subtlety and warmth rather than bombast, I can understand why you’d have tried that.

Jill: They were pretty good as well, they didn’t overpower. So we played a few gigs with them but it didn’t really work.

Bill Drummond: 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….

Q: Did you gig much?

Jill: No, not really.

Q: It’s just you’re listing stuff on your own, Howard Jones tour with Balfe, stuff with the jazzy guys, all for a few gigs, it sounds like it adds up to a lot.

Jill: No, it’s just a few here and there.

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

David Balfe: 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.

The first BBC radio sessions

Q: So how did you get signed?

Jill: You know, it was just weird, the whole thing was so weird. We’d been playing a few gigs in Glasgow and people obviously thought of it as a weirdo band of its time and place. I think Orange Juice had been signed by that time and it was Jim Kerr. Because he was one of the first Glasgow punks he remembers Rose particularly and I used to go to parties and I’d see Charlie Burchill and Jim Kerr, and they’re very sweet people when you meet them, they’re very nice.

And I don’t really like Simple Minds, but they were being interviewed, I think it was on [Radio 1 show with DJ] Kid Jensen, and he asked them what’s happening in Glasgow, what other bands are good. And he said ‘Strawberry Switchblade, they’re good’, so Kid Jensen’s producer got in touch with us.

We had to pick four songs, and there was only the two of us so we had to get a band together. James Kirk from Orange Juice played bass and we had a guy called Shahid Sarwar, who we all called Shahid StarWars, played drums. He was in a band in Glasgow, I can’t remember what they were called [The Recognitions]. We borrowed him and James and there was another guy who played a little bit of keyboard when we went down there.

Basically it was the four of us and we had to rehearse. And we were all ‘it’s OK, it’s only four songs, we can do it we can do it’, and then John Peel’s producer got in touch with us and said that he wanted us to do a session.

Q: Had he heard the Kid Jensen session?

Jill: No, he just heard that we were doing a session for Kid Jensen, so would we do one for them.

Q: He hadn’t heard you at all?

Jill: No!

Q: Isn’t that weird?

Jill: Yeah, really weird.

Q: Do you know how many tapes Peel gets, and yet he hires people who he’s never heard!

Jill: At that point it was the Peel session you really wanted to get rather than a Jensen session, but we weren’t going to turn down either. So we ended up doing two sessions within about two weeks of each other. We had to have eight songs to do it and we only had six so we had to write another two!

[Those songs would be Little River and 10 James Orr Street – the other six tracks are on a recording of a gig on 16 June 1982].

The Jensen session was a bit more upbeat, the Peel session was a bit quieter. It was just weird, it was wild, absolutely wild. I remember the Jensen session was the first proper recording we did and the producer was Dale Griffin and another guy from Mott The Hoople and I could hardly sit next to them. I could remember them from when I was 14, I was hyperventilating, I could hardly play.

Rose: And we did a John Peel roadshow as well. He used to do roadshows and bands would play. It was just BBC roadshows that DJs would do and there’d be a disco he’d compere or whatever. And he did one in Edinburgh and it was Strawberry Switchblade and Sophisticated Boom Boom, which were another Glasgow all female band at the time. So we did that and we did the John Peel session and then we did the Kid Jensen session. We recorded the Peel one first but Jensen went out first.

[BBC archives say the Peel session was recorded on 4 October 1982 and broadcast on 5 October, Jensen was recorded on 3 October 1982 and broadcast on 7 October]

Q: Did you submit demos or anything?

Rose: No, we didn’t! No, he just phoned my house – not even getting the producer of the show to phone – and said ‘Hi, this is John Peel, do you want to do a session?’ I said ‘do you want us to send a tape?’ and he said, ‘no, that’s OK’. Then David Jensen did it as well just cos John Peel had, they were both trying to be the first one to get us out.

It was mad, everything just happened like that, we weren’t asking for anything, we weren’t pushing. I was going to people and pushing for gigs and stuff like that but not for John Peel to phone up and say ‘do you want to do a session next week? Can you come down?’ Yes! It was bizarre.

Jill: We did that [sessions for Radio 1] and then Bill Drummond, who was Echo & The Bunnymen‘s manager, phoned us and said he’d heard the sessions and wanted to sign us. At that time he was working for Warner Brothers publishing. Him and David Balfe came up to meet us.

David Balfe had been in Teardrop Explodes [also managed by Drummond] and he wanted to get into management. The Teardrop Explodes had just split up, I remember him playing their last album to us, the one that never got released.

Q: It got belatedly released in 1990 as Everyone Wants To Shag The Teardrop Explodes. It’s not very good.

Jill: I remember thinking that when I heard it at the time. He was obviously very proud of it, he’d had a lot to do with it.

Rose: Then David Balfe and Bill Drummond heard the sessions, and they came up to Glasgow to meet us and propose that they two would be a management team for us. It ended up that Balfey was our manager solely cos Bill Drummond had to concentrate on running the Bunnymen and they didn’t want him to spread himself out too much.

Q: How did you first hear of Strawberry Switchblade?

Bill Drummond: 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?

Bill Drummond: 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.

David Balfe: 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.

David Balfe: 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.

Bill Drummond: So the two of us went up to Glasgow to meet up with them and I think they had an American woman as a manager 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.

David Balfe: 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.

Getting signed, Trees and Flowers

Q: What were your first impressions on meeting them?

David Balfe: 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.

Bill Drummond: 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 its appeal to a big audience, I guess.

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

David Balfe: 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.

Jill: So, I remember them coming up to see us in somebody’s flat, I think it was Edwyn’s, and they talked to us and said they’d like to sign us to Warner Brothers Publishing, and they’d like to put out a single too. They put out Trees and Flowers on 92 Happy Customers Records.

Q: Was there anything else ever on that label? The catalogue number is HAPS001 which implies it’s a first release.

Rose: Well, that label was Will Sergeant’s from the Bunnymen, I think he might’ve done something on it.

[There was only one other release on the label, Sergeant’s solo album Themes For Grind, released March 1982].

Rose: But basically he wanted to put our first single out as an independent before we went on to a semi-major. He liked Strawberry Switchblade so he wanted to put the record out, and we thought ‘yeah, cool!’. We liked the Bunnymen, so it was mutual.

We were lucky in that sense that we didn’t get just thrown out into the commercial soup of pop straight away. There was a bit of dread, because of the people that we knew and that we were involved with at the beginning like Bill Drummond. It was good to put the first single out as an independent before we went to a major.

Bill Drummond: 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.

He’d done an album on it already of his own stuff, 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: Did Trees and Flowers do well?

Jill: It did well as an indie single, yeah. Top ten in the indie charts, and the indie charts at the time did sell quite well. And it was the only single we had that had posters. I remember seeing flyposters round London, we got our picture taken in front of one of them!

Q: Trees and Flowers has got incredible personnel on it; you’ve got the rhythm section of Madness, you’ve got Roddy Frame from Aztec Camera on guitar, you’ve got Nicky Holland who was arranging and performing with Fun Boy Three, and you’ve got Balfe and Drummond producing. It’s laden with major figures from the time, this little first indie single.

Rose: I know! It was good actually. It was lucky, we just happened to be in a scene that was just buzzing with life, so much talent.

Q: I see the connection with Roddy Frame from Postcard Records, but what’s the connection with Madness?

Jill: David Balfe knew them for some reason, I think maybe it was through a girlfriend or something. I remember going out to dinner with people, when we first came down to London once we’d signed they’d go ‘we’re all going out to dinner in this wee place in Camden’ and there’d be several members of Madness there and we’d be going, [incredulous gaping face] ‘this is just bizarre’. I think Balfe had met them, the Teardrops probably came across Madness.

Bill Drummond: 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.

Bill Drummond: 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?

Bill Drummond: 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!

Rose: It was good actually. It was lucky, we just happened to be in a scene that was just buzzing with life, so much talent.

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

Jill: Bill Drummond and David Balfe had moved to London at that time. Bill Drummond is such a gab and he’s so enthusiastic, he would get to know people, the pair of them were like that. And Bill had been managing the Bunnymen for a good while and wanted to branch out, so he was an A&R man in Warners publishing.

When they signed us we had to go to London to see them and I couldn’t get on the train cos I was so agoraphobic. I could get out and about in Glasgow but the thought of getting on the train… I remember my boyfriend Peter and Rose’s husband went, and Peter asked the managing director of Warners publishing to borrow a fiver so he could get back to the station! And they still signed us!

Then we got a support slot with Orange Juice. We did this tour with Orange Juice and half way through we signed the contract with Warners publishing, in Liverpool. Then the single was released.

It was such a bizarre tour, we did it in a hired car, just the two of us and a reel to reel tape deck. Drew, Rose’s husband, set it up with programmed drums and bass on it, and the pair of us would play guitar and sing. It worked, although sometimes the tape would keep going when we’d finished and stuff.

Rose: Then we had a lot of record companies start to get interested, a lot of the independents like Cherry Red and Rough Trade, and then some majors got interested. I think we went with WEA because, well, One: the advance [laughs] Two: the fact that they had a little subsidiary label that was quite cool to be on, it wasn’t quite selling out to a major.

Q: 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?

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

David Balfe: 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.

David Balfe: 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?

David Balfe: Yes, yes. Well we had no money.

Bill Drummond: 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?

Bill Drummond: 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?

Bill Drummond: 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, and cos the taxis were free.

Jill: So that was him, just Drummond’s stuff on WEA. The guy who ran Warner Brothers publishing was Rob Dickins, he became head of WEA Records and he took Bill Drummond with him and made him an A&R guy there. Balfey then got together with another type of manager, Paul King who was managing Tears For Fears, Level 42 and Julian [Cope], so they were the managers and Bill just went off to A&R and took us with him.

So we were signed for shit, you know, we were signed for not much money at all, £20,000 which was nothing compared to what Brilliant would be signed for. And I felt they’d sold us down the river a little bit. I only wanted enough to live on, but we had no money.

I remember asking if we could have some money so I could buy a dress for Top Of The Pops. The one I got was really expensive, I got it in Kensington Market and it was 60 quid or something, and I thought it was just outrageous, so much money. And then I was hacking at it, it didn’t have sleeves so I put sleeves on it and did stuff to it. Imagine having to ask! It’s your first Top Of The Pops! When you think what bands get spent on them now…

We were getting a wage from the money that we had, but £20,000 was supposed to do us for two years. We had a publishing advance which wasn’t very much but we could manage on it, we didn’t spend a lot of money.

And if you’re working in studios and the record company have got a cab account then we’d just go everywhere in a cab, really take the piss, ‘just wait for us while we do our shopping’.[laughs] Rose was terrible for that, really bad. Once we had a hit single then they let us have some money to buy clothes. It was a pitiful amount, but we used to make everything ourselves.

Q: It seems strange you weren’t on [early 1980s Glasgow indie label] Postcard Records, given that you were around all the Postcard bands. Did you plan anything with them?

Rose: We may have done had things not happened quickly, and we gone the other way. We did talk about stuff, but Postcard were really starting to wind up by the time we were really starting to do things, because Alan was losing interest.

Q: I suppose Aztec Camera and Orange Juice had both moved on by then.

Rose: Yeah, and also Paul Quinn, he was concentrating on him a bit, trying to make something of him. He had a nice voice, nice guy and everything and his version of Pale Blue Eyes was gorgeous, but I don’t really know what happened after that. Then we moved to London and Postcard was still in Glasgow.

Probably by the time we moved to London they weren’t really doing anything any more anyway. Alan had spent all his money and done all the stuff he was going to do. I don’t know. I really can’t remember what happened there. That was the crowd that we hung about with, but it escapes me why we didn’t do something with Postcard. Even The Poems were going to do something with Postcard. And we just decided to it ourselves.

Q: It is an odd thing, cos the links were maintained with Roddy Frame playing on Trees and Flowers.

Rose: Exactly, yeah. And Orange Juice promoting us to everybody, saying look out for Strawberry Switchblade. But I think because we really quite quickly started getting interest from other places, and then we went on tour with Orange Juice which was really good fun and we started playing gigs outside Glasgow and Edinburgh and getting a lot more exposure and more interest from outside. Cherry Red and lots of labels like that were interested, and Rough Trade as soon as they heard the sessions they were interested in us.

I think they knew us all too well at Postcard, they knew we only had eight songs, nobody else did! [laughs] So at the time we weren’t really ready to be releasing things. Everything kind of snowballed and just went the other way. We were quite interested in Cherry Red and then we got talked out of that one for Warner Brothers.

Q: It was a great time for Rough Trade, they’d signed your friends The Pastels and Aztec Camera.

Rose: Felt were on Cherry Red at the time, I think. Cherry Red had done that compilation Pillows and Prayers, it’s got a lot of really good stuff on it. It was a good time. I really liked a lot of stuff on Cherry Red. I always liked a lot of stuff on Rough Trade but Cherry Red seemed to be slightly… there was a much wider range of things on Rough Trade, Cherry Red just seemed a wee bit more exciting, and I liked the name, very me – any colour you like as long as it’s red!

Q: How come Postcard never put anything out of yours?

Jill: I don’t know. I suppose by the time we were going to release stuff Orange Juice had signed a major deal and were recording their album and they were spending a lot of time there….

Q: But you were around earlier, in 1982.

Jill: But I think all that was happening by then. There was talk of us being on Postcard but it never happened, and then we did the demos and James Kirk who was in Orange Juice helped us. We probably would’ve done it with Postcard, but it all happened so quickly, it was just bizarre.

10 James Orr Street and Rose’s childhood

Q: Before you told me who wrote which lyrics, I’d seen 10 James Orr Street as an agoraphobic song, but you say Rose wrote it. What’s it about then?

Jill: 10 James Orr Street is where she lived when she was a child and she really loved it there. It was a council flat so the council could turf you out whenever they wanted. I think they were going to renovate them or knock them down. She didn’t want to leave, she loved it. Basically that was it, that’s what it’s about.

I wrote the music for that one and just ‘la la la’d the thing to her and she wrote the lyrics. She has much more of a gift for writing lyrics than I do. It’s not something I like to do, it’s not something I’m particularly good at. She’s got the gift so I was happy to go ‘this is the chords and the tune’ and she’d go and write the lyrics. They were good when they were simple like that [on 10 James Orr Street]. That’s the good thing about being part of a partnership, we both had different talents. I was completely happy with that song.

Rose: 10 James Orr Street obviously, it was really my favourite place that I’ve ever lived and I really didn’t want to leave it. But they were knocking the buildings down to extend the hospital and we had to go. I was really heartbroken when I left that house cos my first love lived there as well, this little ten year old boy who used to run away from me all the time. I was giving him sweets and he was going ‘go away’. I was ten and he was nine. I just loved that place. So 10 James Orr Street was about having to leave somewhere you just really don’t want to.

The place I moved to afterwards turned out to be an absolute nightmare, an awful place. My little brother died within six months of us moving to that place. I just hated the place that we’d moved to, so 10 James Orr Street just seemed like the perfect place in the world looking back on it. The place we moved to afterward, I was there till I was 16. It was horrible because in was in sort of a gangland part of Glasgow, so it was really violent.

When I moved there I was ten years old, or just turned eleven I think, and I was totally, like, the world is a wonderful place. I used to find all these places that I’d call fairyland, I was just an innocent little kid who thought everybody could be saved if they only knew. Even bad people, if you talked to them and stuff they’d be fine, if they just knew what you knew they’d be fine. Then my little brother died, that really changed my perspective on life.

And living in that area, where I could see people running down the street with an axe in their back. I found people dead; I found a man who’d been stabbed with a sword when I was about fourteen. It was a 42 year old man, it was in the paper next day that he had a family.

The guys who stabbed him with the big sword were just up the hill and they saw me and my friend, and because we were witnesses they chased us. We were only about from here to that door over there from her house but we were too scared to run in there cos they’d know where she lived, so we just ran and ran. We ran through people’s gardens, we eventually had to stop running cos we were knackered. We were hiding under a hedge and these guys, we could hear them walking about looking for us and they were patting the hedge with the sword. To come out of that a sane person is impossible.

And that was just one story, there were loads of them. My dad got hit over the head with an axe twice because he’s deaf in one ear and somebody had asked him a question, they’d asked him if was Paddy McCormick and my dad thought they’d asked ‘do you know Paddy McCormick?’. The man who was meant to be hit, his wife carried my dad up the stairs, he was unconscious. I remember she had a camelhair coat on and it was just covered in blood.

My dad went off to the hospital, and the guy that did it came to the door an hour later or something. I have no idea who let him into the house, there was loads of neighbours in the house cos my mum was panicking and stuff like that, cos we didn’t know what would happen to my dad with two great big gashes across the top of his skull, he was in hospital and we hadn’t heard anything yet.

And this guy came to the door to apologise, to say ‘you’re OK, it’s not going to go any further, I apologise, just a case of mistaken identity’. He thought that was it, that’s all he had to do.

I flew at the guy, I was screaming at him, I thought ‘if I can kill this guy right now I’ll kill this guy right now’. I was trying to punch him and the neighbour was pulling me off. I was only a kid and this guy was early twenties, there’s quite a big difference. I just could not see why this guy was in the house apologising, he should be dying under my hand.

And then I realised when he’d gone that basically my mum had to accept his apology, because if she hadn’t and she had pressed charges, then he was one of the top guys in the gang, and they’d have put petrol bombs through the window or something like that. She was protecting her kids and I didn’t realise that, I just thought an eye for an eye. I didn’t even think that, it was just an emotional thing, I was distraught and I just wanted to kill that guy.

I realised afterwards that there was all that sort of stuff goes on, if you see things you turn a blind eye and all that, and I couldn’t stand that attitude. I really really disliked that attitude. If you turn a blind eye then they will always get away with it, you just have to stand up to them.

It was really difficult cos my mum and dad were, like, ‘don’t cause any trouble,’ and I was ‘you can’t let them bully you like that,’ it was awful.

This one guy stabbed his girlfriend through the stomach when she was pregnant, in the street. They were about 17-ish. A lot of things like that happened, it was not uncommon. I saw a little boy who was just jumping on the side doors of a bus for a ride to the next bus stop and he fell off and went under the back wheel of the bus, and his head and his teeth flew all over the road.

I saw some really gruesome things, it’s a wonder I’m not locked up somewhere. I did see some really awful things cos it was quite a wild place and the children were really wild.

We lived in a tenement and there were six families and only two of them had never been in trouble with the police; us and the people directly below us. There were armed robbers on the bottom floor, murderers, someone was in for manslaughter.

In the other house there was a manslaughterer and a murderer; two guy in prison. And one of the other brothers tried to kill me once. He got me by the throat and he picked me up. It was such a stupid thing – my three year old brother was fighting with his three year old brother over a biscuit. His mother came up to the door to complain and my mum and dad were out working and I had to look after my siblings cos I was the oldest. I said, ‘my mum and dad aren’t in right now’.

Obviously that’s why she came up, she knew they weren’t in, she knew where they worked. She was trying to push into the house, and I tried to close the door and say ‘come back when my mum and dad come back’. I pushed the door and she stuck her foot in the door, I pushed the door on her foot really hard. She pulled her foot out and started screaming at the top of her voice and ran downstairs and her son came up who was 22 or something like that – early twenties – and he kicked the door in.

I told my friend who was with me to take all the kids into the living room and put things up against the door. This guy was strangling me, he lifted me up off the ground, my feet were about a foot off the ground, I was just standing there being strangled until somebody came and pulled him off me. And his sister shouted something about ‘you’re pretty, I’ll spoil that for you, I’m going to throw acid in your face,’ and they’re the kind of people who would do that.

There was a boy who was about the same age as me, he was always trying to trip me up and push me, and that’s when I took up martial arts. When I used to come round the corner with my martial arts bag that guy who used to bully me all the time would cross the road. I’d only done a couple of lessons, I hadn’t done anything much yet, but because my mum and dad know someone who was a black belt and a really good person who worked with them, and also the guy who was teaching me was a world champion. It was also at the time when Kung Fu was on TV and everybody was into kung fu, so although I was only about four foot eleven at the time they thought ‘she could probably take out about 20 guys with one swing’! I was ‘don’t try me out please!’, I was only just learning the right stance and stuff, but it really worked; nobody bullied me, nobody tried to.

My little brother got killed. Some guys said that they were going to kill him, and I said, ‘you touch him and I’ll get you’, cos that’s what big sisters do. I always wished I had a big brother so I wasn’t the one that had to do that. And we went off, my little brother was only six and we decided to go home. He ran into these guys on the way home, two of them held an arm each and the other one kicked into his stomach. That was on the Thursday, he died on the Sunday of peritonitis; ruptured appendix.

The doctor had been called out lots of times but because of the kicking he thought it was just internal bruising. So he was lying there for days dying and I was actually sat with him as he died. I was laughing my head off cos he was telling me these funny stories – he was lying on the sofa and he was telling me there were these little men on the top of the sofa, little men with funny hats on who were coming to take him away.

I was going ‘what do they look like? What do they look like?’ and he was describing what they look like and they just sounded like pixies. He said, ‘they’re coming to take me away’. I said ‘where are they taking you?’ and then he just stopped talking and he was staring at the ceiling. And I remember him making this funny noise when he just stared at the ceiling and I was going ‘Michael, Michael’ and he wouldn’t talk, he was just staring at the ceiling. My other little boy noticed the boy that had hit him so we ran out to get him. All we did was get his ball off him and kick it over a fence and say, ‘if anything happens to my little brother you’re going to be in trouble’.

I went back and when I got to the bottom of the stairs I heard this really loud shriek, this scream. I thought that sounds like my mum, I ran up the stairs and before I got to the last flight she was saying ‘don’t come up don’t come up’, and of course that just said to me ‘come up’.

So I looked in the house and there was a long corridor with the living room at the end of it. My dad was just lifting his head away trying to give my little brother the kiss of life. He didn’t know I was there, he turned round and shook his head to my mum. I just completely freaked out, I leaped down all the stairs.

A neighbour stopped me at one point and slapped me to try and calm me down. I ran for eight miles to my granny’s and told her what happened, that he was really sick. I didn’t say he was dead cos I didn’t want to believe that. I told her about the hallucinations and she said the last time she knew someone who did that, they died.

I started screaming cos I didn’t want her to say that word. I was only 11 and I was so freaked out by it. Just as we got back the ambulance was pulling away. It was the worst time of my life. From 11 years old I got a wee bit more cynical with people.

Since we moved to that place I thought actually, some people are not saveable, you can’t change them. You see all these little kids who run around and their mums and dads are alcoholics, you feel really sorry for them and up until a point they’re probably saveable. But beyond a certain age when they become teenagers and late teenagers, you’re not going to change that person’s mind, they’re gonna thieve, they’re gonna mug you. I’ve been mugged a couple of times, I’ve been assaulted a couple of times, not seriously.

Somebody thought I was a boy once cos I had really short hair and he came running over to beat me up, and when he realised I was a girl he thought he’d just touch me up instead. They were guys who went to the same school as me. Other guys who went to the same school as me held me and my friend up in an elevator and told us to take our knickers off. I said no, I looked at one of the guys who was in my class and said, ‘you know you’re not going to do this don’t you? This is really stupid, I know exactly who you are’. They were holding a knife up to us and my friend was so scared she took her knickers off. I just bluntly refused. Eventually they just let us go and didn’t do anything. It was a horrible place, it was a really horrible place to grow up.

It was a horrible place for somebody who… It was a horrible place for anybody, but I was somebody who was really optimistic and believed in all the beautiful things in life, in trees and… trees and flowers, haha. I just love nature and I love life, and then I saw that and thought ‘this is so awful’. I really really believe that some people are just scum. It’s not a PC thing to say, but when you live with them you don’t care about that, you just think, ‘that person is the complete scum of the world and we’d be better without him,’ cos there were a lot of people like that.

Also I turned away from religion at that age as well, cos when my little brother died I thought that was a really cruel thing for God to do.

Q: Had religion been a big thing for you up until then?

Rose: Oh yeah, we were brought up Catholics and we went to chapel all the time. Just before we were moving my cat ran away because we were moving and it was scared. My mum sent me off to church on my own. I was really really shy when I was a little kid and I was too scared to go on my own cos I didn’t know anybody.

She gave me tuppence for the plate, and I was all dressed in a little white dress cos you used to do that in those days; Sunday best of little white dress, little white shoes and a hat and a handbag with tuppence for the plate in it. I decided to buy sweets with the tuppence and sat waiting for time to go home. My cat ran past me with its hair sticking up and it was foaming at the mouth and really rabid looking. I started running after it. It fell over and got up and ran away again and I couldn’t catch it.

Then this boy picked it up and said ‘is this your cat?’ and he was swinging it by the tail and he dropped it into the dustbin and said ‘it’s dead’. I said it’s not dead cos it was making noise. He set the bin on fire and I could hear my cat screaming. I was totally one hundred percent convinced that was God punishing me for not going to chapel. I really though it was my fault that that happened.

Then when the thing happened with my little brother I thought no. How can you possibly love somebody you’re terrified of? How can you force children – out of fear – to believe in something? I just thought there’s no way. I don’t believe in God, I’m not going to love something that I’m scared of who tells me I’ll burn in Hell if I don’t love him. So I turned away from God.

I had a vision when we first went to London and we were looking for a flat and living in a hotel and Jesus Christ appeared over the top of my bed. This was really real – whether it was a hallucination or whatever, and I wasn’t on drugs – and he hung over my bed and I thought ‘Jesus wants to have sex with me’, and I just said FUCK OFF. And that was a Catholic saying fuck off to Jesus Christ.

Although I was a lot older then, for two weeks I had this impulse, every time I walked past a church or a chapel I wanted to go in, but going ‘no no, be strong, don’t give in to him, don’t give in to that‘. You stub your toe and you think, ‘well what have I done, what am I being punished for?’ That’s what Catholicism does to you. I just thought it’s sick and I’m not having anything to do with it. If I go to Hell that’s OK cos all my friends are going there anyway.

Q: Eternal heaven with Cliff Richard or eternal hell with Jimi Hendrix, who do you want to spend eternity with?

Rose: I’ll go to Hell thankyou very much, that’s where the party is!

Q: Did you move away fairly quickly?

Rose: I lived there until I was 16, as soon as I was old enough to leave home. I left and went to live in Paisley where my boyfriend lived, also where there was a punk club. I moved there and never wanted to go back to that place again. I hated it. Kids would set flats on fire, a highrise flat, people would die. One of the wee boys that set the fire was 10 years old, he died as well. And his brother and other brother died joyriding. His mum and dad were complete alcoholics who never knew where their kids were anyway. It was a hellhole, it was so awful.

The only reason we stayed there is cos we were poor. It wasn’t cos we were bad, we were just a large poor Catholic family, and cos we were moving out of one area into another we had three choices of council house, and that was the third choice. My mum had turned down the other two, she didn’t like them. Turned out it was a bad choice we were stuck with for ages. I’m sure it moulded me quite a lot, the way I think about things.

Q: It’s extraordinary how you can have gone from such a happy optimistic child to a place that forces you to see the other end of the spectrum. Something that always draws me back to Strawberry Switchblade is that bittersweet thing, the way it is dark and melancholy yet very delicate and beautiful. Self-contained partly to keep the world out but also because there’s enough inside to sustain, looking outside and reaching inside.

Rose: My whole life’s been like that.

Q: It’s that mix that makes the greatest and most moving pop music.

Rose: The Mary Chain are like that as well.

Q: Tim Buckley too.

Rose: Oh yeah, Tim Buckley, wow.

Q: That sort of thing that soars and yet there’s an ache, a worldly-wise ache, underneath it. The greatest pop music hits that, emotions that you can’t quite name from simplistic lists. It interesting seeing your growing up as so directly and intensely feeding that mix, that emotional blend that characterises the music.

Rose: I guess it’s that kind of influence that still influences my lyrics now. They’re still like that. I’m a kind of happy-sad person. I’d like the world to be a nice place, but it’s not. So I chose to live somewhere like this where it’s really beautiful and it’s really isolated and you sort of create your own universe out here. You can ignore things. I never buy newspapers and it’s not because I’m stupid and I can’t read, it’s because I don’t want to read it.

I don’t really buy into this society, I really don’t. I keep as far out of it as I possibly can, and I just don’t want any connections with it. If I could completely drop out I would, but I can’t cos I’ve got kids that go to school. If I was on my own I could easily see myself being an old woman in the woods. A witch in the woods who’d do potions for everybody, that would do me!

There’s a little grotto down there on this property and it’s fantastic. In fact Boyd Rice initiated Marc Almond into the Church of Satan in the little grotto that’s just a walk down there! It’s in that book Marc Almond wrote [Tainted Life], he mentions that he comes out to Rose’s to go down to the grotto to be initiated into the Church of Satan by Boyd Rice. I don’t think the landlord would appreciate that!

Fan mail and stalkers

Q: A couple of old press interviews make references to getting letters. Was there a lot of fan mail?

Jill: Not a lot. Most of it was really nice, there were some people who wrote more than once. But then once you get to a certain point you just don’t even see the letters. To begin with we used to write back, and at that time people were still interested in the band and the music.

Q: Who were the people who wrote?

Jill: To begin with it was indie kids who liked the fact it was girls doing stuff. That was when there was the radio sessions and stuff. But after Since Yesterday it was loads of little girls.

Q: There’s a reference to getting very long letters from nutters as well.

Jill: Yeah, Rose used to get the mad letters more than I did.

Q: In one interview she says she got a letter blaming her for the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Jill: I never got anything like that, she got all the nutty stuff.

Q: What about gigs, who were the people who came to the gigs?

Jill: Before the album was released it was an indie audience. I remember one of the Jesus and Mary Chain being there, all the Glasgow people like the Pastels and Orange Juice, students, just indie people. That was the audience wherever we went.

After the album we never toured much, and when we did do it, it was with Howard Jones so obviously it was all going to be little girls. I remember standing in the Albert Hall going ‘it’s like a Sunday school outing, really well dressed kids having a jolly good time, ‘nice’ and ‘wholesome’. It wasn’t like that before.

Q: What about in Japan?

Jill: That was little girls.

Q:Who was it that was into you?

Rose: Our audience was already really really wide. There were kids at gigs and there were old grandfathers at gigs, it was completely across the board. It wasn’t just specific people, Cure-type fans and people from that scene. We had loads of kids come – like, little kids with their parents – and I had a man come up to us to sign these photographs and he was a grandfather. A lot of weirdos as well! I used to get loads of weirdo letters.

Q: In an old interview for ZigZag magazine there’s a reference to getting loads of weird letters, and you getting ninety percent of them.

Rose: I’d get the weird ones and she’d get the sensitive ones! [laughs]

Q: Why was that do you think?

Rose: I have no idea!

Q: How weird is ‘weird’? Anything stick in your memory?

Rose: There was one that was quite extreme, one guy blaming me for all the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which was pretty weird coming from a fan, from someone who actually liked the band. It’s very very hard to follow the letter, he’s jumping all over the place, I think he was schizophrenic.

I had quite a few schizos I got letters from, like I was reading a letter written by three or four people, it would jumble up. I used to get weirdos, or else people saying ‘send me your details I want to make you a leather dress’, something like that. I’d send them measurements for a three piece suite, see if I could get that out of them!

We had a fan club at the time, and the guy who was running the fan club was taking all the weirder obscene or cheeky or whatever mail out so the girls wouldn’t have to look at it. I heard him talking to Balfe about it, my ears perked up and I went ‘those are the ones I want to see!’ and David was going ‘oh no no no’. ‘I want to see every single one of the weird letters’, but we didn’t actually get a lot, I think he binned them. Then he started not getting to them, because I wanted to know – the weird ones can be a lot more interesting!

Q: It gives you a clue as to who’s coming the gigs and what to watch out for.

Rose: Exactly. Which was kind of useful cos I got a stalker, I don’t know if Jill told you about him. When we lived in Muswell Hill I was getting these letters from this guy saying he was suicidal and blah blah, and he really loved Strawberry Switchblade and he was going to kill himself cos he was so depressed. And stupidly I wrote back to him, saying ‘you don’t kill yourself over a pop band, that’s really silly’.

Then he sent me another letter saying he’d come from Wales and moved to Muswell Hill cos in an interview we’d said we lived in Muswell Hill. He moved into a street called ROSEbery Avenue and he said he’d been following me around for a year. I was like ‘Shit! SHIT!’ I was sitting on the bus going ‘could be him, could be him’. I was always thinking, ‘god, I don’t know who this person is’ and I went out a lot at night time and I’d be getting off the bus thinking ‘who’s the weirdo?’.

Then one day I was just pushing my bike up Muswell Hill and I had my daughter with me who was only five, Keri, and then I heard these footsteps behind me getting closer and closer until they were really uncomfortably close but had no intention of overtaking me. I thought ‘what’s going on? Am I going to turn round here?’. And I could hear a walkman tsss-tsss-tssss and I recognised the song; it was Since Yesterday. I just thought ‘oh fuck’, I was a wee bit scared to turn round cos I didn’t know what I was going to see – it might be some big guy, it might just be some weasel. I turned round and it happened to be some weasel! Not very threatening.

Of course he could have been threatening but I’d done martial arts and stuff so I wasn’t really scared of him, I wasn’t intimidated by him. He tapped my shoulder in slow motion – it wasn’t just my imagination, it was really slow – tap. Tap. Tap. Then he said ‘you know who I am don’t you?’ I went, ‘yeah, I think I do. Kelvin?’. Then he was just going like that [looks slowly up and down], we went all the way up the hill with him looking me up and down. I was like ‘get this guy off the street!’ It was really freaky, and then I said ‘don’t you ever follow me when I’m taking my daughter to school,’ I really told him off. That guy was a real fruitcake.

I once stepped out of a cab by accident in Muswell Hill and he jumped out in front of the car with me – not to push me out of the way of the car. I said to him, ‘Kelvin, what the hell did you do that for?’ and he said ‘if you were going to die I wanted to die with you’. Why didn’t you just save me? He was weird, he was really weird.

I had friends, this band called the Copyheads who came from Glasgow and wanted to stay over somewhere, so they stayed at my flat. And he was outside storming up and down, ‘who are those guys in your house?’ I said ‘they’re just friends from Glasgow, and it’s none of your business anyway’. He came in and tried to put his arms round me and kiss me, I pushed him out of the door.

When I started going out with my next husband he’d shifted houses to one that looked onto the roundabout so he could see whenever I was out so he could run downstairs and follow me around. He threatened to kill Robert, he said his stepdad had a shotgun. He was really furious that Robert was younger than him.

I was doing my driving lessons and he bought a car exactly the same a my car! Mine was a silvery green BMW and he got one that was a silvery blue, so it was slightly different but it was the exact same year and everything. I was doing my driving lessons, and if there’s something gonna put you off it’s this fruitcake following you! Honestly, it was a nightmare.

Q: How long did this go on for?

Rose: Ages. Till I left Muswell Hill. I was there six years and it happened pretty quickly after I moved there, so a very very long time. He went to my doctor’s so he’d have the same doctor as me. She called me in one day and said, ‘I shouldn’t really say this and I don’t think there’s a real problem, I was wondering if you were aware of this person?’

She’d referred him to the psychiatric hospital up the road for group therapy. And then he’d come to my door with this big manual about sexual deviants and say ‘look at page number whatever, that’s you’ and then just disappear.

And then one of the guys from his group therapy knocked on my door one day and said ‘can I borrow your walkman?’.

I didn’t even know this person so I said you can’t borrow my walkman. He said, ‘can I have a hug then, cos my therapist said hug therapy’s really good for me’. I just said piss off.

Instead of it getting better it got worse, he would get people from group therapy sat in the cafe we used to go to, just looking over at us. Instead of one stalker there’s a whole gaggle!

He was just a wee bit over the top. He’d phone me up and say he’d taken an overdose, I’d tell him to phone the Samaritans. My number was ex-directory, I don’t know how he got it. He could’ve got my address from following me – wandering around Muswell Hill we’re not that difficult to spot. A couple of people came to the door actually. I’d open the curtains in the morning and there’d be four goths sat there, I’d close them again! It was a bit mad really.

Kelvin would phone and say ‘leave Drew and I’ll look after you and Keri’. Drew would answer and tell him to go away, I wouldn’t let him do anything other than that – he wanted to give him a smack. I’d be stood talking to someone and they’d ask what I’d been doing and Kelvin would be stood right behind me and say ‘you went to the chinese for a takeaway’.

Q: You were in a really weird position cos you’d got all the mainstream publicity which attracts random mad people, but you’ve also got the outsiderness that gets people who are really obsessional. The level you were pitched at was always going to get the worst of both worlds.

Rose: I know, exactly. I had this 16 year old boy turn up at the door once with his auntie. He asked the shopkeepers where I lived – thankyou very much for telling him – he was from Sheffield I think, but his aunt lived in London. He turned up with a whole bunch of records to be signed and then one day he came back with some more and I let him come into the house.

And then he had an epileptic fit! I went ‘SHIT!’ and sat on him, just to hold him down so he didn’t hurt himself. Every time I said ‘you have to go now, your aunt’s probably waiting for you’ he’d have another fit. I called my doctor round. He was there for three days, he would not go away.

Eventually the doctor said he might be faking it. I phoned his mum and said ‘I’ve got your son here and he keeps having fits’. I drove him to the bus stop, put him on a bus and he was in tears and everything. I said ‘go home, your mother’s waiting at the other end’.

Q: That is really far out. Imagine how different your life would have to have been for you to be like that.

Rose: I know! Then his mum kept phoning me up all the time! Saying if he wasn’t at home was he with me. Or, he’s having fits again, will you talk to him? Stuff like that. I said I don’t think it will help, it’s just making it worse. His mum started sending me letters. I sent letters back saying they had to respect my privacy and it’s really not my responsibility.

Things like that happened which were not glamorous, they’re just a real pain and your life just comes to a stop sometimes because something like that happens. You get freaks going to your doctor’s, freaks telling you this about yourself or that about yourself which is total crap, things they’ve made up in their own head.

This Kelvin hated blondes; if he was a trucker he’d probably pick up blondes and murder them. His mum was a blonde and he really didn’t like her cos she’d separated from his dad, and he hated his stepdad and his mum liked his stepdad more than she liked him, so he really didn’t like blondes. I just thought thank fuck I’m not a blonde. But then he wouldn’t have liked me then anyway, would he? He didn’t go to gigs either. That’s the weird thing, he didn’t go to any gigs, he was too shy, he’d nobody to go with.

Q: Too shy to go to gigs but not too shy to harass you on your doorstep?

Rose: That’s the way his mind worked. He wouldn’t go to gigs cos he’d nobody to go with but he was quite happy to threaten you with a shotgun. He got sacked from two jobs because of me. He used to fix video machines, so he was always sticking Strawberry Switchblade videos in all day long, so all the guys he worked with hated Strawberry Switchblade. One of them said she’s got legs that go up to wherever, Kelvin punched the guy and got the sack.

He also fixed jukeboxes, so there was always a Strawberry Switchblade on his ones, which was to our advantage. He got the sack from that for following me when he was supposed to be working.

Q: You’re talking about this really easily and laughing about it. How easy was it to deal with at the time?

Rose: I was frightened till I met him, actually. Thinking someone’s been following you for a year, that was the frightening bit. But once I’d actually met him it was just annoying. I wasn’t that freaked out cos I used to be quite confident in my own ability to defend myself. I was used to weirdos coming up and sitting next to me on the late night bus and heaving to deal with them.

I didn’t like him following me around when Keri was there and I was a wee bit worried about that, that he knew where her school was. I always had to go and pick her up even when she was older, make sure she was escorted to and from school; I might not be frightened of him but he knows where Keri goes to school and who knows what he’s capable of, really?

The guy who said I was responsible for all the Troubles in Northern Ireland, I was a wee bit more scared of that letter, I thought he might be going to do something about it or people might believe him. I wasn’t that scared, I was annoyed more than scared cos it just kind of interfered with things. There are a million and one Kelvin stories. He was just so weird.

He did once come to a gig. This is a funny story actually. I was working with Lawrence from Felt who was a really good friend of mine, and he had a stalker, his female stalker from New Zealand. She hung around him all the time like Kelvin followed me. We were at Creation Records one day, Lawrence and I, and we came outside and the two of them were there, so we introduced them to each other and sent them off in a cab together!

Q: Any report back of how it went?

Rose: All they did was talk about us all the time so it didn’t work! Lawrence and I thought it’d be an ideal set-up! She came up to me and said I’d been saying things to try and put her off Lawrence. ‘Look, Lawrence is my friend, who am I going to listen to, you or Lawrence? Just go away. What Lawrence does is his choice, don’t bother me about it’.

She turned up at my door once as well actually. She came into the house and had this big sobbing session about Lawrence and if I was in love with him and all this sort of stuff. She was so scared that she was in love with him and she wanted him and all that. Lawrence was on an independent label, so it happens to all sorts! But our little scheme of cooking those two up didn’t really work. They did keep in touch, but only to talk about us. Stalkers Anonymous!

Recording the album: the Robin Millar sessions

Jill: We did some recording with that band with Robin somebody who used to produce Sade…

Q: Robin Millar.

Jill: Yeah, a really nice guy, he had studios up in Willesden somewhere and we recorded with him and I enjoyed it, but…

Q: Was this after the album?

Jill: No, this was before the album, he was going to produce the album. But it ended up none of us were sure, us, the record company; it had come out quite mellow, and with the band it just didn’t work with the songs which were three chord wonders. It was missing the point.

There was one we did with Robin Millar, Secrets I think it was, he did a really nice version of it, did a fantastic vocal thing layering up vocals, really ethereal, really beautiful and choral sounding. Just lovely.

Robin Millar: And that is partly to do with this very kind of churchy thing which Rose sort of gave off, this very black candle holiness sort of thing, and I loved their two voices together. I thought well, if you hear them together at some point in the song then you’ve found the centre of what they are, really. That’s the centre of what they are and everything else can radiate out from there.

Jill: I thought it was really exciting to do this in this big studio.

Q: How far did the sessions get?

Jill: I think we did two songs. [There is a tape of Poor Hearts and Secrets. Robin Millar believes there was a third track, known as Lost In Space. Rose also mentions this track, and implies it later had a name-change]

Robin Millar: 1984 was an absolutely extraordinary year for me. Strawberry Switchblade was one of two or three things that I really had a lot of faith in. Them, and another Scottish band called Fruits Of Passion, who had quite a lot of similarity really [with Strawberry Switchblade].

That twelve month period, apart from Fruits Of Passion and Switchblade, for me was Weekend and then Working Week – mixtures of jazz, African influences, good playing, interesting innovative ideas; Everything But The Girl who’d come out of the Marine Girls thing and then Tracey’s own stuff, and they were formulating this bizarre, bizarre hybrid of jazz and at the same time still influenced by people like the Buzzcocks; the end of The Beat and the beginnings of Fine Young Cannibals that I was involved in; and then if you want to go on to a different tip, Sade.

All of these things were basically musician led, band led, flying in the face of programming everything up.

I’m always excited by what I consider to be generic movements which are appearing spontaneously, genuinely from the musicians themselves, whether it’s in the bedroom or the rehearsal room. You do tend to find a flavour in a particular town or country in a particular year.

The Postcard Records thing had appealed to me because of its organicness, its awkwardness, the fact that it didn’t seem to be directly coming from anything that was happening elsewhere, it wasn’t being borrowed, you know? It was almost like the result of a rejection of what was going on, and that’s always been what has appealed to me about that. People who’d organised themselves into some kind of art form that they felt was singular, original, not borrowed from what was going on.

I don’t remember how I… yes I do! I’ll tell you how I met Strawberry Switchblade. It was Geoff Travis, who had had the Raincoats signed up to his label [Rough Trade], or if he hadn’t had them he’d wanted to sign them.

The extraordinary thing about Geoff – through whom I met Everything But The Girl and Young Marble Giants and Weekend – he was a man after my own heart in that he just wanted to put people he believed in with other people he believed in who had different skills. He neither knew nor cared whether he would have a financial interest in the results, he was much more interested in driving music on, and he was much more interested in driving through those people who did not seem to wish to commit to the most commercial scene that was going on. He definitely would have effected the meeting.

Q: What were they like to work with?

Robin Millar: The thing that I remember about Rose was her sort of twitchy-witchy vibe, her black shawly, white-faced, dark, very… what would you call it? Underground in a way, very alternative but very serious, very deep thinker. Old but young. Very young, but very old in a witchy way. I don’t mean that in a bad way, but kind of sussed.

Jill was very ingenuous and very nice. Being the harmonist and everything, she was very applied. Rose was the pure essence of it, and I thought Jill was necessary for the application of it into some sort of format. I’m not sure that Rose could have done it on her own.

I can arrange and I can write anything people want me to write, but all the ideas pretty well have to come out of the band, out of the artist. I will egg on and coax and try to put them in touch with things in themselves like saying, ‘if there was to be other instrumentation on this song, what are the things that have inspired you recently? what are the sounds?’

If they had musicians who they knew and were part of the plot, I would be reluctant to pass over those musicians, I would tend to try to work with them, even painstakingly if necessary.

The sessions were quick, they didn’t take long.

Q: That’s interesting because they must’ve taken some putting together cos there was only the two of them and the other musicians had to be found. One of them was a guy out of Working Week, Simon Booth, and a bassist and drummer had to be found. Was it your idea they used them?

Robin Millar: If you remind me who the musicians were I could tell you.

Q: There was Simon Booth, and Roy Dodds on drums.

Robin Millar: He would’ve been from Weekend, I worked with him then.

Q: So it sounds like your suggestions for the other guys.

Robin Millar: Yeah. Do you remember who played bass?

Q: No idea, no-one seems to remember.

Robin Millar: I think it was Phil Moxon, who was from Young Marble Giants.

[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. Subsequent correspondence with Cook himself has confirmed it was him]

They would have had gaps and I would have found people. Like-minded people by the sound of it, cos all the people we mentioned are from interesting, organic music.

I’ve got some feeling that there was a sense of unease, a sense of awkwardness somewhere in those sessions, but Rose in particular was slightly unfathomable. And, as I say, maybe what I didn’t know about Rose was that she was more of a commercial go-getter.

Q: I think she’s going to love what you said about ‘black candle holiness’, she’ll adore that. She always had a lot of psychic and magical inclinations, and she’s still very much a pagan spirit.

Robin Millar: That’s what I meant by witchy, I don’t mean witchy as an insult.

Q: You can tell with Rose there’s a lot inside her. Regarding the idea of ‘commercial go-getter’, she’s a very very driven woman, but a commercial go-getter is not what she is.

Robin Millar: I have to say that even from that scruffy old cassette I think those tracks are no particular credit for me, except for not destroying it, if you know what I mean. I’m terribly concerned not to destroy things when I make people’s records with them. Maybe it doesn’t make them commercial enough sometimes.

But I hear that and I can picture her and I can picture Jill, and I think they’re true, they’re true statements of where they were at the time and that had they been exposed to the public and had the public liked them I think they would have been quite happy to carry on doing more and develop it, unless they’d fallen out for other reasons.

I get that sense of the spirituality, I can hear all that, I can hear the Hammer horror scenes on the hill at night time with the black crosses, I can hear it in there. There’s something about that jagged Rickenbacker guitar thing which reminds me of big old ceremonial sword axe type things. I can’t explain what I mean but it does evoke the macabre slightly to me.

Also, it’s timeless. There’s something about that Shakin’ All Over drums thing that gives you a sense of ‘have we been here before? Has this music existed before? Is this strangely evocative of all sorts of things like Johnny Remember Me?’

The fact that I exaggeratedly put Jill’s harmonies into a different and a longer reverb from Rose’s. I don’t know if you noticed that, but it’s not just two voices with the same effects on them. You definitely get the feeling that the other one is just behind and some sort of echo. The face behind the shoulder, as it were; looking over the shoulder but unseen by the singer somehow. Some essence of the singer’s facing front and behind her is another version of herself, the harmony is another version of herself, slightly different but unseen by her. She seems focussed and intent on singing what’s going on in front. You don’t get any sense of them being face to face, or even side by side.

You have to say that if that’s the way I set them, that’s the way I saw them. There’s no doubt about that. If that’s the way I set them, which I definitely did on those tracks, I definitely must have seen them not as standing side by side, but as Rose standing in the front and Jill slightly behind, slightly to the side, looking in the same direction but mostly unseen.

Q: The musicians you pulled in from Weekend and wherever to work with Strawberry Switchblade, do you know how much time they would have had to put it all together?

Robin Millar: We’d have done it in the studio. We wouldn’t have rehearsed it. If you noticed, the drum parts are very similar to the demos they’d been making. Bass wasn’t a problem. I would have weeded out and sorted out the vocals. And I would have encouraged the guitar ideas to emerge, the guitar themes.

Q: Did the band themselves have very clear ideas about the songs?

Robin Millar: No, not particularly. That’s why I’m not particularly surprised they were able to go with David Motion and let him see what he could do.

What I do is to fill in the blanks; I try to get people to come up with ideas and I’ll fill in the blanks where they’ve got them. They were quite inexperienced and they’d just have got a guitarist and a bass player and a drummer to do their radio sessions and probably simply accepted the fact that, ‘oh that’s how the drums go’. But I like that you see, I like things that already come with a direction.

Once again, it might be a failing with me, I don’t immediately just deconstruct what I hear and reconstruct it from the middle outwards, which is what I suspect a Trevor Horn or a David Motion will do. I don’t really get inspired to do that, I have to have something to hang my hat on and it would’ve been those BBC recordings.

I’d have put it on, turned it up, gone into the next room so that I didn’t hear the detail, just the big noise that the track was making. It would’ve been the vocals and those basic drum patterns and some kind of guitarry thing going on. So, true to what we had, really. And obviously, you could just tell, the ability and the tone and the understanding to do fabulous things with the vocals. Not as fabulous as David did, but it was a different context.

I take it very much as I find it, it’s very organic. As I said, I’m always trying to get the ideas out of the people. Sometimes perhaps that’s wrong, perhaps they want you to sit down and just tell them ‘you should do this, you should do that’. I think it’s a completely different sort of production, that David Motion-Trevor Horn ‘these are the records I make and will fit your style into them’.

Whatever else the versions of Poor Hearts and Secrets that I did with them is, it flowed out of them. And then I suppose what happened was they must have taken those tracks to the powers that be, and the powers that be must’ve said they’re not trendy enough, they’re not where this record label sees its marketing opportunities – ‘do you want to meet this young guy, we’ve just had a hit with him with something else’.

Q: You’d done two songs, one of which is really good, and yet you gave up?

Jill: Well I really liked it but the record company didn’t. They thought it should be more poppy, and we did too. We did some with a girl called Nicky Holland as well. The girl who played oboe on Trees and Flowers came in and played piano. She’s a classically trained pianist, there was a band called the Ravishing Beauties, she used to be in them, they were classical musicians, middle-class southern English girls. Really sweet, really nice girls.

So three of them, Kate St John, Virginia Astley and Nicky Holland who were all in this band. And the record company wanted to see how we’d get on with her. I can’t remember who was playing with us, I think that was the band as well. But that didn’t work out.

Recording the album: the Robin Millar sessions; continued

Q: Jill said you did some tracks with Robin Millar. What was that?

Rose: Yeah, he didn’t like women.

Q: Really? He produced Sade and things at the same time.

Rose: I think it was Jolene we did with him, was it not?

Q: No, wasn’t that with Clive Langer?

Rose: It was him that didn’t like women. He didn’t even talk to us. His engineer did most of the work, he just put his name on it. The engineer did most of the work, I can’t remember his name. What tracks did we do with Robin Millar?

Q: You recorded Secrets and…

Rose: Oh yeah, Secrets and Lost In Space. We changed that to… I think it was called Lost In Space then, actually. Secrets and, it could have been Poor Hearts.

Q: Yes, it was those two. 

[Robin Millar believes there was a third track, known as Lost In Space]

Rose: I liked his studio actually. All the other studios were had green carpets and stuff, his had a really nice blue carpet!

Q: Why didn’t it work out with Robin Millar?

Rose: I don’t know what happened. We weren’t continuing any further, that was quite near the end, we were recording new songs for the next album, doing demos for it and stuff like that.

Q: The Robin Millar stuff? I thought it was before then. In Jill’s memory you did two songs with him as a trial producer with a view to him doing the album, but it didn’t go down well.

Rose: Well it couldn’t have been Poor Hearts then cos Poor Hearts was written much later.

[This appears to be incorrect: Poor Hearts was recorded for a Janice Long BBC session on 23 January 1984, which is almost certainly earlier or contemporaneous with the Robin Millar sessions]

Q: It’s definitely Secrets and Poor Hearts.

Rose: I liked working with Robin Millar, I think it was afterwards, I’m sure it was afterwards.

Q: Why would you re-record Secrets?

Rose: It’s all a jumble in my head. I’ve probably got the date on a tape somewhere. I actually quite liked working with Robin Millar, so that [not using him for any released material] would have been a record company decision. I liked those demos.

Q: What was the working relationship like between Rose and Jill? How did the dynamics appear to you?

Robin Millar: I always thought of the two of them as separate. I thought of Rose definitely as the dominant one. But then there’s always one in a band. It’s not always the singer, but there is always one.

Jill, I didn’t really think of her as a 50-50 part of what was going on, I thought she was an adjunct, like a band member. Although I assumed they must have worked together developing the songs there was very little evidence of momentum from the band themselves, which is why I’m not surprised they would have tended to go with whatever producer they were working with’s idea.

When I meet bands whose music I love and think is very essential, and I also think is challenging what is going on, I think I sometimes put a political spin on things and a resolve which perhaps isn’t really there. It’s something I bestow on artists I think.

They were probably just a couple of ambitious young girls who wanted to get ahead by whatever means was going, and I was probably far too politically minded to imagine that from where they’d come from, what the tapes sounded like – it sounded like John Peel land, you know?

Q: I think it’s really interesting you say there was a lack of push from Rose and Jill, because they definitely were coming at it with artistic intent, they definitely were in it for the music, they’d come out of a strong punk then Postcard background. I wonder how much of it was them being daunted by working in proper studios with proper producers, which only a few months earlier would have been unimaginable to them.

Robin Millar: I would have thought it was unlikely that working with me posed a challenge to their musical ideas and direction. I’d believe it if they said so and then I’d say I’d done a bad job and that’s quite possible, but all things being equal it would have just flowed naturally out of where they were at that moment, what else they liked.

If I did impose a musician I’d have said, ‘let me play you some other things they’ve done, what do you think of it, would you like to meet them?’. It would all have been very considerate.

Q: I suspect they were already aboard the ever-quickening spiral they were put on by the record company, with more and more decisions being taken for them.

Robin Millar: What label were they on?

Q: They were on Korova, Rob Dickins’ imprint at WEA, so it was the full Warners machine that decided they were going to be the next big thing. They had stylists coming in with costumes for them, there was a lot of pushing ideas on them and it was all moving so quickly with a ‘we know what we’re talking about, trust us’ attitude.

Robin Millar: I’m not surprised. I remember handing in the first Everything But The Girl album, Eden, to Rob Dickins. Eden went on to really do very well and become an international classic, really. He [Dickins] rang up and he said, and I quote, ‘how come you do a great job for Sony on Sade and you do such a shit job for me?’.

By ‘a shit job’ I think he meant not sounding 1980s. Just got some musicians in and done some songs, there’s people strumming guitars and playing organs, where’s all the synths, where’s all the special effects, the Dollar, the Trevor Horn, the ABC, the Simmons drums and glassy digital synthesisers? I’m not surprised at all, I’m not surprised at all.

Q: Do you remember it being said that it wasn’t going to go any further?

Robin Millar: No.

Q: Was it going to be just do two songs and see how it went, or had there been any plans for anything further? Did it feel like you were gearing up to do an album?

Robin Millar: Yes. Yes.

Q: At what point did they say no and back out of that?

Robin Millar: You know, it was happening to me all the time. Sometimes, like Fruits Of Passion, Strawberry Switchblade, it didn’t get through the net. The business just said, ‘no no no, we’re totally into electro’.

Q: Do you remember how the band felt at the time about it?

Robin Millar: No, because the wall went up. I assume whether out of disappointment, embarrassment or whatever it was, I simply never heard from anyone. And the next thing I heard they were in the studio with Dave Motion.

Q: Do you remember when the sessions themselves were completed and you were listening back to final mixes, were people pleased?

Robin Millar: Well that’s usual. It was a fairly typical music biz scenario, really. There weren’t any people in the control room going, ‘well, it’s not really what we want and have you ever considered doing it with electronic drums or going in a different direction?’. No, it was all, ‘great great great, marvellous, this is brilliant’. And then silence.

Then I heard they were in the studio with Dave Motion, the record came out, the record was a hit. There was nothing I could say about that at all, because that is the name of the game.

I’m also quite used to the business taking a dim view. I did two tracks with Sade which are on Diamond Life, and they were rejected by the record company who paid for them, and so was I; we were all dropped. It was Smooth Operator and Your Love Is King.

It was four months later that another record label picked them up and said to Sade, ‘you should work with this American producer’. If she hadn’t said, ‘if I can’t work with Robin Millar I’m not going to work, I’m not going to sign to you,’ I’d have lost that job as well.

Everything But The Girl [also produced by Millar], fortunately I had Geoff Travis who was resisting pressure from Warner Brothers who were distributing and marketing Blanco Y Negro Records, who wanted them to go poppier, and he said, ‘no, I’m trying to build a serious career for a serious band’. So you had on the one hand people like him and on the other the RCAs and Sonys who just wanted to go with the flow.

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

David Balfe: 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.

David Balfe: That’s right, that’s right.

[Not according to Jill, who is now absolutely sure it was John Cook. Subsequent correspondance with Cook has confirmed this]

David Balfe: 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 did a couple of songs with Robin Millar and he was slated to do the album.

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

Q: Yeah, they’re really good.

Bill Drummond: Are they?

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

Bill Drummond: 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.

Bill Drummond: No, no.

Robin Millar: My job is to make sure that the setting for the songs and the people singing and playing them is the perfect setting to hold those songs up to the best possible light so they’ll seem at their best and you’ll get the most out of them. And from there I guess you have to try to dig deep to know what it is that you’re trying to get out of them.

It’s not beauty with Strawberry Switchblade, it’s haunting beauty isn’t it? It’s not great harmonies, it’s great requiem harmonies. There’s a sense of inevitability, a sense of patient holy longing. Waiting for something but you’re not sure what it is, and in the meantime you’re not quite in the right place at the moment in this life, that there’s something beyond that you’re reaching out for. And at the same time, you’re a young person trying to have fun, and it’s very difficult.

Q: That is exactly it.

Robin Millar: And so you’ve got to come up with a record that is like a bunch of young people trying to have fun, but with this sense of yearning and longing that we’re not really in the right place, we’re not settled. The politics around us, the people running the country, the way some of the other young people are into stuff that we’re not into, gives you that sense of outsiderness and dislocation.

But, you are a bunch of young people trying to have fun and so there is going to be an invective in your music that is going to be frisky and immediate, with nice little riffs and good little tunes. It’s that behind the mask thing that, to me, is what’s so marvellous.

What is so brilliant and fantastic about pop music – and I’m never ashamed to say I’m involved in pop music cos I am – the great thing about pop music is that more than anything else I can think of, in three or four minutes you can create something that will mend a broken marriage, that will save a person from dying from a disease, that can make the leaders of a country think again about their foreign policy, that can lead a whole generation into realising that there’s more to life than they thought and compromising is not what you do in your only opportunity on earth.

Films take two hours making heavy weather and are usually very shallow. We don’t have ‘Desert Island Films’ still running after 55 years on Radio 4; we’ve got Desert Island Discs because it doesn’t occur to people to think that a show where you take your eight favourite movies would actually catch the imagination of succeeding generations, but take your eight favourite four minute numbers and people get it immediately, they know exactly.

And they can actually pick eight songs that will encapsulate their youth, their greatest loves, their greatest losses, their greatest hopes, their greatest fears, their greatest achievements all in one go. What an art and what a difficult skill to create all that in a three or four minute thing that, at the same time, you can just put it on turn it up and run around the house, go yaaaay and it just makes the day feel better.

It’s a great thing, but it’s got nothing to do with following the market and making records by numbers. Hearing those two tracks [recorded with Strawberry Switchblade] I was chuckling actually, because I could just imagine – I’ll have to say imagine rather than remember – how those vocals came to go from where they started to where they ended up with me playing my whimsical, encouraging, exacting part in it.

And I could just imagine how those little guitar riffs on Poor Hearts started as a sound more than anything else, or may have started as a riff and I might have said ‘try that riff on this guitar, play it up the octave’. I was always trying to get people more definite with their ideas,

I always thought two or three great ideas were worth a hundred iffy ideas. If this riff’s worth having on this record, let’s make it the riff of the record. It’s not difficult, hearing those tracks, to imagine the process whereby it would have fallen into place with the group of people around.

Recording the album

Q: Did the record company hold that much sway?

Rose: Well, we met loads of producers. We met all these guys, they’d come in and say ‘this is what we’re going to do’, and I’d think, ‘no, that’s not what we’re going to do, these are our songs, we have a concept, we created them and we want to see it through to the end, so we don’t want to just hand them over to you and say Here you go’. There were a lot of producers we knew who were completely like that, who were completely the producer’s more important than the artist sort of thing, like he’s the artist. We met a few like that who we didn’t want to work with.

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

David Balfe: 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.

Rose: Then we met a couple that we tried things out with, and the one that we ended up with, David Motion, he was meant to be a try-out as well, to see how it would go. I was quite unsure – I really liked David Motion, a really nice guy, he was really easy and pleasant to work with but I was really unconvinced at first because I didn’t like some of the sounds that were coming out.

They were going ‘give it time, give it time,’ but the more time you gave it the more money was being put into the project and the more fighting you would have to do with the record company.

So in the end we ended up caught in that trap, basically. And in a sense as much as I love Motion I probably wouldn’t have gone that way.

Q: What would you have preferred to see it come out like?

Rose: I would have rather it sounded less dated, I would have rather we used more real instruments, like Trees and Flowers for example with oboe and french horn. I know we did have that on some of the other tracks as well, people like Andrew Poppy did a couple of arrangements and David Bedford did another couple where we’d have an orchestra and that’s really nice. I would have rather worked with real instruments to be perfectly honest and not all synths and stuff like that cos it was not my passion at the time.

David Balfe: 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.

Jill: I remember going to Liverpool, on the Wirral somewhere and doing some demos in somebody’s house which was just really weird as well [probably Corndon House in Birkenhead, run by David Hughes who’d previously been in Dalek I Love You with David Balfe].

Because we weren’t a band they were just trying us out with different people. They were trying us first of all with this band to see if we were happy and if we thought it worked, then they wanted to try us with a programmer to see if we were happy with that and it worked.

And then we weren’t particularly so then we tried with this other programmer David Motion who eventually did the album, and we kinda liked him, he’s a funny guy.

Q: How did you get the job of producing the Strawberry Switchblade album?

David Motion: I was in a band, Home Service, years and years ago, and basically I fell in love with the recording process. I thought I’d get into studios to learn how to do better recordings of our own material. The idea was that in down time I would record stuff for our own band. And then it took off, I was working 36 hours a day and things moved very quickly. I was in an eight-track studio in Kingston and then somebody there said they’d introduce me to this 24 track near the airport called Airport Studios.

Q: When was this?

David Motion: It started in September 1982, I was 23 at the time or something like that, fairly young. The idea was that I’d be a pop star, that was what I wanted to be, like everybody else.

Q: What genre were you?

David Motion: Technically it was techno-pop, although really without much technology. It was New Wave. I arrived in London and studied at the Royal Academy of Music when I was 18, that was 1978, and just missed the punk thing. But then the stuff that we were doing was on the back of that, it was New Wave. Very influenced by things like Kraftwerk and Yellow Magic Orchestra, early Human League, stuff like that. Cabaret Voltaire, everybody was listening to that at the time.

So I was at the Academy and then I got booted out after two years cos I just wasn’t doing the work and I had a colourful home life at the time. Also I was very interested in pop music, I’d always straddled pop and classical – as I do to this day – so I was torn. The Academy was very much, like, Elgar is the most modern thing there is as one faction, and the other faction was squeaky-gate stuff like Stockhausen, Berio, who were totally atonal. I didn’t fit into either of those genres. But they did have a little studio in the Academy, a tiny little 4-track system and I just went in there and recorded stuff and succeeded in blowing up the desk on a couple of occasions.

At the end of the second year I gave them a tape, it must’ve been about an hour’s worth of music, which was all sopranos and white noise with sweet piano behind it, tuned noise but quite tonal. They said, ‘well this is all lovely but we want you to write this piece for bassoon and piano like we asked you to, and if you don’t then don’t bother coming back’. So that was the time I thought, forget that. I went and got a job and did the band on the side of that.

After a few years of that we did a few gigs, made a few records on our own label, got played by John Peel, ran this little label out of our living room in Tottenham called Crystal Groove records. By about the third record we were getting quite sophisticated, already spent a little bit more time in the studios cos I’d started engineering.

We got one record released by Situation 2 who were part of Beggar’s Banquet, a track called Only Men Fall In Love. By that stage the drummer and I had got rid of – god that sounds really patronising! – we’d gone more techno-pop and decided guitars weren’t part of that. We were a four piece, there was a keyboard player/singer, a drummer, a guitarist and a bassist, and that was the line-up for the first two records, which was very much in keeping with the New Wave format. Then we got more and more involved in the recording, the idea is that there’s just a recorded record, it was just synthesisers and vocals and drum machine.

With that running alongside, I got into studios and that took off and I learned very very quickly. I actually managed to blag the job in the first place, it was a bit bizarre but it shows what can be done if you really really want to do something. This studio in Kingston, I had a friend – who many years down the line ended up as an A&R person at WEA quite by coincidence – who said there was this eight-track studio in Kingston called Ark and I happen to know the owner is really pissed off with his engineer; the guy is unreliable, flaky, probably charging more than he’s declaring, that sort of stuff.

So I just wrote a letter saying how punctual I was, how methodical, trustworthy, all that sort of stuff, and I got a job. The thing was that I hadn’t actually been an engineer ever before. In those days in Melody Maker they used to do articles about studios, and I got hold of one about this studio and it had a complete equipment list. I sent off to all the manufacturers asking for brochures of those bits of equipment and sat down and tried to figure it all out. I’d never actually used the gear before.

It was tied in with a little bit of looking over people’s shoulders when they were making our records so I had some sense of it, but still the first session I had with people paying was pretty hair-raising. But I learned pretty quickly. The bands tell you what they want. I did one session early on where I learned so much, a bunch of black guys in a reggae band, twelve guys in this tiny room smoking weed. They were saying, ‘no it’s wrong, it wants to be more like this’ and I’d turn the graphic EQ and go ‘that?’ and they’d say yeah; I learned like that. Then after a while you get used to tuning into records and the sounds other people use.

So I was six months in this eight-track studio, I got poached by the 24-track studio, and one of the bands that came had a friend at AIR studios, a technical guy, so I had a meeting at AIR. What I didn’t realise was that they offered me the job of assistant engineer, so it was a tape-op, it was going back several steps for me. It was quite useful though cos it meant I could look over the shoulders of the top people at the time.

Ironically Phil Thornalley was one of the first sessions I tape-opped on [Thornalley was later brought in to re-record Let Her Go and Who Knows What Love Is? on the Strawberry Switchblade album after the record company rejected Motion’s versions]. He was doing a Thompson Twins mix with Alex Sadkin. It was amazing just to see how people at that level worked. I did a lot of stuff with Chris Hughes and Ross Cullum, I tape-opped for Martin Rushent.

Q: Had you heard any of the recordings then, the BBC sessions of the indie single?

David Motion: I don’t remember the BBC sessions, I remember the single. They were more interested for me to hear the next set of demos. The demos were very much along the same lines, quite indie, guitar and vocals. At that time I was really more interested in fashioning pop. Not necessarily commercial – although I have some commercial instincts I still think I am quite left of centre and quirky.

In that early period I remember them coming to my flat in Tottenham, we’d borrowed a synth and we kind of thrashed around a bit with that and a drum machine that we may even have borrowed from Balfey. I mapped out one or two of the songs, then we started recording, then it just sort of developed into the album.

I don’t remember being on some kind of shortlist or anything. I think the idea was we’d work on a track or two and see how it went, and if it worked out it’d lead to an album. At the time Balfe and Drummond were also A&R; and had this kind of unit, they were on the same floor as Max Hole and Rob Dickins and Paul Conroy. I can’t remember the exact relationship. They were technically A&R, but they were also Strawberry Switchblade’s managers.

I remember them saying they’d done this indie release, released it on a friendly label or whatever, but it is seen to be coming out of the underground for it to be authentic and all that. And they thought they could do something more.

Q: What else has he done? I’ve never seen his name on anything else.

Jill: He’d worked – [giggles] he’d worked with Dollar!

Q: ‘kinnell!

Jill: I know! We were saying, ‘no way! No way! I don’t think that’s going to be quite us, is it? Are you really sure about this?’ And they were saying he’s a really nice guy.

Q: Jill said you’d previously worked with Dollar.

David Motion: I worked with them separately after they’d split up. At AIR I did a remix with Thereze Bazaar. I found her slightly harder to work with cos she had worked with Trevor Horn and was doing her remix with this ‘I’m The Producer’ vibe about her.

I worked with David Van Day with Wang Chung. This was slightly before Strawberry Switchblade. Wang Chung had written a song for him. They got me in to engineer this thing, we did it at Marcus studios. David Van Day is a very very nice bloke, very amusing person, but he really could not sing to save his life. We were recording his vocal and he just could not get it, just could not get it.

At Marcus there was a vocal booth with a piano in it which you couldn’t see into from the control room, which was very very necessary. We had to have him off to one side out of sight, because he would’ve found it demoralising had he seen the efforts we were going to. It was in turns exasperating and amusing.

What we resorted to doing was running the tape, take all the backing track out of it, and at a particular moment Jack would play the piano and sing the line before and I’d bang it into record and David would try and mimic what he just heard. It took days and days and days to get four lines of vocal which were really not that hard. It was scary. I’d be punching in on individual syllables.

The amazing thing is that once you did actually piece one together out of sixty odd takes it sounded a million dollars. But god it was hard work.

At the end of doing this track we went to a Japanese restaurant and we all got quite drunk and David was saying he didn’t want to be a singer anyway, he wanted to be an actor. I can’t remember if he said he’d been to RADA [Royal Academy of Dramatic Art] but he’d certainly been to some acting college. And then proceeded to spout Shakespeare at volume. Just before we asked for the bill he gave it the whole ‘now is the winter of our discontent’, doing a good thirty lines of it.

At the same time I was at AIR I was still producing on the side in smaller studios for Cherry Red and people like that. Did an album for Kevin Hewick, there was a band called Swallow Tongue I did a 12 inch for. I was just working stupid, stupid hours, doing a full day at AIR and then sessions elsewhere on these other bits, so I was quite fried, which was another thing that made me want to move on pretty fast.

So I left AIR and about a month afterwards I got a call from Max Hole who was Chris Hughes’ manager. Chris Hughes was the producer of Tears For Fears. I tape opped on a session he did for Wang Chung.

Q: Was it unusual for a producer to have a manager?

David Motion: No, it was quite common in those days. I didn’t have one at that time, but I wasn’t a big name producer. It was quite common; I got a manager in ’86. The second you have any sniff of a hit they call – I had calls from about 25 managers, it was a real eye-opener, quite fascinating.

Chris Hughes produced Adam Ant early on – Kings of The Wild Frontier, the hits – and he was also a drummer so he was rhythmically very very good. He hooked up with an engineer called Ross Cullum and they were notorious for how long they took over things; that was an eye-opener as well. At AIR studios they were doing a few overdubs for one track, Dance Hall Days by Wang Chung, and then mixing. The mix took four days, and two and a half days of that was basically spent on the bass drum, getting the sound just right. That’s symptomatic of the way it was all going in the 1980s.

I learned quite a lot just looking over peoples shoulders; Martin Rushent had a particular system of how he worked, Chris Hughes had a system with his Fairlight and stuff like that, a lot of triggering going on A lot of time was spent on things, and it was very difficult to keep your objectivity over that length of time.

So Max Hole, Chris Hughes’ manager, also happened to be the head of A&R at WEA Records, which was quite handy. So he phoned up and said, ‘Chris Hughes said you were great, why don’t you come in and do a meeting?’. We did a meeting, and at the time I had no idea how powerful or important it was, you know, Rob Dickins was there as well, and they said, ‘we’ve had this idea, we’d like to offer you a contract as a staff producer position’. I’d never heard of that before.

Q: It’s the kind of thing Motown did in the 1960s.

David Motion: Exactly. And WEA when it was Atlantic, all those people had staff producers who would produce all the stuff. It was great for me. The idea was I’d produce two singles and two albums as part of this year-long deal. I did two tracks for Black. It was clear they were going places, but then wasn’t really the moment. I can’t remember what else I did. Then it was Strawberry Switchblade. They said, ‘we’d like you to come and meet Strawberry Switchblade and we’re very keen for you to work with them’.

Jill: We liked David Motion when we met him, we got on well with him, we liked what he did, it was really quirky and kinda weird.

Q: It is quirky to be given those songs and want to put really heavy distorted drum sounds on them.

Jill: Exactly. With every song we were like, ‘you can’t do that David, you can’t do that, what do you think you’re doing?’ We’d come in and he’d ask us what we think of a sound. Like Deep Water, we were like ‘what?’ But it was great, it just worked, and we said OK, let’s go with it. And we did a few and it was, ‘yeah, we like this’. It’s very 1980s when you listen to it now. Which is not necessarily a terrible thing.

It’s funny because we did try do play it down, try to keep it folky, keep it poppy-folky-jazzy, keep it quite innocent, quite acoustic, and it just didn’t work. We didn’t know enough about anything like that to be able to say what we wanted.

Q: There was the whole Sade thing going on, you could’ve been pushed into the sophisticated wine-barry thing.

Jill: And we really didn’t want to go there. When we found David and he was really quirky and a bit weird, we thought we’d go with that. It was mostly just him. Occasionally he brought somebody else in, but it was mostly just him and an engineer and us. It was a nice way to work. You have to let somebody help because we couldn’t do everything.

Q: What were your first impressions on meeting them?

David Motion: I thought they had a vibe, they definitely had a really interesting atmosphere about them, that sweet and sour at the same time kind of thing, dark and fluffy at the same time, fascinating. I found them very bright, very lively, and very very easy to get on with.

Q: How do you remember the working relationship between Rose and Jill?

David Motion: Very friendly, very kind of tight. They seemed very close. The more I got to know them the more I realised how different they were. They seemed to get on really well, I never really saw them argue but they were coming from slightly different places I think.

Rose was always slightly kind of – you can see it in the vocals – her vocals are harder, possibly less… if I say ‘sentimental’ it sounds like I’m saying Jill’s are sentimental which they’re not, but Jill’s were always softer and sweeter and that’s why quite often she would be doing the chorus ethereal stuff, Jill’s was always more logical and Rose’s voice would always cut much more. That’s how they were as people as well.

I never really saw them arguing, they seemed quite close. They also had their support network as well, ‘entourage’ is a strong word but Jill’s boyfriend at the time, Peter, was with her everywhere. With her agoraphobia and everything, she would appear in a cab and then he would always be around. I don’t know if [Rose’s husband] Drew was around that much, but there was a sense that it wasn’t just Rose and Jill, there were other kind of lobby parties around.

Q: Did it seem like an equal partnership between them?

David Motion: It did to me. I was very keen for there to be a good relationship amongst the three of us, but I always saw them as presenting a fairly unified front. I don’t remember thinking, ‘if I can get Rose on my side on this one we can get it through,’ or it ever being anything like that. They seemed to be getting on really well, and be having fun also with the forthcoming success.

Rose: We actually recorded the album in quite a few different studios which, instead of going into one studio and recording the whole album, we travelled around and did different songs in different studios.

David Motion: I was very keen to do a week at a time in different studios. Partly for my own experience, to play the field and find where the good studios are, and it was something quirky as well to keep changing the landscape, having been stuck in AIR studios for several months. I wanted to try out all these other places that I’d heard of, so that’s exactly what we did.

I would set up a song, record, which was actually quite hard cos when it started I was engineering it and producing it at the same time. At Marcus studios when we were starting certain tracks Rose and Jill weren’t coming in until after lunch, so if I were playing the piano or whatever then the tape op would be recording it and I’d be running in to listen to it. The initial arrangement was done quite quickly really. Then they’d come in and go ‘we like that’ or ‘we don’t like that’ or whatever; generally I found them incredibly receptive.

They did give me an awful lot of control. There was an awful lot of trust. It was fantastic for me, really. Everybody was saying greatgreatgreat and just letting me get on with it. They’d come in and say, ‘that’s great’, and as time unfolded and we finished things – I can’t remember if we finished Since Yesterday before the rest of the album or what – they started getting the marketing department and the promotions department taking up more of their time. We were having to carve out time for them to come and do vocals. But it all worked very well.

Q: What you did to the songs was such a departure from what they’d done before. Did they have any reservations about any of it?

David Motion: Not that I was aware of. Whether or not it was something I was ignoring in the general euphoria of it playing out that way and me having this enormous freedom, but basically everyone seemed happy with the way it was going. I did have a very clear idea about what I wanted to do, and I was always very interested in creating a very clear atmosphere, something very concrete something loaded and cool and with all sorts of interesting sounds. I was very interested in pushing the sonic side of it, lots and lots of processing, I was interested in mucking about more.

I thought it was great to be working with people who allowed me to do all that other stuff. I’d get the demo, listen to the track, figure out what the chords are and build it up from there. Obviously respecting the integrity of the top line of the melodies, I don’t remember touching those in any way.

Part of what I did with a lot of it was just change. The chords were always fairly straightforward, the song came as them doing a demo, demo vocals sometimes with incomplete words and very straightforward guitar chords. Nothing wrong with it, but a lot of what I was doing was changing it so there was a lot of substitution so it’s not just E or A or whatever, putting different things in the bass, just to make it all flow a bit better and have a bit more colour and texture.

I can’t remember the process for that, but it was a very evolutionary thing. Things would get chopped around a lot as well, partly by the way that I was working in the studio. It was quite techno, in the sense that we were using a lot of technology, but it was still very early technology, so it was very early sequencing.

A lot of the stuff was triggered – and this is stuff I’d picked up from people like Martin Rushent and Chris Hughes when I was tape-opping at AIR – where you put linn drum code down and fire samples off that. Sometimes there’d be delays and the linn code would be before it by a second or something and you’d have to have a delay for the sample. So you’d put down the linn drum where you wanted it to start, just as a reference point. Then you’d load a sample of a particular drum sound into an AMS, which was a delay at the time, trim that down and then that would always be slightly late, so you’d have to turn the tape over to measure how far you were out.

You could do it by ear if you like, but if you were doing it methodically you’d measure it so you’d get it bang in time. It was painstaking stuff. I’m amazed it only took six or seven weeks, that was quite quick considering the technology.

And then there was some early sequencing. I can’t remember the name of the sequencer, but there was a guy called Gary Hutchens who I worked with a lot round that time. This is pre-computer as well, before Cubase and stuff like that.

Everything else had to support that, but it wasn’t like a guitar band, it’s not like we’ll play this live. You kind of build a concept and graft this on to that, but I always believed about production that you want to leave somebody with a very clear impression after they’ve heard it, even if they can’t necessarily remember the melody you want to leave them with a very clear sense of atmosphere. And the atmosphere needs to kind of match what they look like and what they’re trying to project.

Recording the album, ii

Q: On Since Yesterday, how did the fanfare from Sibelius’ 5th symphony get on it?

Jill: That was David Motion. I’m not sure he even realised. He didn’t tell us. Not being great classical music fans we didn’t know! That was his thing, he did it and said what do you think, and we said, ‘yeah, sounds good’. It’s only afterwards we had to ask ‘who’s Sibelius then?’.

Q: Did much get changed that late on?

Jill: Nothing major. Since Yesterday we rewrote the verse. But that wasn’t him, that was us. We were sitting together and David Balfe was saying that we should think about the verse and rewrite it cos it was a bit repetitive, so Rose rewrote the lyrics. That was the most major change that we did. [The song was originally titled Dance, and had been recorded for the BBC Jensen session in October 1982]

Q: It’s the most prominent song on the album and yet until quite late the lyrics and melody were totally different. How late was it changed?

Jill: Pretty late, cos I remember Bill Drummond and David Balfe saying we should work on the lyrics. And not so much the lyrics but the tune to get more melody into it, a bit of variation. It was fairly late on, we were rehearsing together in London for the album and Rose rewrote the lyrics for it.

Q: Out in one go or did she work at it?

Jill: She must’ve gone off and worked at it. I think later on she’d just have said no! I was quite amazed that she did do that, I think that was the only one that she did rewrite the lyrics for.

Q: Listening to the earlier versions of the songs they change a bit but the lyrics are basically in place for everything except that one.

Jill: When she changed that little melody bit and it wouldn’t fit whatever we had for it before, so she just had to go away and rethink it, and she did. I remember her coming up and singing it and thinking it was much better, fantastic. So that’s how it was. At that point David Motion must’ve heard the demos, it was very late on.

Q: That was Balfe spurring that on – how close was he watching?

Jill: Not that much really. He was involved and he would probably have liked to be a bit more involved, but no, he left the music side of it to us. He had another band at the time that he was managing.

It’s funny cos when we signed with David Balfe and Bill Drummond we thought Bill Drummond was going to be our manager and it turned out to be David Balfe who was the one looking after us, and he was obviously a man with an eye on climbing a career ladder and having his own record label or being a manager and making money. So a lot of his decisions we were wary of, cos it was obvious that’s what he was doing.

[Balfe swiftly went on to form his own label, Food Records, starting with Jesus Jones, Crazyhead and Diesel Park West. Then he signed Blur and sold the label to EMI for several million pounds]

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?

David Balfe: 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.

Jill: He had a band called Brilliant, do you remember them?

Q: Yeah, Youth from Killing Joke and Jimmy Cauty who went on to do the KLF with Bill Drummond. Truly dreadful album, the Brilliant album. I don’t know how much you can confirm of this – the legend is that Drummond signed them to WEA for a ridiculous amount of money.

Jill: Yes. Which didn’t happen with us!

Q: And Drummond got Pete Waterman in to produce for another ridiculous amount of money, and doing the Brilliant album is what paid for Waterman’s set-up that gave us the Stock Aitken Waterman unholy trinity in the late 1980s.

Jill: Very possibly. I would imagine that’s the truth.

Q: The Brilliant album deservedly sold fuck all and lost a fortune.

Jill: I remember going down to meet Youth. I can’t remember why. Balfey was also managing Zodiac Mindwarp as well.

Q: That early?

Jill: That was towards the end, after we’d done the album. I remember Peter [McArthur, Jill’s boyfriend] doing some photos for Zodiac Mindwarp. Balfey seemed to know a lot of people, a big network of quite disparate people.

Q: There’s the Youth connection with you then – Youth gets a credit on the Let Her Go remix.

Jill: Yes, that’s right. Him and Balfey were quite big pals.

Q: The version of Since Yesterday you would’ve heard on BBC sessions or demos would have been called Dance, which was substantially different.

David Motion: I didn’t realise that. It’s possible she said, ‘I’m going to rewrite it’ and when she sang it it just sounded so natural, but I can’t honestly remember that.

I remember doing something I did an awful lot at the time, at the end of a track to have all the vocals running at once for the end choruses. I think they really enjoyed that because all of a sudden it takes it to another level and you can see how everything fits nicely together, you get extra texture. I think it was something they hadn’t really come across before. It worked really well, you just ran a section of the verse vocal while the chorus vocals go on at full tilt.

Q: Having heard the Radio 1 sessions and other early versions, the bombast of a lot of the released versions is quite overpowering by comparison.

Rose: I know. It was quite weird really, cos it was a medium that I wasnae that familiar with – synthesisers and stuff – not being very technically minded. I could work the mixing desk, I’d engineer for him and stuff like that cos I really liked doing that. I do like synths a lot more now than I did then, I buy them now and I use them now.

But I kinda always really liked the sound of Trees and Flowers, the fragility of it and the beauty of the pure sounding instruments that are played well, it just sounded really really nice. I would have liked to have done a bit more of that, especially when you get little hook lines in something like On The Journey From Home [Being Cold] with the melodica parts, melodies like that. If you have really strong melodies, OK we played them on melodicas and we were playing harmonies over each other, but I would have been so nice if some of the other songs could have been that rich. They wouldn’t have dated quite as much. I know loads of people are back into 1980s stuff again.

Q: It’s in a revivalist way though, superficial and nostalgic rather than creative.

Rose: Yeah and kinda kitschy. I would love to do that album again, I think those songs just weren’t done justice to. I don’t want to say anything that would reflect badly on anybody that was involved in it cos I liked everybody that we worked with, but I really think they [the songs] weren’t done justice to, they could have been so much better.

Q: It’s difficult with new technology to spot what’s going to date badly, you can’t tell what’s going to be superseded and what’s going to stick around.

Rose: Well of course, I know, of course. And there were some great sounds actually – I love that whale sound on Deep Water which was a synth sound. I love that sound, it gets you in the gut.

I really liked quite a lot of it but there were bits of it that are too rinky-dink for me. You know what I mean? Like, press the sequencer and everything just goes dut-dut-dut-dut-dut, there’s nothing organic in there. Where’s the breath? Where’s the human in that? Everything’s digitalised. I like analogue, although I use digital now as well, I do like that real feeling about music when you can actually hear somebody’s breath or you can hear them play the guitar, you can almost hear the fingers touching it.

Q: I love acoustic stuff where you can hear the fret squeak as the fingers move on the wound strings.

Rose: When they squeak and it’s a good squeak in the right place I like it, but if it’s a squeak that’s ‘that wasn’t supposed to be there’, I don’t like that actually. Although I’m guilty of it sometimes. I like deliberate ones though. Music’s just one of those things, it does something different to everybody. I think those songs could have been so much better if we’d gone with the same approach as Trees and Flowers and done it with real instruments, and we should have blended it a bit, but it all went dut-dut-dut-dut-dut. And some of the songs, my voice is so shrill, it’s really high and I just think, god, I sound like a chipmunk.

Q: But it’s that which gives it the fragility, the delicate touch. Harmonies build it up but it’s the high voice that creates that gorgeous fragile bit, that’s the thing that gives it its real sensitivity, its real power.

Rose: I like them, but I like them when they have a bass harmony down there somewhere. I like harmonies that are really close, that kind of resonate almost, like they’re the same organic thing.

A lot of things I do now I like to put really close harmonies so it has almost a Gregorian feel. Then I like to put really high things over the top. But some of the first album I did in Sorrow I went overboard on harmonies, harmonies everywhere, put on another one!

The second album round I thought, ‘you’re being too predictable putting harmonies everywhere just because you can,’ so I pulled back from that a wee bit.

But it’s good to experiment. I want to record an album that’s all vocals, all the different melodies are vocal melodies. Maybe just a bit of simple heartbeat drumming a bit of flute or something like that, but mostly all vocal melodies coming from all directions. I really want to do that, something to completely surround your head and get drowned in.

I did a gig recently and a guy came up to me and said ‘your songs really haunt me,’ and I thought that’s a real compliment. And we did this gig – this is not about Strawberry Switchblade – we did this gig in America and the whole audience started crying, it was amazing, it was totally amazing.

First of all this girl started crying, then someone else started crying, her boyfriend started crying, it was fucking amazing. What a compliment, to make all these people cry, you know? A whole bunch of them – ten of them – got a plane and came over when we played Whitby last year.

We did one gig in Germany, the venue had a lot to do with it, it was this massive big monument and it was circular. We opened with a vocal piece and then bagpipes came in, really really soft and gentle at the beginning. There was a little glass dome at the very top of the monument and just as I started singing the sun came through this dome and put a ray of light where I was stood, it was fucking angelic!

And this girl who was in one of the other bands, the cellist with Backworld, she came back afterwards and said when the ray of light came through her eyes just filled. If somebody tells you that you can make them cry it’s really touching. You’re touching people then.

Q: The thing that separates good music from bad whatever the genre is a thing Mick Jones from The Clash said. He said he was sick of seeing all these big bands doing enormous gigs that just took your money and put you in a field while they played and at the end of it you were exactly the same but older and poorer. They just take your money and time, they don’t give you anything. He said he wanted to be in a band that gives more than it takes, something that move people, make them feel different at the end than they were at the start. That power to affect is the thing that separates all good music from the bad. Whether you’re listening to Dead Can Dance, Funkadelic or Nirvana, they all pass that test.

Rose: I totally agree with you. Music is there to move you, it’s there to play with your emotions. Even when I was growing up the stuff I was drawn to was the stuff I could feel, it’s the passion in music – whether it’s tragic or beautiful or whatever – it’s that passion in music that makes music so powerful, which gives music the power over you as a human being.

I remember I just love Jah Wobble’s bass playing cos it used to thud you right in the gut, right in the solar plexus. Some people’s music just has that. This Is The Day by The The, that accordion part, god, I used to play that over and over on my walkman all the time. Whenever I was feeling shit or depressed I’d put that on and I’d go [sings melody] I just loved it so much. I got an accordion, I needed to play that melody! There are just some things so brilliant that will stay with you forever.

Q: This is why people still want to talk to you about Strawberry Switchblade or why people still listen to the Mary Chain, when nobody wants to interview a contemporary like Nick Kamen about his records. It’s the difference between who means it and who doesn’t.

Recording the album, iii

Q: How quickly was the album done?

David Motion: I have a very low attention span so I tended to work very quickly on it. We did the album in six or seven weeks, although there was a bit of pootling around at the end with a bit of remixing and that sort of stuff, it was essentially six weeks which was fairly quick at the time.

Jill: It took a while because we had all these stop-starts with other people. We went to lots of different studios, so it seemed like a lot longer than it was. He [David Motion] wanted to try out lots of different studios, which was fine by us. We were ‘let’s sample the local studios!’, so we did a bit here, a bit there.

Q: Did WEA say to spend all that money cos it didn’t matter, you were going to be huge?

Jill: Yeah, they were ‘whatever’. It wasn’t budgetless, you know, and obviously he [Motion] wasn’t as expensive as Trevor Horn, and they weren’t overgenerous, but it certainly cost. It was great.

We went to Chipping Norton to do some of it, a residential studio. I remember taking the cats, Rose had a cat and I had three and we stayed in this studio with cottages that had hessian wallpaper and the cats climbed up it, hanging off like stickle-bricks, one of them was chewing all the dried flowers round the fireplaces.

There was tons of gold discs and stuff, the Bay City Rollers had recorded there in the 1970s in their heyday. We were ‘oh my gosh, this is so weird, it’s the English countryside’, we’d never been in that before. So we’d do a week there and then a week in some studio in Westbourne Grove then a week in a studio in Finsbury Park. It must’ve taken about two or three months, all in all.

Q: How much were WEA watching over your shoulder?

David Motion: Not that much, really. I mean, they’d pop down from time to time. We did a week in [rural residential studio] Chipping Norton and that was fairly close to the end, and I think I might’ve arranged it like that cos I didn’t really want them to come down that much. It was harder for them to do that if we were at Chipping Norton.

I think we did a week at Martin Rushent’s place as well, at Goring [rural Berkshire]. It wasn’t actively to discourage people from coming down, they were welcome whenever. They didn’t really come down that much, they were really just listening to the end result and saying ‘that’s great’ or ‘no it isn’t’.

Q: Was it easy working with David Motion?

Jill: Dead easy.

Q: His work is so prominent on it, was there any kind of difficulty with how much he put in?

Jill: No, because we got on with him.

Q: But you’re having to trust him to take these songs that you’ve been living with for a long time, he comes in and throws these huge sounds on to it all.

Jill: We were kinda gobsmacked a lot of the time, but he always asked us. He wasn’t a man that you couldn’t approach. We trusted him and we liked him.

Q: Did you and Rose have much input into the arrangement of drums and bass and whatnot?

Jill: No, he did it. He had heard fairly complete recordings of the stuff, and if he wanted to do any major change he spoke to us about it and we sat down and he played us through it.

Rose: We could say yes and no to things. If we really didn’t like something we did have the power of veto. But also, there were so many bloody cooks in the kitchen, d’you know what I mean? At first there was just me, Jill and David Motion, but then Balfe would come along and put his tuppence worth in and Drummond, and then the head of the company.

But we did have a lot of control over it in the end actually, about how it was mixed and stuff like that, but if you’re having control over something you’re not a hundred percent in love with it doesn’t mean as much.

David Motion: We never disagreed in a major way. Occasionally it might be, ‘are you sure?,’ that kind of thing, but I’d modify it.

Q: Both of them remember it being a very easy very smooth working process.

David Motion: It was. I never felt as if we were steamrollering them into something they didn’t want to do, I never got any sniff of that.

Q: You’ve said that they were happy with what you’d done to the songs. Were there any of their ideas you didn’t go for?

David Motion: No, not really, because they’d always deliver them as, ‘well here are the songs’. It wasn’t that it was not under discussion but it was kind of ‘see what you can do with it’, and that was it.

My angle was very much that I was having fun and I’d come in one day and say, well, I feel a bit of Michel Legrand or something, so – what was that track that David Bedford did, the last track; Being Cold – so with that I just started and thought it could be a really nice Windmills Of Your Mind kind of vibe and it kind of grew from that and sort of seemed to work, and the melodica added to that sort of thing.

Q: Jill says she was actively discouraged by David Bedford from putting a melodica on it.

David Motion: Oh yeah! But I just thought that added the final touch. I think that’s the nice thing, you’ve got this quiet pro backing and this slightly ramshackle thing on top and that kind of gives it the edge.

Going back to the Phil Thornalley things, they’re a bit too polished, it might not have been the right song, I don’t know, but maybe people sense if it’s not quite real enough. I like quirky stuff, and I wasn’t trying to thrash the quirkiness out of them, maybe that’s why that worked. Those kind of touches really helped, I think.

It was nice to have those little bits of orchestral stuff on as well. I was doing lots of stuff like triggering white noise and tuned noise and stuff like that on 10 James Orr Street.

On my version of Who Knows What Love Is?, which you can hear on the reprise, it got quite in deep with the sampled brush sounds, stuff like that, each with their own slightly different reverb and positioning, that took quite a while to construct.

And then there was this trumpeter Bruce Nockles; I was very keen to have a texture, there was something kind of missing, so I just sent him out and he said ‘why not just do some long notes?’ and then it was ‘yeah that’s great, but can you do more different ones?’, so there are these clusters and this slightly drifty backing.

Rose: The one thing I don’t like about that is that the guitars are hardly audible at all. There are guitars on that album believe it or not, but they were mixed so low cos David Motion doesn’t like guitars, so low that Jill and I were almost mixed out of the album, apart from vocally. Not all, there are obvious bits where our presence is there, but I think that I would’ve done things a wee bit different.

But it was that ‘just give it a chance, give it a chance,’ and then the album’s finished and you’re listening to it, and then what do you say? ‘I hate it, we’ve spent £250,000 and I want to do it again’? We’d just been round all these different studios and that would have really fucked them off.

I was objecting to some of the stuff we were doing, right at the beginning of the recording sessions, thinking, ‘hmm I don’t think I like the way this is going’, and it was all ‘keep trying, give it a chance’; acquire a taste for it, basically.

Q: For your own record!

Rose: Exactly! And I was ‘hmm, I still don’t like it’, and at the end of the day there were so many layers of things on. There were a lot of things I did like about it, but, you know. But if I’d been recording it myself it would’ve been very different.

I’ve a recording studio through there now, so what I do, I do it myself so I’ve got complete control. And that’s the way it should be really. I mean, if you write a song you should see it through to the end.

OK, once it’s on vinyl or CD it belongs to whoever buys it, that’s my opinion anyway. Send your baby off out into the world and people will listen to it and get what they get from it or not, but you’ve done your bit then and you’re happy with it when you send it out, and it’s a much better feeling than not being happy with it when you send it out, or being doubtful.

It was so confusing, everything was going so fast, we were off doing this, off doing that, then back recording something else. It was kinda hard to be focussed on ‘do I like this or not?’, do you know what I mean? It was really confusing. A lot of pushing and shoving was going on and I think Jill and I were wiped out by the workload we were doing. Especially when we were doing crap stuff, spending the whole bloody day doing a photo session, it was the most boring thing in the world. I didn’t mind interviews so much but I hated photo sessions.

David Motion: I think they did get a little frustrated with the lack of time they had. The cabs would start to arrive later. That was such a record company thing in those days, instead of travelling by tube or any other way it’d always be a cab from home, a cab back. They’d have more marketing meetings and have to go, as it got closer to the end there was more of that which had an impact on our time. Which gave me space to do even more stuff.

David Balfe: 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 don’t think it was the right way to have done the album. There’s no guitars!

David Balfe: Well there are some guitars.

Q: But they’re very very buried.

David Balfe: 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.

David Balfe: 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.

Recording the album, iv

Q: When the album was finished was everybody happy with the result?

David Motion: I think so, yeah. I was very happy.

Q: Rose and Jill?

David Motion: Yeah, they seemed very happy.

It was finished in summer, then it was released in September or October [the flagship single Since Yesterday was – the album wasn’t released until April 1985] and they were hoping to get the autumn rush as I was saying, and I didn’t really see much of them cos they were busy doing loads and loads of promotion.

At the tail end of the recording of the album they were also doing a lot of stuff like photo shoots and general image things and beginning to do interviews. They worked very hard.

I remember I saw Rose some time later. It was all such a novelty to begin with, doing the interviews. And then after a while there were these rumours emerging, I think she said she liked mud wrestling or something like that in some interview. She said, ‘yeah, we say the same thing day in day out, after a while I got bored and started making stuff up,’ which is just brilliant.

They were very much on a fast track for a while, preoccupied with the promotional side. I know that sounds very corporate, but that’s the way it is.

Q: They both say it exactly the same.

David Motion: They were very good at hanging on to their integrity about what Strawberry Switchblade were, they were rock solid and they had a clarity and a presence which was great.

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.

David Balfe: 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.

Q: So where did Phil Thornalley come into it?

Jill: There were a couple of tracks that we were a little bit iffy about. And Phil Thornalley was somebody I think Balfey and Bill Drummond knew, so we said let’s see if he can do a version of them. I really liked him, he was great. We had a very intense session doing it, he got the drummer from The Cure in to play the drums.

Q: He’d already recorded some great stuff with The Cure, which is a whole different attitude than Dollar.

Jill: It was Who Knows What Love Is? we did with Phil Thornalley. We’d already recorded it with David Motion.

David Motion: There was a residual thing about the album, that Rob Dickins was saying about my sound basically, which was that it was incredibly bright and it hurt his ears and there was no bass and stuff like that. Which I don’t think is really true, although I was very fond of that kind of that really bright, jangly, angular kind of sound. Which is why Phil Thornalley did a couple of tracks on the album.

Obviously I’m bound to say this, but I still think my versions are better, but his were much smoother and more commercial really.

Q: I was just about to ask this, what brought Phil Thornalley in?

David Motion: I think because of this residual thing that somehow my sound was a bit hard. They – that’s Rob and Max – were obsessed about things crossing over into the States. I’m not sure Strawberry Switchblade were ever a Stateside proposition.

Q: I don’t think anything was ever even released in the USA.

David Motion: No, but they identified that if it was smoother and a little bit softer it might work better for the States. We did have this ongoing tension between us, Rob and Max versus myself, about the sound. I loved it, the brighter the better as far as I was concerned at the time but, as I said, I did have my own agenda. So he [Phil Thornalley] was brought in and he did Jolene and he did..

Q: It was Clive Langer did Jolene, Phil Thornalley did Let Her Go and Who Knows What Love Is?

David Motion: Yeah. My version of Who Knows What Love Is? there’s the reprise at the end, which forms the basis of my version. I only just relistened to it today for the first time in five or six years and a lot of the arrangement was stuff lifted straight off mine. They were quite open about it, they said ‘all the arrangement stuff is fantastic but if you can’t get that sound we need to try it with somebody else.

Phil Thornalley had been doing the Thompson Twins – I don’t know if that was the same time, but I think it was [it was earlier: Thornalley engineered the two previous Thompson Twins albums] – and he was just starting to work with The Cure then and was seen as a useful choice [that was also earlier – Thornalley had produced The Cure’s Pornography in 1982].

Q: Do you still have copies of your versions of the other two tracks?

David Motion: I probably do. I need to dig them out. I’ve got an original test pressing with the original running order which I just saw today. I’d need to have a little poke around and see what I can find.

There was also… I don’t know if we ever finished it… I’m a bit hazy on my memory… we did two more tracks after the body of the album, and I think there’s a version of Let Her Go that I did and then there was one other track, I can’t remember the name.

We did two more tracks down at Sarm East and they were never released. I can’t remember what it was, it might’ve been the sort of thing where Since Yesterday had been a hit and there was a certain kind of acknowledgement that maybe it was right for me to be doing it or something – this is a guess rather than anything else – and we did do another two tracks and for whatever reason they weren’t released. I’ll try and find those. It might only be a backing track.

They were very very busy, the second the single came out they were very busy with interviews and stuff, I didn’t see much of them for ages after that.

Q: How does the album sound to you now?

David Motion: I just listened to it this morning, I thought it sounded fantastic. It still sounds very fresh, sounds very modern to me and I’m pleased with it. It had a lot of ideas, I think that’s the thing, it’s just packed. From my point of view I’m very happy with the way it sounds. I’m not a big one for saying I’d do things differently cos I just wouldn’t, you know? It’s all part of a learning process. It sounds very assured to me, it sounds very clear and did exactly what we all wanted.

I don’t know how it could have been done better. There was this sense – they had high profile management in Balfe and Drummond, they were connected right at the very top in WEA so they got all the promotional machine. Other than taking issue with some of the choices of singles or whatever, the actual production side of things, I don’t know how it could have been bettered, really.

Bill Drummond: 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‘.

Bill Drummond: 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.

Robin Millar: I wouldn’t have wanted to take Strawberry Switchblade where they ended up going anyway. I wouldn’t have been happy doing them. I never got any sense from them that they wanted something different from what was going on; that might have been my naivety, I was pretty naive as far as UK producing was concerned, I only did things as I felt them. Maybe if I’d sat down and asked them the right questions… but you would’ve thought that somewhere in the conversation electro and sequencers and synths would’ve come up if that’s what they’d wanted.

Q: They’ve said that it was David Motion’s idea and they rolled with it, and Rose said there was this situation where the Powers That Be would say ‘if you’re not entirely happy just give it a chance’, and by the time it’s been given a chance there’s a lot of time and money been invested in it and it’s much more difficult to get out of it.

They liked working with David Motion. It shocked them at first, but they liked the result. It was only later they realised it was part of the plan to make them into this frothier Smash Hits thing which they really didn’t want to do and they really hated, and in the end it pulled them to pieces.

Robin Millar: I certainly could have told them that that would happen. It’s so easy to bulldoze young artists into making records that they end up ashamed of and compromised by, that end up painting a picture of them that’s not them.

I absolutely have faith in the fact that I can walk into a room with any artist I’ve worked with will come up and embrace me, say ‘great to see you,’ and something like ‘I still play those tracks we did together’, whether they were hits or not. I’ve never been interested in getting into that.

The records I’ve done that have sold – and there’ve been lots of them – have stood the test of time, are generally organic in nature, generally involve real musicians. And that, as I said earlier, is not because I don’t like that other stuff, it’s just not what I do, it’s not what turns me on.

It’s funny that Balfe went full circle in a way and ended up hating anything that didn’t sound like a band had walked into a studio and just played it. He made public speeches about it at record company do’s.

Rose: There was this other thing that we did, we did a bit of a soundtrack for an Ursula Le Guin story called Rigel 9 [David Bedford album Rigel 9, see discography]. The guy that did some of the orchestration on the Switchblade album asked us to do it. There’s this part in the book where there’s a procession of little aliens, it’s a funeral procession and they’re mourning, and he got us to do the vocals for it, these high little alien voices. I don’t actually know if there’s a movie or anything, but you’d wonder why there was a soundtrack if not.

Q: Do you remember the David Bedford album that Strawberry Switchblade sang on, Rigel 9?

David Motion: No I don’t

Q: The contact was through the sessions you produced.

David Motion: David Bedford’s done loads of stuff, he was involved with Tubular Bells and all that. I’d come across him cos I admired a piece he did, I think it’s called Twelve Hours of Sunset or something like that, and I really enjoyed it.

Q: So it was you who brought him in to work with Strawberry Switchblade?

David Motion: Yeah, I said I think he’s the right person for this, and he did what I thought was a great arrangement, the orchestral stuff on Being Cold, and I think he did a little string thing on Another Day, just a string section thing that was pretty easy [also on Poor Hearts]. I also got Andrew Poppy in on 10 James Orr Street as well.

I used David Bedford for one little section on Orlando as well – you know, the movie [Motion did the score] – he did a section on that.

Q: After the album there was only one more single that came out in the UK, Jolene, which Clive Langer gets the production credit on

David Motion: Oh really?

Q: Do you find it odd that they went with someone else after you?

No. That’s a lesson that you learn over time. It’s not something that makes it any easier. I don’t feel bitter about it or anything, that’s just the way that the industry is.

There was this feeling at WEA that my sound is too bright, there wasn’t enough bass, all that sort of stuff and they wanted something smoother. That’s what they thought, so they’d just go to the people who do that sort of stuff.

They were basically still obsessed about the idea that something could be a hit outside the UK, preferably in the States, and I think that drove a lot of their choice of producer. Obviously it’s disappointing, but I’m not sure I could’ve done a job on Jolene anyway, it’s not my cup of tea really.

Q: It smelt of desperation, the previous single not having charted, so throw out a cover version. Drummond’s idea, apparently.

David Motion: Ha! When in doubt, do a cover.

But it’s funny the kind of impact and the echoes that it has, it’s almost like a full cycle because I’d been listening to a lot of YMO [Yellow Magic Orchestra] before I worked with Strawberry Switchblade and I really liked that kind of techno thing, and I liked what Japanese music that I’d heard.

It was great that it [Strawberry Switchblade] did so well in Japan – as a result of that over many years I’ve worked with quite a lot of Japanese artists. A lot of them have gone ‘oh, Strawberry Switchblade was really important to me’.

There’s one artist in particular that I work with, I think I was brought in because of the Strawberry Switchblade connection rather than she was influenced by it – the record companies are very powerful there – a woman called Chara, she’s monstrously big there. I’ve done stuff on eight albums with her, maybe two tracks on each album.

A lot of it does have some of those kind of sounds, it’s just interesting that that’s why it should have connected. I know in Japan they loved the whole image, that was an important thing as well. It’s kind of cute but they can see it’s slightly dangerous as well.

Since Yesterday : The big hit

Bill Drummond: 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.

Bill Drummond: 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.

David Motion: The moment that it really happened was with Since Yesterday. We did two mixes that were not quite right. The third one was the one, and that was a long mix, three days. By that stage we were also working with Trigger as engineer, and we were kind of trying to come at it more radically.

Q: It is a very odd sounding record, even in the context of the album, it’s not conventional pop by quite some way. The hardness of the drum sounds is really arresting.

David Motion: Well that was one of those moments, we’d been working away for three days and we were determined to try and get it to work. It was quite late at night, I was saying to Trig, ‘it’s not quite right, let’s pull the faders down and start again’.

We started with the drums and he was EQing the snare and he just said, ‘maybe it should be something like that’ [turns hand vigorously], and there was this moment we went, ‘yeah! That’s it!’

It was very mid-EQ’d, a short bandwidth so although there was a lot of top on it there wasn’t much bottom, and from that everything else slotted into place, the bass drum and snare just suggested everything else. The stuff was already on tape, but it was possible to cut away all the unnecessary stuff and it became very clean and angular, everything was there for a reason and Rose’s verse vocals just sail over the top of it.

And then there was a moment of ‘what the hell are we going to do with the middle eight?’. It was basically the same as everything else. That was another three in the morning one, I said, ‘why don’t we try gating it off the hi-hat, gate the whole track?’

That was fairly radical, and it was born slightly out of desperation! We were pissing round, but we were having such fun cos at that point the rest of the track was in place, everything was happening, there was just this one section that wasn’t up to the same level as everything else. So we tried that, and that was it, it just sounded great.

I remember thinking we thought it was great, but then thinking it might be a bit dangerous for the record company. We had no idea when we sent it off and all went to bed at six or seven in the morning.

And then at eleven or twelve o’clock I got a calls from everybody, Max phoned, Balfey phoned, Drummond phoned, saying there might be a couple of minor reservations but it’s fantastic. So I thought, yeah, goal!

Q: So the album’s done and Since Yesterday was the flagship single and the one really big hit. The record company were clearly expecting a lot more.

Jill: Obviously, I think they expected us to have another hit.

Q: What’s it like having a hit single? Anybody born between 1955 and 1985 and brought up in the UK has got to have wanted to be on Top Of The Pops. What’s it like going on Top Of The Pops for the first time?

Jill: I was terrified. Shaking like a leaf. You’ve got all these twatty dancers round you and you want them to piss off! It was great. It was really funny. The BBC are strange, the dressing rooms are real utility, classic BBC. But the studio was just weird, all the cameras on us and cranes and things and we’re just standing there going ‘oh shit!’. We were so scared. Really, if we’d had to sing live…!

Q: And yet on the performance you’re grinning your heads off all through it.

Jill: It was dead exciting and absolutely thrilling, really thrilling. Really. I remember we went through it, the rehearsal was much worse that the actual thing. Once it all got going I just remember being ‘my god, what are we doing?’ Just being there, you know.

Q: Top Of The Pops was such an iconic thing. Maybe it’s changed now cos people are growing up with music and performances freely available on tap, whereas at that time it was about the only thing apart from The Tube and Whistle Test.

Jill: I can remember seeing all sorts of people on it, and desperately waiting for it to come on, and we didn’t have videos so you couldn’t tape it when I was 14 or 16. You were there, you were waiting.

Q: And not only was it on rarely and not tapeable, but music was so central to youth culture up till the 1990s.

Jill: Any of it you did see you were glued to and everybody watched it. I remember as a young teenager watching Top of The Pops and seeing glam-rockers on it, T.Rex and Bowie, and when I was a bit older Be Bop Deluxe were on it. I really liked Be Bop Deluxe.

Q: I remember the New Wave bands, you’d get all this absolutely shite puppetry pop, then on would come The Jam and I’d go ‘that’s what it’s about’, the people who stood out, the people who look like the shouldn’t have been allowed on there, those were the ones that were great.

Jill: I know! I know our song was poppy but we were a weird looking pair.

Q: Yeah, but it’s clearly not Dollar, clearly not employing stylists.

Jill: It was dead exciting!

Q: 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.

Bill Drummond: Well I’m not surprised. It didn’t have what Radio 1 would want.

David Motion: You know how it [Since Yesterday] became a hit do you? You know the process politically at Warners?

Q: No, not at all.

David Motion: Well, I think it was released in late September or the beginning of October, but it was very slow to build.

Q: It hit the chart in late October.

David Motion: And then the Christmas thing all swung into view but it was high enough up in November that Rob and Max thought it could come and go before Christmas. It was showing enough build in the charts that it could’ve had a longer life.

Basically, I heard this story that Rob had had a look at what was potentially doing stuff for WEA that Christmas and Strawberry Switchblade were there and he said, ‘we’re going to keep this record alive come what may over Christmas and then hit it hard, because it’s the only thing for us in terms of new stuff that’s even bubbling around’. So that’s why they did TV advertising, do you remember that? There was a short campaign in between Christmas and the new year which is why, as the Christmas sales came and went, it survived and came again in January.

All the pluggers and everything just dropped everything else and it caused a lot of frustration around the A&R department, because other people had things coming out and yet they said ‘we’re withdrawing support from everything else and this is the one we’re going to go for’. And so all promotion and budget kept it alive for that period, and then ‘bang’ in the new year.

[Since Yesterday had an uncommonly long period in the charts, 17 weeks, about twice as long as most records that only got to the mid top ten].

It’s impressive to see when they really decide to go for it, from a commercial point of view it was very impressive.

Q: Let Her Go comes out two months later, which is similar sounding enough to surely sell to the same people but different enough that it doesn’t sound like Since Yesterday Part Two, and it died, absolutely bombed. That makes sense now, hearing how Since Yesterday was pushed so hard.

David Motion: Obviously I could argue it was because it was the wrong producer, but other people could argue it was other things! There you go, that’s ego!

David Balfe: 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.

Press and media overload

Q: Having a hit certainly made the journalists attitude towards you change – most of the interviews after Since Yesterday are really shallow and trivial.

Jill: The first interview we ever did was the NME about Trees and Flowers time, just a page [actually August 1982, nearly a year before Trees and Flowers]. The minute we had a single in the charts it was only about ribbons and what make up you use.

Q: You expect it from the kids mags, No 1 and Smash Hits, that’s what they’re there for. And Beeb magazine; a one-page interview with a double-page picture in a magazine that’s got Peter Duncan on the front. But even in stuff like ZigZag, which was a serious music magazine, it’s still a fairly crap interview.

Jill: I think because we dressed up people couldn’t get past that. I kinda forgot that the songs even meant anything cos nobody ever asked us. Ever. They’d ask ‘how did you get your name’, but they didn’t actually want to know cos if you mentioned Orange Juice they’d [blank look]. They didn’t go into it in any depth, just asking questions and ticking them off the list.

Q: There doesn’t seem to be anything out there, which is why I’m doing this website now cos there’s a need for it – people are still listening to Strawberry Switchblade. It’s not like Hear’Say selling 300,000 in a week when, two months later, most copies have had their last ever play. Your stuff is being tracked down by people who part with sizeable sums for it, it still means something to people. And yet your history isn’t documented. This is exactly what the internet is good for, so that the people who want to find this information can get it.

Jill: Most people had an angle on what they were going to do and they didn’t deviate from it. Also it was difficult cos Rose was quite resistant to talking about anything in any great depth as well, and then when things broke down between us it was difficult.

Or else it was just hysterically funny, we’d just be having a laugh, which then doesn’t really do you any favours.

Q: There’s an interview when Jolene came out where you’re having a laugh, basically playing word games around Western imagery, which is fine for a conversation but it’s not an informative interview.

Jill: Nobody really asked us anything, then they figured there was no depth to us so they wouldn’t ask us anything. How could it progress from that? People had made up their minds.

Q: Did that bug you a lot of the time?

Jill: It was mind-numbingly boring. With most interviews you were shoved in a room for half an hour with someone so they weren’t going to get an in-depth interview, and you’d be doing it all day.

Before, I remember someone came up to interview us in Glasgow for the NME and there was a photographer there and he spent the day with us. I think that’s why NME interviews were generally a little bit better, cos they spend time with people unless they’re really big. If they get hold of bands before a major label’s got hold of them, they’d spend time with them.

Rose: The press were really bizarre actually. We did do quite a few interviews before we actually signed. We did a really early The Face right at the beginning and we’d done the NME, we’d done a few things.

We did start to get the more cynical side of the interviewers coming out, trying to prod more things out of you, wanting to go into detail about the lyrics. I was like, ‘you’ll get what you’re given and that’s all. You’ll get as much as we want to say and if we don’t want to say anything else about it then that’s it. The lyrics speak for themselves’. I don’t really feel like I want to explain through all the lyrics in the songs.

The press were up and down, really. It was good, we actually got loads and loads of exposure in loads of good magazines that were hip at the time. And then when we did Top Of The Pops it was Smash Hits and those kind of magazines. We did women’s magazines and everything, Woman’s Own and stuff like that, covering lots of angles.

Q: Most of the stuff I’ve seen from after Since Yesterday is either trivial stuff about clothes, or it’s being patronising.

Rose: We got quite a lot of that from the serious press, titles like ‘Strawberry Tarts’ in Sounds. Not that the interview was bad, but they’d just put stupid things like that which was a bit irritating. But when you’re doing all those teen magazines like Smash Hits that ask you the most mundane questions then, then it was much much better doing an interview for Rolling Stone or Sounds or something like that, something not quite so ‘what’s your favourite colour? Where do you buy your ribbons?’, stupid things like that.

Bill Drummond: 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.

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.

Bill Drummond: 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. 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.

Rose: We’d get so bored with interviews like that that I started lying every time we did an interview. We did some women’s magazine, Woman’s Own or something like that, and they said ‘what do you do when you entertain guests?’ I said ‘usually we have something healthy to eat, we’ll get some chips from the chip shop and some mineral water cos we’re really into healthy living. And then we’ll mudwrestle’. They said ‘how do you do that at home’, I said you just get a big plastic pool, fill it with mud and have mudwrestling parties. They were ‘really?‘ and we’re ‘yeah!‘

‘And then what do you do?’ ‘Well, we shower off and have a glass of wine’. ‘Do you shower off together?’ I just said, ‘well, some of us shower together, some don’t, whatever’s easiest’.

Q: Did they print this stuff?

Rose: Yeah! They printed it, they printed it! In another one I said I was so exhausted I had to be carried out on a stretcher. My mum phoned me up cos they printed that. I used to just think, it’s time to have a laugh cos this is getting so boring. People can be so gullible – I would never have believed that in a hundred years – but they printed it! I thought they might leave out some of it cos it’s a bit risque for Woman’s Own.

Q: Was there any opportunity to get taken seriously, if the proper music press is being patronising cos you’re not blokes and the rest is Smash Hits and Beeb?

Rose: We did some interviews that were intelligent reading – I can’t remember what the magazines were – where there were some feminist themes coming at it from the angle of women in music rather than girls in short skirts.

Q: It’s an interesting angle to look at Strawberry Switchblade cos while it’s two intelligent articulate women writing their own songs, you’re also all ribbons and frills. Feminist politics at the time still had a big streak of not dressing up cos its got overtones of doing it just to please men, being a bit dungarees and crewcuts.

Rose: Well exactly. I remember we did a gig with The Slits in Glasgow. They were out doing their soundcheck and I was in the dressing room putting my make-up on and their manager comes up to me and says, ‘what are you doing putting that make-up on? Who are you putting it on for? Are you putting it on for men or are you putting it on for yourself? Have you asked yourself these questions?’

I said to her, ‘being a feminist is not being a man. I celebrate the feminine side of my personality, and who are you to tell me what to do? And anyway one of your band is wearing make-up! Just go away. I’m not going to dress down for men, I won’t let what men do rule my life’.

To begin with, in The Poems when I was an anarchist I went through a wee phase where I thought I shouldn’t wear make-up and stuff. Then I just thought ‘NO’; that’s not me being who I want to be. I’m doing this because I like being extravagant and I like to paint my face like a picture. I’d do lots of colours or draw flowers on my face and things like that. I just like it, it’s an art form. Dressing up and doing this whole thing, it’s great fun. Kids love dressing up and I just never grew out of it!

If you’re a feminist it doesn’t mean that you have to be like a man, it means the exact opposite. People just got it wrong and thought you have to be as macho as possible or whatever. I was brought up with lots of brothers, I was a real tomboy when I was a kid; anything a guy could do I could do anyway, and I used to prove that throughout my growing-up years. I was always a feminist. If I want to wear make up and false eyelashes and whatever, so be it, nobody will tell me what to do.

I think a lot of feminists got it wrong, and because they got it wrong they probably lost a wee bit of the fun out of their lives cos they were taking it too seriously.

Q: The 1980s was a time when individualism was coming through, and feminism was probably helped by that because feminism demands that people be judged as individuals rather than either eulogised or dismissed on grounds of their gender.

Rose: We actually had quite a feminist following as well, and quite a sizeable lesbian following as well. We did a club in Edinburgh, a gay club, and there were all these women coming backstage trying to chat us up, ‘are you two girlfriends? Are you seeing anybody?’

We did have a lot of a gay following male and female. A lot of gay men liked Strawberry Switchblade, cos we’re not conventional women, we are flamboyant. The amount of gay guys who’ve said to me ‘I’d turn for you!’

Q: At this summer’s gay Pride in London, the headmaster of Jill’s daughter’s school borrowed some of Jill’s old polka dot outfits and went with his boyfriend as Strawberry Switchblade. Imagine your headmaster and his boyfriend dressing up as your mum!

Rose: Excellent!

Q: At least sometimes when people know who you are it needn’t be a stalker.

Rose: When I came out here [rural Oxfordshire] I came out here to get away from the Kelvins. I thought London’s totally doing my head in, it’s too chaotic, it’s driving me insane. Which it actually was, literally. I moved out to the country and dropped out a lot, I didn’t really keep in contact with a lot of people, like a hermit in the woods for a while. I just needed the tranquillity. The woods were my valium, basically.

Q: When was that?

Rose: I’ve been here for nine years. I lived in Canada for one and a half, and then came straight here, after going to Scotland to have a baby cos I wanted it to be Scottish. It sounds terrible doesn’t it? I wanted to do that with my last daughter as well but nobody would let me, it would’ve been hitch-hiking up the road at nine months pregnant! So she was born in Oxford. I dunno, I just like it out here, I like the peace, I like the quiet.

We go to the pub one night, a little country pub. I walked in and asked for a Red Witch and they just looked at me. They don’t even sell mineral water, never mind cocktails or whatever. I sat down and this guy said, ‘I know you’. I thought I came out here to get away from everybody that knows me. He said ‘I worked with you in the studio once’, and he was an engineer on a Strawberry Switchblade session! His name’s Pete Brown, he lives locally. His dad’s Joe Brown and his sister’s Sam Brown.

And then a girl moved a couple of cottages down from me with her boyfriend who was a photographer. She said to him one day, ‘I know that girl’ and he asked me. I said ‘I know her as well, is she a make-up artist?’ She did Strawberry Switchblade’s make-up and she moved here! For two years she was a neighbour. I thought god, it’s such a small world, it’s bizarre. You can’t run away from yourself!

Q: There’s a photo of you at the launch of Red Wedge. How did they get you into that? Strawberry Switchblade don’t have much of a political tone to them.

Jill: I can’t remember how I got involved with that. At that time I was a member of the Labour Party, but it wasn’t through that. I think I met somebody who was organising it and they asked if I would do it. Thatcher was in at that time, you know? So I went along, I met Neil Kinnock, it was great.

Q: Did you do any of the Red Wedge gigs?

Jill: No, because Rose was so totally not into politics. She’d say ‘I’m into personal politics not party politics’, she was totally against that, it wasn’t something she was interested in at all. I went along to the launch, it was really interesting to meet all those people.

[Red Wedge was launched in November 1985, by which time Rose and Jill living more separate lives. The campaign only listed Jill as a supporter, rather than the band. However, both Rose and Jill had endorsed International Youth Year in March 1985]

Q: What is it like in retrospect? Red Wedge is now largely seen as a half-arsed thing.

Jill: I thought it was well meaning, I’m not embarrassed to have been part of it at all. We did Artists Against Apartheid as well, well I did it anyway, I can’t remember if Rose did much with it. It was just something you got asked to do. It was a real 80s thing. It was well meaning.

Q: I think Band Aid gets really overlooked as a cultural phenomenon, after that there was a whole load of stuff with people using music in that way.

Jill: It’s not anything that I feel embarrassed about. At that point I felt there was – and there still is – a lot of apathy with young people about voting. Rose would say ‘I’m not going to vote, they’re all the same’. There was Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party and Margaret Thatcher’s Tory Party; they’re not the same, they are so not the same. You may not be able to say it now, but at that point they were not the same. They were different parties, they did different things.

You’ve got to find out about the history, people died to get you a vote. You don’t have to vote for Labour or the Tories, you can vote for another party, it’s worth doing. So I felt, why not? Especially when Thatcher was in, she was such an evil bitch. They were such an appalling party, they did so much damage to this country, it’s never recovered. And I felt really strongly about it. Even if it is half-arsed it’s better than doing bugger all. You just go along, a picture gets in the paper and somebody sees it and decides to vote. They can vote whatever they like, but just think about it, do it.

Q: It’s a measure of how different the political landscape was then – the idea of a whole load of good people saying ‘yay vote Labour’ now is unthinkable. That time was the beginning of the convergence of the main parties, and the consequent encouragement of what gets called apathy, which is usually not apathy at all but actually disgust with the whole system. The Labour Party at that time had just turned their back on the miners, they were disowning Liverpool City Council and abandoning commitment to nuclear disarmament.

These days we see it was the beginning of their launching on to the corporate capitalist agenda giving people no party political choice outside of that, and so maybe that’s why Red Wedge is dismissed, it was a campaign for the Labour Party just as they became Tory Lite.

Jill: I think that’s pretty unfair though. It’s fair enough to say just vote. I voted Labour and so I didn’t mind standing up and saying I voted Labour. At that point that was what I believed in and I wasn’t ashamed of saying it.

Q: Did Red Wedge do any good, do you think?

Jill: Nah. Not at all! I don’t think so. They didn’t win did they?

Jill’s agoraphobia

Q: All the Strawberry Switchblade lyrics have this melancholy and awkwardness to it. You’ve mentioned your agoraphobia several times and Trees and Flowers is clearly about that. How bad was the agoraphobia?

Jill: It started when I was about 15, I missed a year of school. I didn’t do O Levels at school cos I’d missed a year. Nobody knew how to treat it. Being an outpatient in a mental hospital wasn’t much fun.

Q: How did it start? Cos when it first starts you’re just going to get called an idle git.

Jill: Yeah, they said I just wanted to get out of going to school. The first time that I had it I was 10 and I was at primary school and I remember saying I felt dizzy all the time. I remember being taken to the doctor and he said I was just trying to get out of school, just a hypochondriac, and I was so mortified cos I was actually really frightened and didn’t know why I was going dizzy and light-headed.

When I was ten I believed the doctor, and if he says nothing’s wrong with me then nothing’s wrong with me and I just didn’t do certain things and kind of got over it I suppose.

But then it happened again when I was 15 and I was really freaked and I used to just scream, I used to get into such a state of panic that my dad would slap me across the face to shut me up cos I was in such a panic. I use to think I was going to die cos I felt I was clearly having an out of body experience, I’d be looking down on myself, I wouldn’t be able to stand because my head was spinning, I’d be screaming ‘I’M GOING TO DIE’. My parents couldn’t handle it at all.

And I remember when I wasn’t doing that just sitting, sitting, just feeling so depressed, and thinking some weird thing’s come over me like some veil’s been drawn down and I’m never going to be the same, I’m never going to be happy, I’m never going to be the same again. I remember thinking I’m going to end up in a hospital, I can’t cope with anything. It was awful.

I think it was depression, it was probably brought about by hormones or something. And since then I’ve suffered from depression which brings on anxiety which brings on the symptoms of agoraphobia.

Agoraphobia is just severe anxiety manifesting itself in panics. It’s panic attacks. I was having panic attacks at school. I’d be sitting there shaking and having to leave the classroom, all hot and cold and thinking I was going to faint and thinking I was going to die, my heart pounding, all that sort of thing.

If somebody had explained that to me then it might’ve helped, but nobody explained it to me until I was about 18 when my dad found a book about it and I read about it. And after that it was never so bad, I still had the panics but at least it was a recognised phenomenon.

Q: You’re no longer panicking about panicking…

Jill: …which reduces the amount of time you panic. I’d be left on my own all day which is the worst way to treat somebody suffering from depression and anxiety, to leave them alone.

My friend Lisa was telling me how she was reading a book by a Victorian female writer who had suffered from depression and anxiety, and at that time they used to confine you to a room and they wouldn’t allow you to write, to have paper, pencils, pens, anything so you were just there in a room on your own, you weren’t allowed visitors, you weren’t allowed to go out; that’s the worst thing to do. But women were told ‘you’re suffering from hysteria’. The idea that the best treatment for it is to shut you in a room with nothing so you can completely rest – you can’t cos your mind is plummeting the depths.

Q: It’s a typical Victorian way to treat women – if she won’t do what she’s told then get her out of the way, don’t let anybody see her being disobedient.

Jill: The idea that they wouldn’t even let them write – the best thing I found after being left alone – cos everybody went out my mum worked, my dad worked, my sister went to school and I was left in the house on my own with the silence echoing. There’d be this flurry of activity and then they’d go out. They used to give me all kinds of medication which I never took, I used to throw them out on the floor when I got really panicky and count them, count count count count, shaking, you know?

And sometimes I’d run out the front door and run back in again, just do anything to try and snap out of the panic. The worst thing is just to leave you sitting there. I remember my dad brought a kitten home and I used to sit with the kitten and focus completely. She’d sit on my lap and sleep so much, and I’d be stroking her, it was something to concentrate on, something not me. Waiting for everyone to come home, having freaked out several times on my own. It was awful, absolutely awful. It was a year of that.

My friend Marge used to come round after school or after work and bring albums. I remember getting the Patti Smith album Horses. I used to listen to John Peel. I’d read the NME, I got the NME every week, and Sounds. I used to read them cover to cover, that was the best day of the week when they came out. But I’d never listen to music on my own, I’d read stuff but not listen to stuff on my own.

Q: Why?

Jill: Well, it would depress me. Music’s very emotive anyway, and especially the sort of music I was listening to.

Q: That’s really odd, cos so many people deal with depression by having music ‘in there’ with them, particularly the darkest music, it actually helps by making them feel not alone, that there are other people who feel the same way.

Jill: I did listen to it, but I had to do it when there was somebody else in the house, I could never listen to it when I was in on my own.

I remember reading in Where Are They Now in Q magazine and the guy had said ‘one of them was supposed to be agoraphobic, yeah right, standing up in front of loads of people and going on Top of The Pops, how very agoraphobic’, and this wasn’t that long ago. How completely shit, what a horrible sweeping bloody statement to make about somebody. It was like being punched. I was going to write to them but I thought it doesn’t matter, and I know it’s not true. Jesus, I’ve been through it.

And especially when it still happens. It’s the sort of thing that will subside and then it’ll come back. It’s more to do with depression, depression and anxiety, it’s not anything glamorous. Agoraphobia’s just a name for the condition. I didn’t want to go out, I couldn’t go out cos I was scared I’d have a panic. I’d have panics at home where nobody could see me!

I remember being out with [daughter] Jessie when she was about six months old, I was coming home from the doctor’s. I was panicking. I took her out of the pram, I thought ‘if I hold her it’ll stop me panicking; she’s a baby, she needs me’. I was pushing the pram while holding her and I was literally yards from the house, and I saw somebody coming down the road. I needed to talk to somebody, just have them walk me to the door. I said to this woman ‘excuse me, would you mind walking me, I live just there’, and she didn’t speak English! She was saying ‘attacked? Attacked? Put baby down!’. By the time I’d finished explaining to her it had started to subside. I panicked again once I got in the house.

Before then I’d been thinking I had a baby, I had to look after her, I won’t panic. You can have months of it being fine and then it’ll just happen.

Q: You put this into Trees and Flowers, putting it out overtly. There’s a lot of stigma comes with psychological conditions and mental health problems these days, but back then there was even more. Did you have any reservations about putting that stuff out and being so open about it?

Jill: No, because at that point I’d met lots of people and managed to talk about it. I knew there’d be other people out there – I used to read the NME cover to cover, and there might be someone read me talking about it and get a bit of hope. Women used to be agoraphobic for the whole of their lives because it wasn’t explained to them, it was just ‘something that happens to housewives’. It happens to women a lot.

But no, it didn’t bother me at all, why should it? Loads of people have it.

Q: While you know you should be able to talk about it, there was always a chance it could provoke reactions from people who could be cruel and make things worse for you.

Jill: I never had anything like that. I got over it when I used to dress up and look weird in Glasgow. That helped me a lot, cos it wasn’t like me being out, it was somebody else being out. It never bothered me. I’d been at art school for four years and, I dunno – people spend their lives trying to cultivate stuff like that, ‘I am really interesting, honestly, I have problems!’

Part of being there, we had to read about loads of artists, and you read that and, jeez, I’m completely sane! There’s nothing wrong with me, I’ve just got a bit of anxiety. I’ve not got any bizarre real serious psychological psychiatric problems that some people have to live with and deal with. I’m not saying this isn’t serious, but at least it’s something that’ll come and go.

Q: Isn’t it odd how people with extreme introspection and self-consciousness end up dressing really outlandishly? Think about goths who spend three hours dressing up and then are worried that everyone’s looking at them. Like if you’re, say, a Mod, you can have a day job and no-one would know. But if you’re a goth, it’s a full-time thing, 24/7 looking like something out of the Addams Family and yet being nervous of other people and not wanting them to look at you. It’s such a paradox of being scared of attention yet dressing up so they’d stand out in a crowd of a thousand people.

Jill: But it’s a way of hiding isn’t it? It doesn’t really make them stand out, it’s a total mask, it’s something to hide behind. I can relate to it. I used to wear a lot of make up – get a cotton bud, stick it in black paint and run it under my eye then put a point at each end and then put stripes on of whatever colour I was wearing.

Q: How did the agoraphobia affect things with the band?

Jill: I suppose I knew it was going to affect the band. Everybody near me knew I was agoraphobic. I didn’t really affect me hugely cos I wasn’t too bad at that point. I wasn’t good at travelling out of Glasgow. It was tricky. There were several times I didn’t get to London. We used to travel at night cos it was cheap, but by that time I’d worked myself into such a state; when dusk falls it’s not a good time for depression and anxiety. So I’d be ‘I can’t go, you’ll have to go without me’.

That’s why we moved to London really, cos we had to keep travelling backwards and forwards from Glasgow. We used to stay in this hotel in Sussex Gardens, the Keio, run by Chinese people. It was nice, it was fine, but it was a hotel; we didn’t have the cats there and Rose didn’t have her daughter there, so we had to move. I couldn’t do the travelling, it was so upsetting.

Every time I went back to Glasgow I’d wonder if I would get back to London. London was important cos there were things to do and I’d be letting Rose down if I didn’t.

Q: Was everyone around you understanding about it?

Jill: Not really. Bill Drummond was OK about it, Balfey wasn’t particularly, he thought it was a pain, Rose thought it was a pain. She never said much, but it was clear it wasn’t going to stop her. But Peter [McArthur, Jill’s boyfriend] was.

I tried really hard. When I first came to London I used to go to sleep listening to this self-help tape. One side was called Good Night, the other’s Good Morning, this Australian woman talking. I used to fall asleep listening to that on my walkman. In the morning as soon as I woke up I’d turn the tape round and wake up to it. That was months and months.

I knew Rose wanted to do it [be successful with the band]. I wanted to do it as well, but it was difficult with responsibilities to other people.

Q: Did anyone ever give you any stick, any ‘snap out of it’ stuff?

Jill: No, no. They were all ‘it’s OK’. But you can tell when people aren’t particularly sympathetic. It was very difficult for them to be around, depression is difficult to be around because you’re aware that there’s nothing you can do to help.

Q: How did Jill’s agoraphobia affect having to travel and go out to do gigs and interviews and stuff?

Rose: Some times it was worse than others. I mean, there were times where the tour van was sat outside and she would not come out of the house, and there’d be all sorts of bribes but she just couldn’t get out of the house. Eventually we’d get her into the van.

She’d had valium given to her from the doctor once when we were going to Japan, and she had a fit in the airport. She just started screaming and saying ‘I’m not getting on the plane’. She didn’t like planes anyway, that’s a whole part of the agoraphobia as well. ‘It’s unnatural for something that big and heavy to fly, I’m not getting on it’!

So I ended up getting on the plane myself, off to Japan the first time. Well, I wasn’t by myself, David Balfe the manager was there and our translator from the record company was there. Jill was left at the airport. We were supposed to be doing gigs as well.

The record company had to buy her boyfriend a ticket cos she could travel with him sometimes. He got a ticket and they flew over the next day or the day after that. But I had to deal with the press stuff and it was just madness, I was so exhausted, it was so mad and I couldn’t wait till she got there, cos it’s better when there’s the two of you.

It affected quite a lot of things quite a lot of times. Sometimes I’d have to go down to London on my own to do meetings with the record company or do auditions and stuff like that which I really didn’t enjoy doing. I don’t like saying to somebody ‘you’re not what I’m looking for,’ especially when they’re well respected in a circle of musicians. It was things like that that were really difficult.

We were going to do the second album – or we were talking about doing the second album – with Ryuichi Sakamoto. We had the big meeting in Japan with him and he was really up for doing it but we had to go to Japan to do it and stay in Japan for two months, and Jill wouldn’t do it. She wasn’t having any of it, ‘can he not come here?’

David Balfe was a massive fan of his and he was like, ‘can you sign this album?’ ! But Jill couldn’t go to Japan and stay there. So that was a hindrance. We couldn’t play New York, we couldn’t play Hong Kong, cos we had gigs in places like that. We were supposed to go to New York on bloody Concorde and come back on the QE2! I was, ‘oh wow, that’d be so fantastic!’, but Jill would say ‘I can’t go’.

And then there was supposed to be some big opening or something in Japan and we were supposed to go to that, and we couldn’t do it. I would have gone myself cos one of us is better than none of us, but at that point there was a wee bit of ego shit going on in the band, so it wasn’t gonna happen.

It kinda steadily got worse, the agoraphobia, because we were being asked to do more things and go further afield. Someone said to Jill once – the guy who supposed to be doing the sound on tour, the road manager – he said ‘I think you’re in the wrong profession if you’re agoraphobic,’ and she got really really upset and her boyfriend got really upset with this guy and there was a massive big row. The guy punched Jill’s boyfriend on the nose.

Q: How was everyone else about it, how tolerant were people?

Rose: I think most people were really pretty tolerant, actually. She’d always had agoraphobia as long as I’d known her. It’s a horrible condition to have, when she was panicking she was really scared. It’s not like ‘I don’t want to do this,’ she was really really scared, scared for her life, that kind of fear. And I know what that feels like from a different kind of angle, being scared for your life – I’ve felt that before but not through agoraphobia. Most people were pretty tolerant I think. Her boyfriend was really good cos he’d go places with her.

At the end she was seeing hypnotists and stuff, we’d tried everything, the record company had tried. She’d meditation tapes and all sorts of stuff, and she went to group therapy where people had all sorts of different phobias. And sometimes she would get better. It was completely unpredictable, that was the worst thing about it, it was so completely unpredictable. If it was like PMT and you knew it was coming then you could avoid it!

From my point of view it would be really disappointing. I was really disappointed we couldn’t go to Hong Kong, but I completely understood why. And maybe we could do it later. And New York, I really wanted to play New York but, well, we’ve hundreds of other things to do. But I did want to go on the QE2 and Concorde!

Q: Surely you must’ve been aware at the time that that kind of opportunity isn’t going to be there forever?

Rose: I know, I know, exactly. But it [agoraphobia] had always been there, so we’d lived with it from the beginning. But there were real opportunities missed, like going to Japan for two months and doing the album with Ryuichi Sakamoto, which would’ve been really interesting.

We had a really funny time when we all went out to dinner with him and we were chatting about it with him. We were all talking about different things around the table and that end of the table was talking about food, this end of the table was talking about something else. That end of the table started talking about dogs that were popular in Japan as pets and I turned to Ryuichi Sakamoto and said ‘do you eat dogs?’ and David Balfe just looked at me and went completely bright red, cos he was the Big Fan.

I was always saying inappropriate things to people, not deliberately but things would slip out. Like we were at the Rock and Pop Awards and all the big guys in the business were there and I’d go ‘I’m just off to the toilet to touch myself up’. I was only talking about my make-up, but everyone was chins dropped to their chests. [laughs] I’d go ‘oh!’, realising what I’d just said. I used to do stuff like that all the time.

So, Balfe was like, ‘there she goes again! You’ve completely humiliated us now!’. But the Japanese eat dogs anyway. It’s no big deal.

Q: I didn’t realise the second album had got as far as sorting out a producer.

Rose: Oh yeah, yeah definitely. He [Sakamoto] looked like the one we were going to go with. Balfe really wanted to go with him.

Q: How close did it get to starting?

Rose: We split up quite soon before. We were supposed to go back to Japan really soon and do a tour there, a couple of months or something like that. We had songs ready, the next single was going to be Cut With A Cake Knife. We had a whole year or two’s plans ahead of us.

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

Bill Drummond: 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?

Bill Drummond: 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.

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

Bill Drummond: 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.

12 inch remixes

Q: There was this thing in the 1980s that singles had to have an extended 12 inch mix. It didn’t have to add anything to it creatively, it didn’t matter if it was no good at all, just as long as it was longer, that was the only criterion. With the Strawberry Switchblade 12 inch remixes, did any of them feel any good at the time?

Jill: No! It was really half-arsed, it was nothing to do with us, it was the record company saying ‘you’ve got to put them out’. I think the funniest one was Trees and Flowers – what was the point of that?

Q: The point of remixes is to make them longer for clubs so you can dance – so, Trees and Flowers??

Jill: I know! I remember thinking ‘what is the point?’ with that and all the others.

Q: The Let Her Go one is quite good. They credit five people with doing the remix!

Jill: We just had nothing to do with it, it was just taken out of our hands. We were just told they were going to be remixed. I think Rose always wanted to be there but I don’t know if she ever was. At that time we were probably quite busy and so they just went in and did it without us. They’d come and say, ‘there’s a single coming out, you have to do the 12 inch’.

I suppose if you were interested in producing your own stuff it was OK, but we’d no clue, we could barely play. Maybe now we’d say, ‘right, we’ll do it, let’s actually put some effort into it instead of letting somebody go in and take the vocals off leave it droning on for a minute and then put them back on’. After you’d recorded and you’d started something new they’d come back and say, ‘oh we need a 12 inch, it needs to be done by tomorrow’. I can’t say I was ever involved in or impressed by the 12 inches.

Q: They put out an album of all the 12 inch remixes as well! You should see the prices that can go for as well, serious money for an album of cack!

Jill: I know! Grrrreat. And isn’t that the one with all those terrible Japanese singles at the end? ‘Ecstasy’ and stuff like that? Warn them! Say ‘don’t do it, save your money’!!

Q: How much did you have to do with any of the 12 inch remixes?

Rose: [assorted can-of-worms oh-dear-me phonetics] I had an incredible massive fight with Balfey and Bill Drummond and one of them cos they said, ‘ah we’ll just go in the studio and mix it’. I said you won’t, I want to hear it. They said, ‘you don’t need to be there’. I need to be there! It’s my song! So I go down to the studio and they were completely blanking me out. I was saying things and they were just, ‘be quiet Rose’.

Q: Do you remember which one it was?

Rose: It was more likely to be something like Jolene or Let Her Go or something like that. I tried all I could to muster up the energy to destroy that tape but it wasn’t happening. So I put a spell on Balfey. And it’s still sealed in the notepad I had then that I used to write my lyrics and stuff. I’m too scared to let it out in case it happens, cos I was so angry! So if Balfey ever gets hit by a car, it’s my fault. Especially if I’m driving it!

Q: With Let Her Go they did that Kitchensynch Mix which has five names credited for remixing. Balfe and Drummond got Youth and others in for that.

Rose: I wasn’t there for that session, they did that one without even telling us they were doing it. So I probably put my foot down at that point and said I want to know, so the argument would probably have been Jolene.

Q: The 12 inch remixes. What were they all about then?

David Motion: Well, I don’t remember doing one. I don’t know if I did, did I? Not to my knowledge!

Q: They all go uncredited except for the Let Her Go one, which didn’t actually come out on the Let Her Go single, it was on the Who Knows What Love Is? 12 inch.

David Motion: It’s around that time there were all those 12 inch remixes, but I never really got the hang of that.

Q: So no-one knows who did these! Jill says she wasn’t even there for them.

David Motion: Sounds like Balfe and Drummond.

Q: The Let Her Go remix is the only one that’s remotely listenable, and that credits Drummond and Youth – you can hear good creative musical minds working on it. But all the other ones are really dreadful, no musical merit except for the remnants of the original track. They don’t make it any different or better, just longer. ‘Not Guilty’ on your part, then.

David Motion: Absolutely.

Q: Who did the remixing?

Bill Drummond: 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.

Bill Drummond: Fuck knows.

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

Bill Drummond: No.

Q: You definitely did at least one.

Bill Drummond: 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 12 inch is to have a longer version for playing in clubs, so having an extended version of Trees and Flowers makes no sense whatsoever.

Bill Drummond: 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?

Bill Drummond: Yeah, almost. Obviously the existence of twelve 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: The others don’t give any credits for remixers so we can’t tell. It was such a weird thing in the 1980s, you couldn’t just release a single, you had to put a seven and a twelve inch out, and the twelve inch would have to have a longer version. It doesn’t matter how good and perfect the seven inch was, it doesn’t matter how rubbish the twelve inch was. It didn’t have to be any better, just longer, just turn everything off and leave the drum machine going for a while.

Rose: Have a little prelude, and instrumental part. Twelve inches are for albums, seven inches are for singles. I was heartbroken when there stopped being seven inch singles.

Q: It’s the definitive pop format.

Rose: It is, it is. I’ve still got lots, and I still buy lots of seven inches from Oxfam and that, cos I love them. It’s a perfect little art form.

Q: It’s perfect, something like Echo Beach – do you want the album, do you want four extra tracks or remixes that you have to program your player not to play, or do you want to put it on, it plays Echo Beach, then it finishes?

Rose: Or you get one of those old players where you stack them up – I’ve got one of them, so you can play them like you used to when you were a wee lass. I mean CDs are great for what they are.

Q: For ambient stuff especially.

Rose: But for artwork, they lack, they don’t come anywhere near a really good album sleeve which is a really good size that you can see and you can touch.

Videos and Jolene

Rose: We were working with [director of videos] Tim Pope. That was one of the major upsets for me. I loved his videos and I just thought Tim Pope and us were a perfect combination, we had good fun working together. We talked to other video directors and they came up with the naffest ideas like Jill sitting on a bed with a box of chocolates and real girly sexist shit, real crap, no sense of art or anything, just boring video.

Jill: The shit videos we had to do! We did a couple of good videos with Tim Pope who was fantastic, such a brilliant guy, I really liked him. His birthday was the day after mine, I remember having a joint party. He was the sort of the person I wanted to work with. The first video he did with us I thought ‘he’s got it’.

Q: Which song was that for?

Jill: Since Yesterday. He got one of the animators from Magic Roundabout to do it. He shot it in black and white, we didn’t look particularly glamorous and we had polka dots on velcro so they could move about and the guy from Magic Roundabout animated us. There was a big pop-art hanging with circles, mobiles that spun, it was bizarre but so exciting. It took two days to do it cos the animation was so slow.

Tim Pope was such a nutter. I remember Robert Smith coming in to see him. It was incredible, really good fun and I thought ‘yeah, that’s great, that’s a really good video’, there was a point to making it.

Q: Where did you first come across Strawberry Switchblade?

Tim Pope: As usual, I think I got a call. I was hip in those days, the early 1980s, and I think I got a call from the record company. I wasn’t particularly known for dealing with – quote – ‘women’. Whenever you make videos for – quote – ‘women’, as actually I recently did with KT Tunstall, so many people try and get involved with a video for a woman.

Maybe the girls came to me or maybe it was Dave Balfe or somebody, but I remember meeting them and liking them a lot. Same as you, I thought there was something quite sinister and dark underneath the apparent fluffiness, there was something that drew me to it. They were just one band in amongst loads I worked with at that point.

My birthday’s in February and Jill’s is around then as well and we once shared a birthday party together. It was brilliant, all these bands from the 1980s came to it, it was such a great night. I’ve still got the invitation somewhere, I’ll probably put it on my website. I remember dancing with her, it was brilliant.

Q: Did they have ideas for the videos already or did you cook stuff up together?

Tim Pope: Remember we’re talking about something that was 20 years ago! But I seem to remember that I just instantly liked them, I liked their image. As always, I’ll meet someone, spend a lot of time talking to them, listening to them, seeing what I see about them, listening to the music, listening to everything. I must have based it a little bit on them, that video [Since Yesterday], because of all that dotty kind of stuff, stuff like that, but I don’t specifically remember.

Q: I’m just curious about how much input they had to any of them. You said they didn’t have that much with Since Yesterday.

Tim Pope: It’s hard to say. I always say that I’m like this bespoke tailor. I’ll make a suit to fit someone perfectly and that will involve me spending time with them, talking with them, looking at where I think their career is, really just evaluating everything and trying to put it together. I allow people as much into that process as they want to be, or as little as they want to be.

I’ve just made this video for this guy called Jim [surname unclear] and he didn’t want any input into it. I made a video that was very much true to his music, very much fitted in, and if he didn’t want to interact too much on it that was great. He loved the video. I reflect what people are.

Q: Jill had an art school background, she’d worked – and indeed still works – in visual arts, so I wondered if she’d had any strong or definite input.

Tim Pope: I don’t remember specifically but I remember I liked them a lot and I would’ve sat down and spent a lot of time and talked to them.

Q: They remember being extremely proud that it was an animator from Magic Roundabout who was involved in doing the stop-frame stuff.

Tim Pope: Was it? Rory. I don’t remember that, but it probably is true. He was an absolute nutter. It was a guy called Rory. I think to be honest he was a real pervert and really enjoyed these young girls. I have a funny feeling that’s what was really going off with him. He did a bunch of stuff with me at the time, he did some Cure videos with me and some adverts as well.

Q: How was the video received by the record company?

Tim Pope: Well the record company – this was happening to me with every band I was working with at that stage – were trying to separate me from the band. It used to happen with every band, it happened with The Cure. Everyone was trying to separate me and I said well fine, go and get someone else to do it, that’s fine by me. There was nothing I could do. I thought the way I thought and I could only do it that way.

It’s interesting the labels always wanted to separate me from the bands cos I was a similar age to them and made these daft videos, I wasn’t prepared to take no prisoners with anything I did. I was quite strong about their views.

Jill: The second one he did was like a follow-on to it with a flurry of polka dots going off and they [record company] totally didn’t get it. It’s a bit more glam cos I think they’d told him to try and make us a bit more glamorous. But Rose was just wearing this hilarious tutu and boots, we wanted it to look like something from Eraserhead, something really weird, something ‘these people aren’t quite right’, and the record company hated it.

We did another one with Tim Pope for Who Knows What Love Is? with us running about in costume in a park somewhere which was funny, and then they just wouldn’t let us use him any more.

David Balfe: As a pop band we lost all indie credibility with the top five single [Since Yesterday], 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.

Rose: Then the Jolene one came up and we talked to Tim Pope about it. With Tim Pope we put ideas together, jumbled them up and came out with something good. But we went with this other company – well we were forced into it basically; ‘just try it’, famous last words.

So we did this video with somebody else, because if we do this then the record company will let us do that, something we want to do that they didn’t want to do. It was like that all the time. We shouldn’t be in that situation, we should be calling the shots because this is our art form, it’s what we do. Then we did the video and I loved bits of it but a lot of the best bits they didn’t put in cos they thought they were too risque for 1985.

Q: What sort of stuff?

Rose: I don’t know if you saw the Jolene video. You know the cage bit? There’s a bit where I’m dancing in a catsuit, a full-body catsuit with hands and feet and everything. I was dancing in a cage with flowers. There was a camera on rails, and I had shackles and handcuffs on and chains, and I was following the camera; it was really pretty fetish actually.

And they just cut out all the best bits that I thought were really really good and that said ‘this is Strawberry Switchblade’. We have people who like that side of us as well, it’s not just people who just like Strawberries; some people like the Switchblade.

They cut out all the bits that would make people’s heads turn round and make them stop saying ‘they’re twee’. This is how we get out of that, it’s not by turning into someone who looks like she should be singing in the West End or on Dallas or something like that. This is how we get out of people calling us twee, just by letting us be who we are, because we’re not twee. Just let us express ourselves completely. But that wasn’t going to happen.

Also there was this dance scene that was supposed to be shot in a club, the cage was in a club. I thought, if we’re gonna have all of these extras let’s get all our friends. Actually I don’t think Jill wanted to get her friends, because I think she thought some of my friends were too weird. We ended up getting all these extras who looked like a bunch of wankers. It was so cheesy, a bad cheesy 1980s club thing with guys dancing about in tights.

Tim Pope: The record company, specifically this guy called Rob Dickins who managed the label, very specifically wanted them to be marketed like they ‘should’ be marketed, in inverted commas. He wanted them to be marketed like little girls, if you like. I thought there was something much darker, much more interesting. And they felt very strongly, I remember this, they felt really strongly that they shouldn’t be marketed that way. They wanted themselves to be in the video, they wanted their personalities to be in it. And I think they were.

All of this is evidenced by the fact that when they did make their fourth video, which was, er…

Q: Jolene

Tim Pope: Jolene! They were put in cages and stuff like that, and I don’t think that was good. I think they were better than that. There was something about their music that had a David Lynchy kind of quality that I liked, something kind of dark, lurking in the shadows with their music.

Q: Certainly with the Let Her Go video, that seems shinier, more colourful and mainstream.

Tim Pope: Yeah.

Q: Was that record company pressure to make it more like that?

Tim Pope: Probably me. I think the first one [Since Yesterday] is the best video, definitely. I think the next ones are OK, they sort of have a magical quality which I think are nice. I was still inexperienced in those days as well, I was still very much learning, and unfortunately learned sometimes at other peoples’ expenses! I think it’s quite quirky that one still [Let Her Go].

Funnily enough I hadn’t seen it for years and then maybe I saw it on your site, I hadn’t seen it for about 25 years or something and I suddenly saw it and I thought it was pretty shit actually to be honest, but I could see what I was trying to do. It had a sort of dreamlike thing. There’s that bit where Jill leans over where she’s a bit sort of mad which I liked.

Q: For Who Knows What Love Is? there’s all the outdoor sequences. Is that consciously trying to make it different from the first two?

Tim Pope: No, I would never work that way. I thought the song had a very dreamy sort of sappy quality. There was something very sexy about the two of them as well, and I used trees and things like that, and there’s this overt sort of sexual almost lesbian thing that happened in that, in a very dark and bizarre way. There’s this idea of Rose stalking Jill and all that kind of stuff, and coming between that big tree, I thought that was a real old chuckler.

It was just me having a bit of a chuckle to be honest. We just ran around with a 16mm camera. There was a cameraman I had met in that period who was an art student or something and I liked the way his stuff looked. We just thought we’ll fuck off to this forest and shoot all this dark stuff.

The light was brilliant that day, it was really magical. I remember the rushes of that were really magical and quite dark.

Q: Where was it shot?

Tim Pope: I have no idea. I wouldn’t even be able to begin to tell you. Somewhere in England.

Q: Jill remembers it being Sussex-y maybe, but no idea.

Tim Pope: It’s a lovely place though and I’d love to go back there.

Q: How do you think your videos stand up in retrospect?

Tim Pope: I like the first one [Since Yesterday], that’s the only one I really like to be honest. The others don’t do it, but then I don’t think the songs are as strong. Whereas Since Yesterday is a quintessential piece of pop to me, it’s quite succinct and to the point. It really encapsulates what they are, which is extreme light and extreme dark, and somehow or other I think that video has that quality within it, there’s something odd and bizarre about that video.

At that period I was really into David Lynch movies and that kind of stuff and there’s something like Angelo Badalamenti who always writes the music for David Lynch stuff, and there’s something like fluffy clouds on the top but underneath it you know there’s something very dark. That’s what I like about their music and Since Yesterday did that, I don’t think the others encapsulated that idea as well.

Jolene

Q: Jolene‘s going to be seen as a fairly cheesy track to have done though, isn’t it? What was the idea?

Jill: [laughs] Well, we were just desperate by that point. They wanted us to do something like that.

Q: Who suggested it?

Jill: You know, I can’t remember, I think it might have been Balfey.

Rose: It was Bill Drummond. Loved the song, loved Dolly Parton, thought ‘you have to do this song’.

Bill Drummond: That was a definite record company thing.

David Balfe: 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.

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

Bill Drummond: 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. 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.

[In 1993 Rose released a cover of Down From Dover on the Spell album Seasons In The Sun].

Rose: And that was another thing – we should have gone for the Marianne Faithfull one when they wanted us to do that. They wanted us to do a cover.

Q: Which Marianne Faithfull song?

Rose: The Marianne Faithfull one was put to us much earlier on, it was As Tears Go By, which is a beautiful song and I love it. I actually have done a version with Dave Ball which was not released, but we did a version of it.

Rob Dickins loved that song and wanted us to do a version, but we at that point didn’t want to do a cover. It was too early in our career to do a cover song. I think it was just after Since Yesterday or something like that, so we didn’t want to do a cover that soon cos then we’re going to get into the covers thing, and we want to our own songs, so we bluntly refused that.

But then after a couple of other singles the Jolene thing came up and that was one of those ‘you do this for me I’ll do that for you’ things. Things were all falling apart by that time, we couldn’t use the video director we wanted.

I actually liked the song Jolene and I liked Dolly Parton, but it was still a trade-off and I was anti it purely on the principle that it was a trade-off. They wanted it to be a club thing and I wasn’t into that scene at all. I didn’t care if the records got played in clubs. We’re not releasing records to be played in clubs, we’re releasing records cos we’re musicians and that’s what we do. They wanted to do it cos it would make more money and blah blah blah.

Q: Moving on to Jolene, Rose remembers talking up some ideas for a video with you.

Tim Pope: And they were fantastic. And I don’t remember the ideas at all now! Bear in mind it was 20 years ago. But I remember whatever way we were going was fantastic. And that’s when this guy Rob Dickins stepped in and said, ‘we want videos where they look sexy, obviously sexy’. If putting them in cages is ‘sexy’.

Q: The record company push to commercialise them, do you remember where their management stood on that? What Balfe and Drummond had to say about what Rob Dickins wanted to do?

 

Tim Pope: I think everyone’s balls were a little bit snipped after things didn’t work out as strongly as they wanted them to, d’you know what I mean? I seem to remember everyone having to concede slightly. Everyone had been great bangers of drums after Since Yesterday but the drum sounded less resonantly later on, shall we say. That’s all I seem to remember. Again, it’s hard to remember.

But they went off and did that thing which was fascinating, and I didn’t even know about that side of them, the KL whatsitcalled, the band they had…

Q: The KLF.

Tim Pope: Yeah, which I loved. They were always arty, they were always subversive people, so they were a very good match for the girls. But they must’ve caved at a given point cos they stopped working with me. I’m fine working with someone else, but I don’t think you need to do a video where you’re hung up in cages, do you? I saw them afterwards and they were in tears about it.

Jill: We thought OK, that would be really funny because we could do it really camp and we wanted to do this really camp video and we had it all worked out and they didn’t let us do it. We had to go to Paris to shoot it and it was terrible, sooo embarrassing. I can’t even tell you, it was just shit, just awful, really bad.

All the other ones had been making a little film. Especially the first one, I’m proud of that. I did film at art school and I was really into doing this. We’d been given a budget to make a piece of film that’s to represent you and something that you’ve written yourself. What a fantastic opportunity, it ought to be something decent instead of total shit.

Q: Also, with doing Jolene, if you’ve got any kind of tongue-in-cheek or ironic level to what you’re doing then it’s really important to have the video make it clear.

Jill: Yes!

Q: It’s such an in-yer-face and literal medium it’s important to be overt that there’s another element.

Jill: Absolutely! Which it didn’t, it really didn’t. We wanted it to be shot in a fake saloon with busty barmaids with plumes and cowboys and stuff, we just thought that’d be so funny. Really crap, bad shaking saloon doors, really tacky, really colourful so there’s no doubt in your mind that this is fun and something daft. But no.

Q: It’s really odd as a counterpoint because there’s such incredible melancholy to your own songs.

Jill: I don’t understand it myself really. We liked it, but we liked it the camp silliness of it, and it was such a silly thing to do

Q: Especially trying to see it as being of a piece with everything else you’d done before.

Jill: Exactly. And also the way it was done, which was Balfey. There was a lot of Balfe influence, I remember we did the recording at AIR studios in Oxford Street which was very expensive and there was a lot of muso people involved, it was nothing to do with me.

By that time I thought I don’t want to do any of it, I just want to go home, go back to Scotland and lie in a darkened room and pretend it hadn’t happened.

Tim Pope: But I liked it, I loved the song, I thought it was great. Did you not like it?

Q: I think the idea’s good, it’s a great song, but it was done badly, with that hopalong rhythm. It’s not dated very well, the 1980s electro thing, although Larry Adler’s harmonica is killer on it.

Tim Pope: Was it Larry Adler? D’you know I recorded with him once. Me and my mate recorded this song called With You and one Saturday or Sunday I went into a recording studio with the two of them. We just went in for a total laugh and fucked around and recorded this thing. God knows where it is, I’ve no idea where it is, I haven’t heard it since then, but somewhere it exists.

Q: The initial idea had been to do a more kind of I Feel Love sort of backing and instead it’s got a bouncy hopalong as a nod to the country provenance that kills it stone dead.

Tim Pope: Didn’t it do pretty well in Japan?

Q: Yes.

Tim Pope: It was obvious that they had that kind of thing, almost like The Cure, that sort of floppy doll kind of effect, if you like.

Q: I’m surprised The Cure had so little support with being on Fiction with Chris Parry, I got the impression it was a small label run by someone who respected them.

Tim Pope: It was Chris Parry who used to sit me down with The Cure and say, ‘I’ve had a couple of meetings with MTV and they want you to cut the videos this quickly’. I said, ‘well fuck off and get someone else then’. And in the instance of Strawberry Switchblade they did. Rob wanted something to make them look sexy, and clearly his idea of sex was putting women in cages.

Bill Drummond: 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.

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 12 inch version? I don’t know how it stands up today.

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

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

David Balfe: He [producer Clive Langer] 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 20 something or other.

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

David Balfe: It was a flop anyway, and that was that.

Rose: So that’s when it started falling apart basically. That whole Jolene era was too many compromises and not enough comebacks.

Q: Did both you and Jill feel like there were too many compromises?

Rose: Yeah, I think so.

Extreme promotions

Q: Given that you’ve got a hit and the record company start using their publicity machine, did they ever try anything more direct on steering your image? Did they ever say ‘don’t wear that, wear this instead’?

Jill: The record company struggled with us, but they couldn’t imagine doing it any other way. If they could’ve just cleaned us up, washed the make-up off and brushed the hair out a little bit, had the outfits but much cuter, got rid of the thick black eyeliner and blue lipstick, they would’ve done.

I remember they got a stylist to come up with some cute clothes; they were really nice, really well done, but they were cute and girly and frothy and sweet. Little strawberries on them and things. Good grief! What do you think we are?! She’d done this presentation with drawings and little bits of fabric, but well the whole point was we just shoved our clothes together, made them really badly, that’s why they look the way they look.

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

Bill Drummond: 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.

Bill Drummond: 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: 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 banal ones too and that there was a lot of pressure to be cute. Did they complain at the time about that?

David Balfe: 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.

David Balfe: 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 50 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.

David Balfe: 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 of weirdness in it with the stop-frame animation and the monochrome, it doesn’t look sleek or sweet.

David Balfe: 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.

David Balfe: 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.

Jill: I remember the worst thing, the thing where I thought ‘I don’t want to do this any more’ was round the time of the third single. The second single [on WEA, Let Her Go] hadn’t gone into the charts and so they really wanted to push. They wanted me to go out with Mike Read [then Radio 1’s inane breakfast show DJ and twattish TV ‘personality’, not to be confused with Mike Reid who played Frank Butcher on EastEnders, arguably an even grislier sexual prospect].

He phoned somebody up and said he liked me, and we’d done Top Of The Pops and I think he was presenting it and he was chatting to me and I was [uncomfortable squirm] and he’d got in touch with the radio promotions guy and said he’d like to go out with me. They’d tried to arrange for me to go out with him. I was going out with Peter, and they knew him.

They wanted me to go out with this guy, to go to some awards ceremony with him as his date. I was like, ‘hello?‘ I remember Balfey saying ‘I’ll come and sit outside the place in the car so if you want to leave at any time you can’. I was like, ‘hello? Excuse me? Am I a prostitute?’

Mike Read used to turn up at things, he’d turn up at studios. They’d obviously told him where we would be, and I was not interested, they knew I had a boyfriend. The promotions departments in record companies seem to be peopled by folk with no morals, they just want you to do anything. And I said no.

The mind boggles cos we weren’t exactly glam pretty girls, we were weird hair-extension freaks. I would not be the Spice Girls. You look at them and think, god, what must they get? Someone saying, ‘ooh, I fancy that one’ and some sleazy guy in radio promotions going, ‘I really think it’d do you a lot of good if you went out with him’.

I remember going with the radio promotions – radio promotions seem to be the worst – to Langan’s Brasserie, that posh restaurant, to have lunch with Mike Read, ostensibly just to chat, and it was with Rose and Balfey and radio promotions guy and I’m like ‘I’m not sitting next to him, you’re not putting me next to him’.

And they put me right next to him. Can you believe it? Just for publicity, let’s get a photo. That is not why I was doing it, and I thought fuck it big time, I’m not doing it, that’s not what I want to do.

David Balfe: 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.

The partnership starts to come apart

David Balfe: 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. 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.

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

Q: Did you consciously realise that at the time?

Bill Drummond: 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?

Bill Drummond: 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?

Bill Drummond: 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?

Bill Drummond: 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?

Bill Drummond: It’s just an unwritten thing.

Jill: And at that point I was not getting on with Rose and her kind of losing proportion of the whole thing.

Q: In what sense? What kind of thing?

Jill: We just kinda went off in different directions. She did lose proportion, she got a bit – Spinal Tap where the sandwiches aren’t the right shape – she got a wee bit like that. There was obviously a lot of pressure and she just wasn’t used to stuff like that and she didn’t know how to handle herself and she was greedy. She was ‘this is my thing, it’s not yours, just keep in the background’, you know? Which is tiring after a while, you need a bit of mutual respect if we’re going to do this

I mean I know a lot of people in bands hate each other but there’s still some kind of respect there that holds them together and makes them recognise what the other’s doing is good. By the time it got to this stage I couldn’t even recognise that, it was just silly.

I think you find out about people when you’re under stress. It’s not the best way to get to know somebody under those kind of circumstances, it puts you under a lot of pressure. I really enjoyed doing things with somebody else, with another woman, but it just didn’t work out. I just didn’t feel like there was any kind of mutual respect.

After we’d done the album there wasn’t really much co-operation, we were just kind of growing apart. I thought the good thing about it was to work together, to write together. It got to the point where she and I were writing separately, and I’m just not interested in doing that.

That’s why I didn’t really carry on afterwards because I didn’t want to work on my own, I want to work with other people. I think that’s the kind of dynamic that works well with a lot of people in bands and that write together, there’s a dynamic between two people that doesn’t work on their own.

Q: So it came to splitting up rather than being dropped? Your history is so undocumented that I wasn’t sure.

Jill: Oh yes, we split up. We decided to split up and then the record company had an option to keep both of us on, but they’d had so much trouble with us, I’d just point-blank refused to do all the shit things, which I have every right to do. Not going out with some DJ. I remember him inviting us to his country retreat for the weekend. No! Sorry, maybe he’s lovely, but no. That’s so shit, it’s not the way to do things.

And they obviously had no faith in us or the record or anything, so what’s the point? We’d have been better off on an indie label. It wasn’t good, and Bill and Balfey were on that 1980s huge-advance kick, they just wanted to go off and be mega, and they just didn’t want to nurture it.

Q: It was also when you were coming apart as a team as well.

Rose: A lot of that was because I really felt really pressured. I mean, I’d come home at the end of the day and out of pure exhaustion of arguing a point with the record company, I’d just burst into tears.

I was so frustrated and angry cos I always made sure we had group meetings every Friday and made sure we talked about whatever we thought was the right thing to do. And Jill and I would sit down and agree on everything, we’d agree we have to tell Rob Dickins and we have to tell the record company what we don’t want to do.

But then we’d get in there and Jill would be too shy to say it, and she’d also be too shy to say ‘I agree with Rose,’ even though we’d said it at home. So I felt like I was bashing my head off a brick wall all the time, cos I was like the baddie going in going ‘no no no no,’ looking for back-up and it wasn’t there. Jill would’ve probably just gone with it, rather than face the conflict.

Jill: The pressure from the record company got bigger and what we were getting out of it got smaller, and I just couldn’t be bothered fighting any more.

Rose: I couldn’t stand it any more. I couldn’t stand always being at a battle, and actually knowing that Jill was on my side – on our side – but not being able to say something. Sometimes her boyfriend would say something on her behalf, but the record company really didn’t like that.

It was hard work – I was having to push our point of view but they were saying it was my point of view cos they could probably get Jill to agree if they pushed hard enough, and I was the troublemaker.

I said ‘if I can’t use Tim Pope it’s the beginning of the end for me,’ and Tim Pope was saying ‘don’t do that on my behalf’. I said, ‘I wasn’t, I was doing it on our behalf. We started out this band. Why fix something if it’s not broken? We’re really happy the way things are and we’re not just standing up for you, we’re standing up for ourselves, it’s cos we like this arrangement’. The record company were just getting the better of us more often than not.

Tim Pope: I’ll tell you a story. I was on this video panel about four or five years ago and Rob Dickins was there. I was on the panel with him and Baby Spice or somebody. I tackled him about it – we had a laugh about it, it was like 20 years on – but we came to real fisticuffs about it at the time cos they thought I was wrong.

Also the girls’ leverage was not that strong, they weren’t having international hits. It wasn’t like with The Cure, where people tried to separate me there the band could fight back a little. I think by the time it had got to that point in their career they couldn’t particularly fight.

Q: Can you give me the specifics of Rob Dickins’ response when you talked a couple of years ago?

Tim Pope: We laughed.

Q: Did he concede at all that he was wrong?

Tim Pope: I don’t think he bothered. Rob Dickins was the kind of guy who was into a band that would sell eight million records. It was that kind of label and I’m not sure they were the right label for a band like that.

The girls by nature of what they were, they were subversive people, I think Rose more than Jill, they knew the nature of what they were subverting. I think it was the wrong label for them. I never used to do work for that label.

I don’t think Rob Dickins gave tuppence about them to be honest. We laughed, but the last time I’d seen him, twenty years before, we’d come almost to fisticuffs and I probably called him a cunt, as I remember.

Rose: I thought, this is not why I wanted to be in a band, to be stressed and go home at the end of the day feeling that bad, to sit down and burst into tears and think ‘shit, I hate this, I can’t stand it and I’m going to have to do it all again tomorrow’. I started being really really short with people, being really blunt and telling them exactly what I thought.

I said to Jill, ‘if it’s going to continue like this I don’t want it to continue at all’. It was one of the Friday group meetings, she came downstairs and I said I’m really not happy with the way things are going and if we can’t change it, if it’s not going to change then I’d rather we split up, I’d rather we just didn’t do it any more cos it’s not what we wanted to do. She just said that she agreed, or something like that.

It could’ve been easier you know, we didn’t have to break up, we could’ve sorted it out somehow but there just wasn’t the… I don’t know. Also we’d just sacked our manager as well, we sacked David Balfe because we didn’t trust him because he was manipulating one of us off the other.

That’s why I always had the Friday group meetings cos when we were a four piece we had the meetings in front of our manager, so that everything was said in front of everybody and nobody could be grouping off into little groups. Cos Balfey’s gonna talk to me and say things how he knows Rose likes to hear things, he’s gonna say it to Jill how he knows Jill likes to hear things, and I’d say let’s get together and hear how we all like to hear things.

Q: The songwriting credit for Black Taxi. It’s credited to you, Jill, Balfe and Mulhearne. Who was Mulhearne?

Rose: Mulhearne? I have no idea.

Q: Jill has no idea either. She said a lot of the songs near the end she didn’t have a lot to do with and maybe it was one of those, which kind of implies it would have more to do with you.

Rose: Black Taxi I remember because we were writing it in the studio as we were doing the session, like finishing the lyrics in the studio. Balfey came up with the keyboard stuff. Drew, my husband then, did a lot of the sequencing stuff. I wrote the lyrics and sang it. I don’t know a Mulhearne! I have no idea, unless it was the engineer or something. Maybe it’s Balfey’s alter-ego so he gets half the money!

Q: There is actually stuff like that with him! There was a 7 inch EP that came free with some Littlewoods promotion, four retro hits like Thin Lizzy’s Whiskey In The Jar, and one was Reward by the Teardrop Explodes. That was written by Alan Gill and Julian Cope, yet the EP credits it to Gill and Balfe. Let’s not name names, but it looks like somebody made sure Balfe got the money instead of Cope! It’s amazing that neither of you know of anyone called Mulhearne yet you allegedly wrote a song together.

Rose: I don’t remember anyone else even being in the studio apart from the engineers, cos it was a radio session.

Q: Neither Jill nor Rose have any idea who Mulhearne is. Have you?

David Balfe: 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: On a tape of late demos there’s Beautiful End, Cake Knife, Dark 7, Michael Who Walks By Night. Whose songs are whose?

Jill: Beautiful End, Cake Knife and 60 Cowboys were Rose’s songs. Michael Who Walks By Night and Dark 7 are mine.

Q: Did you do the lyrics as well?

Jill: Yeah, and I’m singing on them, and it’s terrible. I don’t think Rose wanted to sing them cos she hadn’t written them. That’s why I didn’t think it was going to work. I didn’t really want to sing. I don’t mind doing backing vocals and harmonies and layering things up.

Problems With Management and Money

Q: It’s amazing, talking to Jill and Julian Cope and other people who have known and worked with Balfe, everybody has got specific stories about him that still make their hackles rise.

Rose: It’s funny, Jill started going out with Balfey for a while as well. She had this little sneaky affair with him at one point. I think she really liked him actually. But that all fell apart. That was another thing, ‘what’s going on there?’

I’d have thought it was funny, except that David Balfe had this girlfriend at Warner Brothers and they’d just bought a place together and she was working for us at the record company. It was really close to the edge, she could really fuck things up for us inside if she found out about that. She was a really nice girl and both Jill and I liked her.

David Balfe: 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 story was a wind-up that Balfe took seriously]

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.

Rose: Balfey told all his friends in Madness that he’d had both of us, they had that really male crap. I got really angry with him for that, just a male chauvinist idiot. Once, we’d just come off stage at a TV show and as we got into the elevator he slapped or pinched my backside in front of all the audience. I was so fucking furious that I turned round and slapped him really hard across the face. I said, if you ever do that again Drew will slap you even harder.

He said he was sorry and he knew not to go there again. It was so patronising cos we were young girls. It’s like, fuck off, I don’t care how friendly you are and how much I like you, you do not humiliate me in front of all those people.

Q: He wouldn’t do an equivalent thing for a male artist, it is blatantly sexist.

Rose: It is completely. More than anything, it was patronising and humiliating in front of the people who were behind us. I was so angry with him for that, he never did do it again. And there were money things that I didn’t trust him about.

Q: That’s the favourite subject with everyone who says things about him.

Rose: Is it? He claims I owe him money cos I didn’t pay rent at this flat. Which is true, for the last little bit I did owe him £500, but when we went to Japan and we worked out all the money – we were doing gigs and getting paid quite well – and we were going to make a certain amount of money, and that was going to go on the lighting and whatever we were going to take over, and in the end there’d be a certain amount of profit. And the profit never showed up anywhere.

This was just when we were splitting up, we were asking, where’s all the money from the Japan thing? I started really getting interested in the money then. Before that we’d just give ourselves a wage and let the accountant deal with it.

In the beginning I didn’t realise that when you go on TV you get paid for it. I didn’t know that, I really didn’t. So all those times we went on TV, which was hundreds of times, we were getting paid for it. So hang on, we should have money. And after the Japan thing, where’s the money?

Money definitely went missing. Or it was spent on something we didn’t agree on. It was in our contract that if Balfey was going to come on tour with us, even as our manager, he had to pay his air fare out of his 20%. I stipulated that right at the beginning, and it was agreed on. I don’t know if it ever happened though. We were so busy that we couldn’t keep our eyes on everything.

David Balfe: 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 eighteen 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?

David Balfe: 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.

Rose: Balfey would always be edgy ringing me up, cos he could never predict what I was going to say about any specific thing he put forward about the band. He said to Drew that it fucked with his head cos he never knew which angle to come at with me.

Q: Imagine him being so scheming he’s got think abut his angle to come at, rather than talk about something and just see what you think.

Rose: Exactly. He’d say something to Jill in one way and say it to me in another way. If he thought I was going to object to something he’d fluff it all up, but I’m not stupid; I know Balfe and I’d know what he was doing so it didn’t work.

David Balfe: 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.

Rose: Once he’d got all these badges done with photographs that I really didn’t like and – this is really trivial, it was really petty of me to do this – but I said I’m not going out of the door, I’m not doing the gigs unless you bring the box of badges back. I wouldn’t have made such a fuss but I’d said to him before that I don’t want to use that picture, I really don’t want to use it.

Balfe came out with some thing about how they just came back like that and he’d told them I didn’t want it with that picture. I said well, we don’t use them then. He said we have to now we’ve got them, I said if you want to use those badges you take them on tour and not me. It was because I knew he had no intentions of ever listening to me when I said I didn’t want those badges done.

Q: It’s like with the record company saying what to wear, the people around you being unclear about whose band it is, and whose band it isn’t.

Rose: And sometimes you have to do really stupid petty things like that.

Q: It’s not like there’s only one picture of you available, so for someone outside to be deciding what picture to use irrespective of what the artist thinks, that’s where the pettiness kicks in, and you have to play on that level to get it stopped.

Rose: I know. And it got so stupid. I didn’t want those little stupid catfights, it was a waste of time, it was a waste of mental energy, it was just not worth it. So I ended up thinking I don’t want this any more. It ceased to be fun, it ceased to be what it was supposed to be. And god knows where it would’ve gone had we continued.

Robin Millar: It just makes you wonder about the ineptitude of Warner Brothers at that time, doesn’t it? How could they not have sat down and had a half-hour conversation with the two of them and thought, ‘well it’s completely inappropriate what we’ve got planned for them in terms of marketing and presentation’. But there we are, Strawberry Switchblade and the 1980s Warner Brothers dynasty; that’s chalk and cheese for you.

Disintegration

Q: Jill says that before it came apart you were writing totally separately and bringing completed songs to each other, that the writing collaboration had stopped.

Rose: That did start to happen a wee bit but it didn’t happen completely cos we did actually still do a couple of songs together. We did do things separately, then Jill wanted to sing on the ones she’d written and it was splitting it into two singers now. Well, there was always two singers cos we always both did harmonies and stuff like that. But we did start to write separately, that’s because we were communicating less and less.

Q: What caused that?

Rose: I don’t know what caused it, it just kinda happened. I don’t think it was a deliberate thing, I really don’t. I can’t remember there being any point where one of us decided to do that.

I think actually Jill wanted to sing and she wanted to sing Who Knows What Love Is? and the record company thought if it was going to be released as a single then I should sing it, although she had sung it live. It always reminded me of that band where one guy would start singing and then the other would come in. Was it Tears For Fears?

Q: I don’t know; my Tears for Fears trivia isn’t that extensive.

Rose: I only know of them cos they were on the same management company as us. Anyway, it just got a bit like that.

Q: It has worked well for some people, like the Clash, or The Beatles.

Rose: We did start to write stuff separately, which is why I’ve got demos of songs that would’ve been on the second album. I think it was also because we were really really busy and there was less writing time. Time at home was more precious.

We did still write together but we did start fighting a lot then as well though, we did have a lot of petty wee stupid little arguments over who was singing what harmony, really daft things.

Actually, very embarrassingly, we were in the studio once and we had a massive fight about who was going to sing a harmony of one bloody note and it was sooo embarrassing, cos there were tears. It was with this producer, the one who didn’t like women [Jolene session, produced by Clive Langer and Colin Fairley] and what do we do? We go in and react like a pair of daft women!

I was going, basically we do what’s best for the song and if it’s part of the lead line then that’s where it goes so I’ll sing it. But then Jill’s saying ‘I want to sing it, I sing the harmony lines and I’ll sing these ones,’ or ‘I’m not singing enough’, then it got a bit ‘you can’t play on the thing cos I’m the lead guitarist’.

Like on Deep Water there’s the guitar bit ‘di-di-di-di-di-di-di-di di di-do’ – that was probably the first song I wrote actually – I wrote that little lead line, and things like that became problems when Jill was ‘the lead guitarist’ and I shouldn’t be doing the lead lines cos that’s treading on her territory and it got a bit daft like that.

Her boyfriend used to say, ‘you’re letting Rose do too much,’ stuff like that. The reason was that Jill was actually ill, she was agoraphobic and quite often couldn’t do the meetings or whatever. There was a legitimate reason why I was doing more, why I was travelling to London while she stayed in Glasgow, because she couldn’t, so it was a necessity.

But then at the end, well, my ex blamed her ex for mixing things and making her feel insecure. I don’t know if it’s true. But stuff like that was happening, and we just got to the stage where we started to argue with each other about who was doing what and I didn’t want her to sing for the band, basically.

How we do it, it works well, we do harmonies and stuff and it’s good. And I don’t mind that there’s a couple of songs that Jill always sang and I did harmonies and I did the lead line on the guitar in some sessions and we kinda swapped roles around a wee bit, which was really good fun cos then you got to do the other side and I quite enjoyed that, I like little toppy lead lines.

But then when we did start writing songs separately it was ‘I wrote it so I want to sing it,’ and it was splitting down the middle anyway, right at the very end. That was the very very end and we were falling apart then anyway cos there was all this stuff that was…

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

David Balfe: 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.

David Balfe: 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.

What if?

Robin Millar: It’s important to ask the Strawberry Switchblades of the world ‘what if?’, what do they think may have happened. Not necessarily with my productions, could have been someone else’s, but what would have happened if there had been no outsider coming in saying ‘we’re going to process your music in the following way’, that it had all just grown out of them as central figures and they had become as big as the Smiths, which they could have done. How would they feel now? Better.

Q: Do you think it would’ve been different if you’d stayed on a truly independent label?

Rose: It wouldn’t have gone quite so quickly, it wouldn’t have been as rapid as it was. We may possibly have lasted longer, not split up quite so soon.

I imagine that would be the case anyway, because it [splitting up] was a lot to do with the pressures of the record company and them deciding who was going to do the next video when we were quite happy with who’s doing the videos right now thankyou very much – it was decisions like that which would really really piss me off.

It would be trade offs, ‘OK you can do this if you agree to try this’, and then they started trying to get us to change our image. We came as a package, we were already everything that we were when we came to the record company, why are you trying to change us into something from Dallas? We don’t want to look like The Bangles, we want to look like Strawberry Switchblade; that is who we are.

Q: The Bangles when they started out were actually a lot like you, a good band in part of a really good independent underground pop scene, writing their own songs and everything, and then they got CBS trying to make them into MTV corporate froth.

Rose: Exactly. And I was just totally opposed to that and didn’t want to calm down the make-up.

Q: Was it that direct, and that small details?

Rose: Well, they were saying ‘you should get into leather’ and stuff like that, but I was wearing PVC anyway. But it was ‘settle down a wee bit’ so we could reach a wider audience. Cos, although we were doing pretty well and we were quite happy doing what we were doing, we weren’t quite straight enough for a lot of people who were watching it. People would watch it cos it was interesting, it looked kind of cartoony and fun.

Bill Drummond: 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: 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.

David Balfe: 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.

David Balfe: 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 and Garfunkel type thing.

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

David Balfe: But did you see them live?

Q: No.

David Balfe: 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 early stuff where they’re not doing the harmonies yet and Rose can’t quite sing, but it’s 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.

David Balfe: 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.

David Motion: How can you fight against such a commercial machine? The whole point is to sell records, that’s what everybody wanted to do, but then it’s at a cost. And that’s the thing – how do you hang on to your integrity while going through that machine? A lot of people describe those kind of record companies, particularly in the 1980s, as being like machines.

Maybe it became a little more honest later in the 1980s where people basically wanted hits and it was kinds of cool to be pop. It may not be seen as cool now, but it definitely was, all the left of centre bands and people involved in the record industry earlier suddenly thought, actually it’s OK to go for a straight down the line commercial thing.

Q: The only way I could imagine it having gone differently is if they hadn’t signed with WEA but stayed with the indie thing. I’m surprised they didn’t put stuff out on Postcard. That was their mates and it was there.

David Motion: If you look at Balfe and Drummond’s credentials, they were from a left of centre background, an indie thing, and then they wanted to make money and sell a lot of records. Even people at Postcard. I did an album with Win, formerly of the Fire Engines, and who Postcard was involved with. They all wanted to sell records. [Postcard offered a deal to the Fire Engines, but they opted for Edinburgh indie label Fast Product instead; after the Fire Engines split, two members formed Win]

It’s always a problem in indie music, how do you find an audience and build an audience and be self-sustaining? Either you have to choose these channels which do function and do work but then there’s the danger, as we’ve seen, that you can find the original motivation gets lost under the gloss.

Q: One of the reasons I’m doing this website is to reclaim it from the image of mainstream pop. A lot of people I mention it to just remember Since Yesterday and think of it as disposable frothy pop.

But then now there’s some time since all the publicity overkill, and now people have come across Rose for her subsequent work and find Strawberry Switchblade as her backhistory people are seeing it as the unsettled bittersweet thing that it was always intended to be. I remember them at the time and I twigged there was more to them than Top of The Pops and mainstream popularity.

Robin Millar: They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or right place at the right time; I mean, maybe they’d have never had hits with me. They wouldn’t have had hits with me because they were with Warners and that isn’t what Warners do.

I suppose I might have known that at the time if I’d been more experienced. But I still had a rose-tinted view that record company people were like us, and wanted the same things, and wanted to be friends first. The whole point of a life in music is that you can and should be able to have a great time, be with people you like, get on well, not have the usual crap you get from a 9 to 5.

I think it takes quite a while for it to sink in that a lot of people who work at record companies – the ones that stayed there rather than run in go ‘oh my god’ and run and hide – are as unlike you, maybe more unlike you, than the people you meet working down at the benefit office. I’m not sure why or when that happened, but it did happen in the eighties that you met less and less people in record companies who you felt were kindred spirits.

I’d come from France, I’d been in France for six and a half years, and the people I’d met at the record companies in France were like me. They were just music freaks, and they signed acts because they liked them, they released records because they liked them.

If the Smiths had been signed directly to Warners without Geoff in between, the Smiths wouldn’t have been allowed to make records like they made, would they? Not in a million years! And when you actually listen to the work I was doing with Switchblade and then you listen to the Smiths and you think of the nature of the grip and the hold that the Smiths took in the hearts and minds of their fans; that’s where I like my acts to go.

I like my musicians to come from the bedroom, from the rehearsal room, nothing to do with the industry at all. That thing that starts playing to 50 people which becomes a hundred people which becomes a thousand turned away at the door, then it catches on, then you put the records out, then the market finds itself and these people become important, seminal, influential, they become deeply satisfied as well as satisfying.

It may have ended up with Morrissey losing his perspective but he certainly wouldn’t have wished for anything better or different in the type of success. And I think you can hear a direct link from the work I did with Strawberry Switchblade in 1984, and the [Fine Young] Cannibals and where the Smiths were.

It was a very strong direction. There was a very strong culture pushing through, just to have guitar bass and drums, great song ideas, a great sense of belonging to the people who were standing in the audience.

Q: And yet still retaining that feeling of outsiderness from the masses.

Robin Millar: Yeah. I always have and still do feel completely outside that loop. I’ve been to the Brits once and I just walked around, acutely uncomfortable. I thought, this is my business, what am I doing in my business?

Q: Most people deeply involved in music are outside The Music Industry. In the same way in literature, you can be Kurt Vonnegut or you can be Jackie Collins and you’re in the same business but you’ve nothing to say to each other and only one of you is part of ‘The Industry’. It’s the people who don’t get awards, who don’t belong who make the most interesting stuff. The best people on Top Of The Pops are the ones who look the most out of place. Seeing the Jam or the Mary Chain without choreographed moves but giving it tons was part of how you knew they were for real.

It’s a really sad thing because Strawberry Switchblade were there with the talent and the desire, they were making music for all the reasons people should make music; cos they had something to say, they had this little protective gang of themselves that would bond themselves but also fortify the people who understood the music; they had this stuff they wanted to say that was just coming out of them, not for any fame or glory, and this knack for these great darkly beautiful pop songs and gorgeous gorgeous voices, and it was all taken from them – and what they could’ve done taken from all of us – by this corporate steamroller.

Robin Millar: And it’s really really wrong-thinking to say that a group like that don’t want to communicate with a large number of people and sell a lot of records – they do. It’s just that they want to sell records to a completely different group of people. Record companies have got their marketing strategies, their radio stations that they’ve got in with, their record shops they’ve got promotional understandings with, their TV people; so the formats limit themselves by the marketing opportunities the record companies have in front of them. In other words, the records are market-driven.

Q: It’s the only way they can have any kind of predictive strategy, because the people that bands with integrity do want to sell to, you can’t make them buy records by glossy promotional techniques, they’re not susceptible to marketing strategies. They can only build the promotional machinery to sell the worthless, unchallenging and dull records.

Robin Millar: Can I give you the best example that I can think of? This may sound like a really strange example, but the best example I can think of is the Ferrari motor car. The Ferrari comes directly out of an authentic passionate skill for developing the best racing car in the world. Not selling to supermodels or premiership footballers, just making the best motor car that they can. That’s what they devoted all their passion to, and they started to win some races then people got to hear about them and love them.

And everything that is beautifully crafted and efficient tends to have an aesthetic that matches it. A car that will do 200 miles an hour looks like a car that will do 200 miles an hour, and it looks beautiful.

Ferrari have never ever advertised their cars in their history, anywhere. There has never been a magazine ad, a cinema ad or a TV ad for a Ferrari car. And yet it’s the most sought after glamorous vehicle in the world. It’s because what has always driven it and what still drives it is completely and utterly authentic.

The Rolling Stones, even though they couldn’t be less like Ferraris in appearance, are the equivalent. Right from the word go they had dedication, authenticity of purpose and the willingness to go and take it round the world over and over and over again. They will still now pack more football stadiums than any other band in the world because that authenticity still comes through.

Forty years on and still, before every gig, there’s a Moroccan marquee behind the stage where they’ve put the same Indian rug and the same lights, and for forty minutes Ronnie and Keith sit opposite each other on the rug just riffing, so that when they walk on and go ‘1 2 3 4’ they’ve already nailed their groove. That’s real, they don’t do that for the money or the tinsel. They do it because it wouldn’t occur to them not to do it.

That’s the kind of success that I crave for my artists, and I have played no part in any other sort of success because I’ve never seen it last, I’ve never seen it give lasting value to the people in the middle of it.

Bill Drummond: 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: If you had’ve kept with the indie thing would it have lasted longer, would there have been more to it?

Jill: Yeah, probably. Perhaps we’d have had to pull together a bit more. I dunno. I think in general there was quite a lot that was different about us. It worked because we were both there, it worked because we were us, and that just wasn’t there any more once we’d come down to London and once we’d been interfered with by a big record company.

Maybe had we stayed in Glasgow and just carried on… I think it would’ve fizzled out, I think we were too different. In the end I didn’t feel any respect for her at all. It was very tricky to work with her. I think she felt very under pressure. She’s the sort of person who if you said ‘that looks great’ or ‘that sounds fantastic’ would change it because she’d think you were lying to her; if you didn’t like something she’d stick to it cos she’d think ‘clearly you’re trying to manipulate me’, she was very paranoid.

Rose: magic, paganism, politics and Genesis P-Orridge

Q: Had she always been like that or had it come out of her with the commercial success?

Jill: I don’t know. Her and her husband at that point started to hang around with Genesis P-Orridge and his crew. And he obviously wanted to use the fact that she’d had a hit single and I think she sang on one or to of their… Throbbing Gristle was it?

Q: Psychic TV. Throbbing Gristle was his earlier project. [Rose sang on Godstar, a minor UK hit in April/May 1986, credited to Psychic TV & The Angels of Light].

Jill: Yeah, it was Psychic TV she sang with. Then she started getting into black magic and stuff like that, not in a positive way. I don’t know what you think of Genesis P-Orridge but if that was the influence it was a bad influence, a really seriously bad influence. She started to write songs clearly influenced by that, nothing to do with me, no collaboration at all with me. Which was, well, what’s the point, you know?

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?

David Balfe: 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.

Jill: It was all too much. We had flats as well, we had cheap flats in the same building, and me and Peter had this terrible neighbour. He was just awful, he practically threatened to kill us.

Q: Over what?

Jill: Because we walked about on the floor, and we were Irish and in the IRA, which he used to shout through the floorboards. Admittedly the sound insulation wasn’t good, but we didn’t make a lot of noise.

We had the police up to the door because he said we were smoking drugs and we were in the IRA and we had bombs in the house. Well, for a start we’re Scottish, one of us is Catholic and one of us is Protestant, we’re from Glasgow, OK? Please search the flat; us and three cats and that’s it.

We had this campaign from this guy and he nearly got us thrown out and Rose refused to help us. Everybody signed a petition to say that this guy was crazy except them.

Q: Why did they do that?

Jill: They said they didn’t want to lose their flat.

Q: But if everyone else is signing it….

Jill: But because our leases were tied together they didn’t want to do it. Which I just thought was shit cos if you’re friends with somebody then you’re friends with them and you help them out even if it puts you at risk. And it didn’t put her at risk, you know? And in the end we got to stay there because everybody signed the petition except them, and the guy who was being mental was moved. I just thought she’d lost the plot then, totally lost the plot.

Q: Who instigated splitting up then?

Jill: I just said I don’t want to do this anymore because it’s really horrible. The next album which we were going to do had got to the point where she was going to do one side and I was going to do the other. What’s the point? What is the point?

I didn’t want to do that, I wanted to write with her, I wanted to do it with her. But she was writing about ‘crystal nights’, you know? [taken to be a reference to ‘Kristallnacht’: on the night of 9 November 1938 throughout Nazi Germany windows were smashed in thousands of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues and hundreds of the buildings burned, without fire engines or ambulances being sent to help].

Just Nazi shite, and black magic and, well what’s the point? Do your own album! Just go off and do it and I’ll do my own stuff. I didn’t want to, my heart was never in it. I did a few demos, but I didn’t want to do stuff on my own. Some people like Julian [Cope], they can do stuff like that, but even Julian likes to collaborate.

Q: He needs a team but he likes to lead it, I think.

Jill: He’s been doing this for a long time, he’s had other people around him, he’s a strong character who knows exactly what he’s doing and he’s very smart and talented. I don’t think Rose had the direction to do that. It was that, and the Nazi thing, and I just thought I can’t cope with it any more.

It had been difficult for a while but it got to that point where I just didn’t want to do it. And also she’d starting taking a lot of ecstasy, that had just come on the scene and she was hanging out with those people doing a lot of that. We’d have some Belgian TV show to do and she fell out of a tree and couldn’t go so it’d be cancelled. It was that sort of thing, she was totally unreliable and I really couldn’t be arsed. Her heart wasn’t in it.

Q: Jill says your social lives had become very different.

Rose: They had.

Q: She said you were off with Genesis P-Orridge while she was at home with the cat.

Rose: She was a bit freaked out by a lot of the people that I was hanging out with.

Q: She said you bought Nazi memorabilia and that really freaked her out.

Rose: She said that I bought Nazi memorabilia?

Q: What’s the story with that?

Rose: I had a Hitler Youth dagger. Somebody bought me a Hitler Youth dagger for my birthday. I’ve collected weapons since I was really young, starting pistols, ornamental swords and things. I had a crossbow, a slingshots, nunchakas, and stuff for martial arts, butterfly knives. I practised with those things so I had them on that level.

Somebody bought me a Hitler Youth dagger as a ritual dagger, because I was into magic, which Jill was also freaked out by. I’ve always been into it, since I was a kid I’ve been into stuff like that.

I was always interested in the supernatural from when I was really really young, cos weird things used to happen, and continued when I was older. Like I set a tape on fire, mentally, because I didn’t like a song that we were recording. We were doing this song and I really didn’t like the beginning of it, but everybody else thought I was wrong. I thought, the first note’s out of tune, I know it’s out of tune. I was waiting for the head of the record company to come in and say yeah, it’s out of tune. and he came in and said, well done girls it’s in the bag.

Q: What song was this?

Rose: It was Let Her Go. I thought the first note is really out of tune and I was staring at the tape machine and it started to smoke and it went on fire. Even though I saw it I didn’t tell anyone until it was really obvious and they could smell it.

I used to do stuff like that. It started to scare me actually! I stopped being really into magic when I had my son Bobby, because if bad spirits come in they’ll just go for the weakest easiest person to possess. So I stopped being really into it then, because I was bringing spirits into the house.

David Motion: There is one other thing that I’m remembering, it was my girlfriend reminded me of this. It’s completely unrelated. I don’t know how I managed to swing this, but I made it one of the things with Warners about doing the album that I really wanted to try out a whole bunch of different studios and be in a different studio each week. This was because I was intrigued to know what they were like.

I’d worked in a number of studios but there were loads in London I wanted to try so we went into eight that I can remember but there are probably more. There was a week in Chipping Norton out in the countryside. I’m not a big fan of the countryside, but it was nice to be there. That one was towards the end.

The studio that we did the orchestral sessions in called Angel in Islington, it’s basically owned by a library company De Wolfe, but it’s a converted chapel and the main studio has got the old original organ and a view of the choir stalls at the back. Built in to it is a fairly traditional late 1970s/early 1980s studio, wood all around and booths and stuff, and this organ and these pews emerging out of the studio. It’s almost like a movie set, when you come out of the studio to go to the loo you come out into the main church bit.

We were there late one night, probably about three quarters of the way through the album, and I was out in the main studio with Rose. I think it was a Saturday, maybe about ten or eleven o’clock at night, and she was showing me something, she was sitting down and I was standing up.

Then all of a sudden there was this change in atmosphere in the studio. Things kind of went grey and it suddenly went really cold, and we looked at each other. I mean, I’m very sceptical about all that paranormal stuff. So, there was this change in temperature and atmosphere, and I said to Rose, ‘did you just sort of sense something there?’, and she said yeah, and we compared. It was like something passing. I wouldn’t say a person or anything, but there was this strange presence that passed and it was really spooky.

We asked the studio manager and he said people had experienced ghosts and stuff like that. It was an old church and there was obviously bones and stuff down there.

Q: Do you remember what track it was you were working on?

David Motion: No. I think we relaxing, she was just showing me something on the guitar. She was out in the studio, just knocking around, and I went out to talk to her about something or other. It was Angel studios where we did the orchestral tracks, but we were working on most of the tracks most of the time from the word go, in bits and pieces. It was fairly close to the end, final overdubs and stuff like that.

Q: Just you and Rose, was Jill not there?

David Motion: I think Jill was in the control room with Peter, I don’t remember who else was there. I just happened to be in the studio at that moment. I can’t remember if we were about to try something or just chatting. My only spooky experience ever.

Rose: magic, paganism, politics and Genesis P-Orridge; continued

Q: Jill said it got a lot darker round the time the band split.

Rose: What do you mean ‘it got darker’?

Q: Your involvement in magic.

Rose: Well, I was always into magic, but I just got into it more, just started practicing it much much more, proper rituals and stuff like that. I did get into it quite heavily really. It was fine for a while, and then I decided not to do it any more cos there were some bad repercussions coming back.

When I got pregnant I thought it was not a good thing to do, I had some mishaps, magically. I thought, I can’t bring this on two little unsuspecting creatures. I still did tarot and crystal gazing and stuff like that, and I’m still into palmistry and everything.

My great-grandmother was a Romany gypsy so I’ve always been into stuff like that. I always had tarot cards when I was in Switchblade and crystal balls and runes and everything like that. Me and Jill fell out over that cos she didn’t like it cos she thought it was black magic, which it wasn’t. She didn’t understand what it was, really.

I was doing magic to fulfil myself and to better myself, to become wiser about certain things. I was doing it to enrich my life and to become more knowledgeable about things. I was not cursing people or anything!

Q: That’s the stereotypical thing you get, not just magic but anything remotely pagan, that it must be dark and dreadful and full of human sacrifices.

Rose: I’d class myself as pagan, certainly. Really I’m just into the earth and everything around me and all the natural things which are pagan, the things from before Christians came along and swept it all under the…yew trees! You know, which they pretended came after the churches when the yew trees were there before the churches, they built churches beside the sacred trees and people forgot the trees were there first.

There’s a well in the east of England – I can’t remember exactly where now – not so long ago they found deep in the well all these runes and stuff, all about the Mother and a pagan goddess, whose name is very similar to another goddess. They just changed it very slightly, just to confuse. After a couple of generations, the real meaning of the word’s forgotten and people accept the new one cos that’s all they hear. And because back then people weren’t that educated, not everybody could read so it was very easy to manipulate people in that way.

Q: With modern historical research it’s easier to see where religious beliefs have come from, but before all the research had been done and published, you could just take a goddess name and put the word ‘saint’ in front of it, and a few generations later it’s believed to have always been Christian.

Rose: That whole thing did fascinate me, and that was a part of the magic I was into. It was discovering who I was and why I was.

Also, I did do things to contact people, like my friend who’d killed herself. Her ghost did come to me, her spirit came to me on a few occasions quite close after he had died. I saw things, I conjured things. I was just completely open to all of that and welcomed it into my life, but then it got a wee bit out of control at one point and I was getting a wee bit too obsessed with it all. I was completely like, with runes like The Dice Man or something! It was like, Rose! You don’t have to ask the runes if you can have this bar of chocolate! You can decide that yourself!

It wasn’t quite that bad, but it got so I never went anywhere without my runes or my tarot cards or something. It was just like my whole life was a wee bag of magic somewhere. I’d disappear off into the woods at night time when everybody was sleeping in a gypsy dress with my crystal ball.

There was this little wood up in Muswell Hill and it’d be poring with rain one night and I’d just run into the wood with nothing on but a T shirt and a pair of knickers and just stay there until the morning. And then I’d go on the bus that the commuters were on, and my hair would be all full of leaves and stuff and my legs would be all scratched up cos I’d been running through the brambles! I just completely completely wanted to be in the woods.

I had a really good time at that point in my life. But then after my friend died I got really depressed, really quite manically depressed, I wasn’t very well for a while. Which is what made me decide to leave London, it was getting too much.

The reason I used to function much better at the night time – I used to write at night time, used to go out in the woods at night time, do a lot of things at night time – was because everyone was asleep and all those negative vibes weren’t there, so that whole buzz that is London was kind of less of a buzz at night time. I felt much better for it, the buzz was really starting to bug me.

I’d started to distance myself from people, and that was a lot to do with Strawberry Switchblade. When we went to Japan and we’d get mobbed and stuff like that, and then I really started to resent people coming too close to me, just expecting that they could, invading your privacy like that, like you’re public property.

I actually now – Jill’s got agoraphobia – I’ve got people-phobia. I actually do. Sometimes I have a panic attack if I’m in a place with too many people, especially if they’re all moving in the same direction. Like the Underground, people get off the train and it’s really mobbed and they’re all moving in the same direction, I will just automatically turn round and go the other way, because it just freaks me out going in that sea of people, I know they’re not…going where I’m going and I don’t want to go where they’re going, I have to just go the other way.

I think it was a thing about when I was a kid, going against the grain, being different from other people, being into things other people weren’t into and they’d call you a weirdo for being into. I think it was just a physical way of that coming out when I felt panicky with all these people, all this dead energy and I just had to get out of there. I had to get out of London. I just think it’s much nicer out here where you can see the birds, it’s much better medicine.

I was diagnosed with manic depression and that was after Kelvin as well – anybody’d be depressed after him – I just thought I had to get out of London, it wasn’t a good place for me to be at that time, because I was a wee bit self-destructive as well.

Q: In what way?

Rose: Well, I went through this whole phase of challenging fate, doing dangerous things and challenging fate. We were supposed to go to Switzerland one day and I was in the woods at Hampstead. Just a couple of friends who were doing a ritual and stuff like that, and I climbed up this tree. I was taking something off all the way up the tree. Then I fell out of the tree and I broke three ribs.

I thought I was going to die cos I looked down and my chest was just black; it was dark and I thought ‘oh my god, my heart’s falling out cos it’s all opened,’ but it was mostly just green stuff off the tree. I had scratches, a couple deep enough to scar, but not terrible. But I was in so much pain cos I’d broken three ribs. The ribs snapped and a splinter came out and it was right beside my spleen. They were worried they were going to rupture my spleen.

And anyway, I couldn’t go to Switzerland the next day, so that was like a magical thing that came in and interfered with Strawberry Switchblade I guess. After falling out of the tree I was in bed for two months cos I just couldn’t do anything.

Q: Even laughing’s off the cards when you’ve done your ribs in.

Rose: Exactly! My ex-husband was on tour with Psychic TV and I’d just fallen out with Genesis P-Orridge not very long before that and he punched Genesis P-Orridge! He was driving for them and Gen was slagging me off or something and Drew just stopped, turned round and punched Gen right in the nose. He comes up with this and I’m saying ‘don’t tell me! Don’t tell me’ cos I couldn’t stop laughing!

But I did go through a really bad phase of being depressed and dicing with danger. Like, running into the ocean when it was really really dark every time I went to Brighton, which was a lot.

This is all the late 1980s really, long after Strawberry Switchblade had split up. I was just being self-destructive, I would cut myself to see if I would bleed to death or if fate would win. I would do really mad stuff like that cos I was really fucked up cos when my friend killed himself I really thought it was my fault, blamed myself for it. Although it wasn’t my fault, he jumped in front of a train, and he always said he was going to die when he was 23. But I said I’d visit him that night and I didn’t. I didn’t cope with death very well cos of what happened to my wee brother.

I started getting into magic again – well I was still into it – but I’d do ritual magic where I would cut myself at a point in the ritual to energise it and sacrifice some of yourself. In order to gain something you have to give, basically, and I was cutting myself a wee bit too deep sometimes, deliberately, just to see what would happen, cos I just didn’t really care what happened. That was a pretty negative part of my life, which was when London was doing my head in. I just thought, ‘this city is going to swallow me up, I’m going to have to get out of it’. It was a mad time.

Q: It’s really difficult to ask you about this stuff. It’s so easy to seem sensationalist or prying. I’m really glad there’s nobody who wants to look back over 20 years of my life and get me to talk about all of it, all the bits I’m really glad to have left behind. Coming back to the Strawberry Switchblade era, the magic was something Jill talked about and said it was a factor around your splitting up. I get the impression she didn’t ask to much though, she didn’t try to understand it.

Rose: Understand what?

Q: What you were doing magically.

Rose: Oh no, she didn’t. She wouldn’t ask about it, she never mentioned anything except that she didn’t like it and it was scary. She didn’t like a lot of the people around the time I was friends with Gen, she didn’t like a lot of those people, she thought they were freaks and weirdos, she thought they were all evil really. I still hang about with a lot of those people, like David Tibet and there’s nothing evil about him. In fact, he’s a Christian now, weirdly.

She didn’t really know any of them, she just knew they were kind of… dark, and into things that were not to her liking. They were absolutely fine by me, I thought they were all very interesting, I was interested in those things anyway. I enjoyed meeting and talking to these people and seeing their points of view on things and putting my tuppence worth in and having good conversations.

Jill: I’ve nothing against magic, but I had no time for what Rose was doing. It wasn’t scary, it was more reckless and silly.

Q: Did it not freak you out, the Hitler Youth dagger?

Rose: No, because it’s only like army memorabilia, d’you know what I mean? At first I thought, ‘has this been used?’. I did think that, because the one I got had a nick on the end. But a lot of those were never used, they were for boy scouts; they are exactly the same as the boy scout dagger except for the emblem. So really it didn’t have any significance in a Nazi way. There’s no way that I’m a fascist or a Nazi. I think Hitler was a very interesting man but he was totally off his fucking rocker. It’s fascinating to think that he could control a whole nation like that. How the hell did he do that?

Q: There’s something a bit simplistic in the way we’re told it was just him, the way history is boiled down to a few bogeymen when in fact they were part of a massive team.

Rose: All the things he stood for; a super-race tall, blond and blue eyed – he was short and dark! It’s was a headfuck, how can he be promoting that when it was everything he wasn’t? He was obviously a twisted little man right from the beginning. He was obviously very twisted and sick. It is all completely sick and awful.

Somebody actually sent me some bones from Auschwitz that they found when they went to visit there, in a little box. I took them out and I gave them a burial, a proper burial in a place that’s somewhere special to me and said something to put them to rest.

I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t pick up something like that and take it away cos I think it’s disrespectful to the dead. I have complete respect for the remains of someone who isn’t here any more, and especially something like that. People send me significant things, like that and a piece of the Berlin Wall and whatever.

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

David Balfe: 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.

Rose: Yeah, I had an interest in the Second World War, my grandfather fought in it, d’you know what I mean?

Q: It does grab people because it was so audacious, Nazism wasn’t like any other militarism, it was done with such showbiz.

Rose: It was so cunning and well-planned

Q: And yet so ostentatious with the big banners and Hugo Boss uniforms, clearly interested in style and dazzle as well as practicality, so overt, and that still astonishes us today like no other regime ever has.

Rose: I’d never thought about that, when you said showbiz, but it was really, wasn’t it?

Q: Absolutely! Putting a really distinctive symbol on everything that everyone will recognise wherever it goes, you read about the rallies with the deafening music as the speaker marches on, rather than just someone walking on to a stage.

Rose: It is fascinating, because it happened at all. How could that have ever happened?

Q: We forget how prevalent things like militarism and eugenics were at the time – they were common right across the world, but as we forget all of them except the Nazis it makes the Nazis look even more extreme.

Rose: And I think there’s a cultural thing as well. The Japanese army could be limkened to the German army with Mishima and all that, the whole pride and honour thing, it was another big showbiz thing. If you were dishonoured in any way you had to kill yourself. I know it wasn’t the same thing, but the way it was so serious, it was everything, your honour was everything.

Q: It’s so weird for us because our culture really values individual happiness and money, it’s so difficult for us to deal with ideals outside of that. Out of the two cultures, I think perhaps we’re more fascinated by Nazis because the Japanese honour thing is more to do with your internal workings whereas the Nazis was more to do with how other people see you, and that resonates deeply with the consumerist advertising culture we all live in, but it was for a genocidal military regime that we can’t imagine living in.

Rose: It fascinated me that it had ever happened at all, and in a time that there were people still alive from. My grandfather was there, my mother was four when the war ended. It’s such a horrific thing to imagine being in, especially if you have kids, your perception on things changes, you get this instinct to protect.

It’s totally bizarre, I just can’t imagine being in a war, I’d kill myself rather than have to face that horror, cos it would destroy me mentally. That’s the whole thing about humanity; why does someone want to kill somebody else?

Maybe that’s got a lot to do with my upbringing, seeing how people can be so brutally cruel to somebody, chop off their arm with a sword. I didn’t tell you even half the stuff I had to experience; some guy being killed with an ice-skating boot when I was coming out of the ice-skating, got it stuck in his back. I put my grandfather’s scarf that he gave me, it was a real treasure, round this guy’s neck and my coat on him to try and keep him warm till the ambulance came but he died on the way to hospital.

I came across that kind of thing a lot in Glasgow. The idea that someone could willingly want to do something so awful to somebody, another human being, makes me feel sick, it really actually makes me feel sick. I hate violence.

Rose and Boyd Rice

Q: Did you ever talk about any of this stuff with [NON mainman, Spell collaborator and Jeremy Clarkson lookalike] Boyd Rice when you worked with him [on the Spell records], cos he’s got pretty outspoken views on racial issues.

Rose: He has or he did have or he’s always had?

Q: Well, has had certainly.

Rose: I actually asked Boyd about this cos I didn’t want to be tarred with that. Boyd is a really fascinating guy, he’s super intelligent, he’s a really interesting guy. He says he’s not a Nazi. It’s not politics, he just believes in the Darwin theory of survival of the fittest, basically.

Q: But Darwin wasn’t talking in social terms at all. By ‘fittest’, he meant which traits promoted physical survival and reproduction. Having loads of kids would be closer to Darwin’s idea of fittest.

Rose: Well he’s had two! He’s never said anything racist to me. I’ve talked to him about it and he’s said he now has to be careful about things he says because people will misconstrue things. I’m sure he did wear swastikas when he was a punk, a lot of punks did.

Q: There’s a picture of him with the leader of the American Front, both of them in the AF uniform.

Rose: I haven’t seen that. I saw pictures of him in rallies where he used to do things for shock value, and with Monte Cazazza, another guy who’d do performance art things purely to shock people.

There’s a lot of guys that, when I first knew Boyd, were on the same kind of scene and would all be in the same magazines like Monte Cazazza, one guy who made all these mad metal things, one guy who blew his hand off, it was all mad performance art stuff and Boyd would do things that were outrageous as well.

Boyd collects Barbie dolls, you know. He’s really kitsch in a lot of ways. His idea of Satanism for example – he was spokesman for the Church of Satan when Anton LeVey was alive.

The idea of the Church of Satan is not to sacrifice things, it’s just living your life how you please; if you’re into 60s girl bands – which they both were – to celebrate that. To celebrate life, not to do something that was evil. Just to be who you are and do what you want and have that freedom. It was like a kind of anarchism in a way. The way they looked at the Church of Satan it was fun. There were rituals and all this, but they had fun doing it and they weren’t harming anybody when they were doing it.

There are other Church of Satans and I’m sure a lot of them are pretty dodgy, but their one seemed pretty harmless to me. And I know Boyd well enough to know that he’s not evil.

I don’t like people who want to harm somebody just for the sake of harming somebody. I always get asked these things about Boyd. People ask me about Doug Pierce and Boyd Rice from Death In June and NON, cos I’ve worked with both. The two people that I know personally and quite well are not what other people have perceptions of.

The thing about Doug is he is a man of honour, if he says he’ll do something he will do it. Honour and self-respect and the idea that someone’s word is worth something, that friendship really means something. I have a small group of friends that I’ve known for a few years that I feel that close to. Tibet and Coil, those are the people that I’m really that close to, that I will always be that close to, they’re like my own blood and they feel the same way.

When I met Doug I really liked the fact that he was a really strong person, a strong character that really believed in honour and self-respect and self-discipline and stuff like that. He never struck me as being a fascist. I don’t know where he’s going with his life right now cos I haven’t been in contact with him a lot, so I’ve really no idea what he’s up to. And it’s not my place to talk about anybody else’s politics anyway. I can’t speak for Doug, I can’t speak for Boyd, I can’t speak for anybody but myself.

I talked to Boyd recently, but I haven’t saw Doug for a long time, but there’s no way that I would condone any of that because I think it is completely sick and my family would have been persecuted as well, because they were Romany gypsies. Doug is gay, so he would’ve been persecuted. There’s all these contradictions – how could he believe that if he’d be front of the queue for the gas chamber? It just doesn’t make sense. I’m not for people persecuting anybody.

Q: So much of this stuff is written accusing people, it’s good to give the opportunity for you to respond. We could move on and even talk about some Strawberry Switchblade stuff if you like!

Japanese releases: Ecstasy, I Can Feel and the CD

Q: Do you still get much in the way of royalties?

Jill: We get some once in a while. We did get quite a lot from Japan cos they re-released the album there.

Q: Did you know that was coming out in advance?

Jill: No! I didn’t even know afterwards. I only knew cos my friend who’s an air hostess got it for me in San Francisco as an import.

Q: They stuck a load of extra tracks on it, the 12 inch remixes and Ecstasy.

Jill: Clearly they didn’t ask us did they? I would certainly have binned all those.

Q: When did you find out about the Japanese CD reissue of the album? Did they tell you in advance?

Rose: No. They didn’t tell anyone. Someone just told me they saw it and said, was it a bootleg? I saw it and it wasn’t a bootleg it was Warner Brothers. I even advised people to buy that one, because it’s got more tracks on it.

Q: Have you seen which extra tracks they are? Trees and Flowers extended mix, Since Yesterday extended mix even though the normal version’s on there. And yet no Sunday Morning! They’re in the vaults and they choose the 12 inch mix of Since Yesterday over Sunday Morning!

Rose: I know, it’s true. Especially the Japanese singles.

Q: What’s that, apart from Ecstasy? Did I Can Feel only come out in Japan too?

Rose: Yeah.

Q: I’ve always thought those two are really anomalous. What are they?

Rose: They’re nightmares. Ecstasy was basically an advert for something, I can’t remember what it was now.

Q: Subaru cars.

Rose: I thought that was the one they put Since Yesterday over. But it could have been. They used Since Yesterday just as it was over a car advert. Ecstasy, they called it ‘Apple‘.

Q: ‘Ecstasy (Apple Of My Eye)‘.

Rose: ‘Apple of My Eye’? Where did that come from? It was nothing to do with me. The song was called Ecstasy, that was part of the joke of it. They don’t know what I’m talking about but I know what I’m talking about; some people will know, some people won’t know.

Q: How did you end up doing that? Did you understand what it was like?

Rose: It was a nightmare, that period. We did another stupid jingle for Shock Waves hairspray, and that was fucking atrocious as well. With Ecstasy they actually sent us the lyrics, and asked us to write the music for it. I said I’m not singing those lyrics. So I rewrote the lyrics which were just silly, but whatever.

We just made a few bad mistakes at the end of our career, basically. Mostly Balfey pushed from behind, dollar signs popping up in his eyes. All that money that we didn’t really see from those adverts. You get paid for doing stuff like that.

Q: Of course, why else would you do it?

Rose: Exactly. And when I saw the advert I just thought [incredulous wince]. It’s got these Japanese girls sprawled over the car like in those horrible car magazines where they have a dolly bird. It was like, oh Jesus, another nail in the coffin.

Q: What’s the story with I Can Feel?

Rose: What d’you mean ‘story’?

Q: Well, Ecstasy was basically an advert turned into a single, but I Can Feel was another Japanese-only single.

Rose: I Can Feel was a song that was actually properly written as a song. It’s a good song, but the production left a lot to be desired I think. That would probably have been on the second Switchblade album, but done completely differently.

Q: I thought Ecstasy (Apple Of My Eye) was really incongruous for Strawberry Switchblade, a real twee departure from the usual melancholic barbed sweetness. Where did that come from?

Jill: That’s a Rose song. That was when she’d met Genesis P-Orridge. ‘Genesis can do magic’ Rose used to say, so we’d ask, ‘why can’t he magic himself a single in the charts than?’. Cos there was a point where Psychic TV were desperately trying, Godstar which Rose sang on, was a real aim at the charts.

Q: They got the video on all the kids music video shows and everything.

Jill: Yeah, he really wanted to be in the charts. And if Genesis can do magic why can’t he get the bloody single in the charts? What, he’s not going to bother? It’s what he wants and he can do magic, but you know, not for that? Aw fuck off, just write a good song. It’s luck, it’s not magic.

Q: Ecstasy is really incongruous. There was, for a while, an unwritten rule that if you have over a certain level of popness in your band then you have to do a Motown pastiche, and whether that ends up being the Human League’s Mirror Man, Town Called Malice by the Jam or Stop by the Spice Girls, everyone has to do one.

Jill: It’s an unwritten law.

Q: Was Ecstasy really late on?

Jill: Yes, it was very late on, and I hate it. [It was released on 25 September 1985, about 3 weeks after Jolene had been released in the UK and Europe]

Q: Was it released outside of Japan?

Jill: No. What it was, it was an advert for Subaru. So they had the tune – we didn’t write the tune – and Rose wrote the lyrics to it. I didn’t want to do it at all. She wrote the lyrics to it obviously, she’d started taking ecstasy. And I just thought it would be funny to put it on a Japanese advert, but it’s a shit record.

I so hated that song. I still hate it. It’s nothing to do with us as far as I’m concerned. It’s got nothing to do with me, I didn’t even play on it, I didn’t do anything on it. I didn’t write the lyrics, I didn’t like the lyrics, I hated the song, and it was done for a Japanese car advert – what’s the point? Why not let us write something? Why give us a song which is that shit? It was another Balfey thing, ‘you’ve got to make money’.

I remember we did Ecstasy, and we did a Wella hair advert for the radio. It was for Shock Waves [hair products] or something, and Balfey was ‘do this cos you’ll make money’. We went into a studio and wrote something for it. You’d hear it on the radio as an advert. I can’t even remember how it went now. I think Janice Long was doing the voiceover for it. That was at the end of the band, I just thought ‘this is awful’. Just piss off, with your bloody Subaru adverts and Shock Waves radio jingle crap; I’d rather sign on, I really would.

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 advert. They’re really embarrassed about that and say it was you cattle-prodding them into it.

David Balfe: 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’.

David Balfe: 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.

David Balfe: 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.

David Balfe: 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.

David Balfe: 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 would have severely messed with your credibility.

David Balfe: 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.

Jill: I’d spent all my time trying to fight against stuff, by that time it was just about the end of the band and I thought fuck it, nobody’ll ever hear it [Ecstasy].

Q: And they put it on the 1997 reissue CD of the album. They add that and the 12 inch mix of Since Yesterday but miss off Sunday Morning. What were they thinking?

Jill: Exactly! Please miss the point, why don’t you?

There was another song after that that we recorded, I don’t know if it was ever released, I think it was a Japanese single [I Can Feel] which I had nothing to do with. I just sat in the studio, it was Balfey and Rose who did it but it was released under our name.

I was there thinking ‘I really hate this, this has got nothing to do with what we started off being’. It was so depressing, so deeply depressing. It was nothing to do with me, I didn’t sing on it, didn’t play on it, didn’t even know what it sounded like until I got in there. That was the point where I thought, just leave it.

Robin Millar: You shouldn’t define your career by the records you sell, not in any sense. One of the really nice things about conceptual art is that you mount the piece for the duration of an exhibition and then you sweep it up into bin bags at the end, and it’s gone. That doesn’t devalue it as art because it’s the process of creation and then getting some people to experience it the way you want.

The time they spent in the studio with the BBC, the time they spent in the studio with me, the time they spent with David Motion, to me they’re all periods of their life.

Herbie Hancock I suppose leads a slightly more comfortable life than he would’ve done because in 20 minutes as a joke he wrote Watermelon Man before going on stage, because a friend was described as having a head like a watermelon. He literally went over to the piano and went ‘heeey, watermelon man’, and that was it. But I don’t suppose for a minute if you talk to Herbie Hancock about the highs and lows of his musical journey he’ll discuss Watermelon Man. He’ll mention it as being a good meal ticket but it won’t form any important part, it was just something he did for 20 minutes. It sold a lot of records and it’s paid for a lot of suits.

So, in a way, if they fell out as a result of music industry pressures, they should take a deep breath and they should take a longer view. They should say all music careers last a finite amount of time and we did some very interesting things together and we had a very interesting adventure together from an extraordinary fortuitous beginning, and then this fascinating rollercoaster ride where we were able to explore and to develop all sorts of different ways and work with all sorts of different people and then we had a short period of unpleasantness near the end where we felt rather compromised and it got on top of us.

But there’s no value to an ex-husband and an ex-wife hating each other ten years later. None whatsoever. You have to say we liked each other enough to get married once, let’s try to step back.

Just listening to the Peel things and the demos and the stuff they did with me and the excitement when they first went into the studio with David Motion; if they drew a line after that, they had a good time, really.

Afterwards

David Balfe: 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.

Q: Afterwards, did you do much on your own? Is there much recorded and unreleased?

Jill: I did a few demos, it must’ve been late 1986. I did it with a friend called Robin Brown, he sang with me. We just sat in a bedroom with a DX7. I’d written the songs and he did some backing vocals and we recorded it on a little 8 track in somebody’s front room in Muswell Hill, and he put some other things on to it, keyboards and stuff.

Q: What are you playing on them?

Jill: Just guitar and some really hamfisted keyboards. After that I did a few gigs with a band made up of most of Primal Scream, Robert and Andrew Innes. That happened cos I played Alan McGee [head of Primal Scream’s label Creation Records] a demo and he liked it and he said ‘do a few gigs and I’ll get you a band together’.

I had a guy who I was singing with who I don’t think they liked very much, a young gay guy, they wanted to be a bit more rock and he was a bit fey, but I liked him. It was a bit of a strange band. You had Robert from Primal Scream and Andrew Innes and the drummer they had at that time who I think was [Julian Cope collaborator] Donald Skinner’s brother.

Q: How many gigs did you do?

Jill: I think we did about three or four, we did University of London Union and Hammersmith Palais where I was supporting somebody [this might refer to Jill’s headline appearance at Hammersmith Clarendon, 9 July 1987].

Q: Can you remember who?

Jill: It was all done through Alan McGee so it’d probably be someone of his.

Q: How did the gigs go?

Jill: Pretty well. We had a few reviews and I was wearing a hat and it was all one of them mentioned, basically just reviewing the hat.

Q: Like the ribbons and make-up fixations you’d had from the press with Strawberry Switchblade.

Jill: Yeah.

Q: Were you still doing Strawberry Switchblade songs?

Jill: No.

Q: Just new stuff?

Jill: Yes. And I enjoyed it but, you know, not that much. I’d rather have done it with somebody else, with Rose if she’d been OK, if she hadn’t gone off the rails. I’d rather it was more fun. So I didn’t want to carry on, and at that point Alan McGee was going through a lot, I think his marriage broke up, I’d just split up with my boyfriend, it was a really weird time and after the review of my hat I just thought it might be nice to do something a bit…. I just didn’t want to do it, you know?

I mean there was one review, somebody at Record Mirror which was actually a good review, an intelligent review, it was really nice. But because it was just me it was ‘who’s going to be in the band? What are you going to do? Who’s going to produce it?’ and I didn’t want to do it without an ally, somebody that’s going to help.

Q: Have you done any music since? Have you written any stuff?

Jill: Yeah, I do it for the sake of it yeah, just for myself. And occasionally I think maybe I’d like to do something. But I think it’s been tainted by the crap that went on with the record company.

Rose: People keep asking me to release this demo I did just after Switchblade split up, the Sunflower Demos. A lot of the songs are like the Switchblade album, and some of them aren’t quite so 1980s sounding.

I thought, ‘I don’t want to release it, I sound like a chipmunk,’ and then I just thought OK, so I’m going to release it quite soon. It’s ready to go out, I’ve just got to do the artwork for it, and that’ll be stuff that I was working on that might have been on the second Strawberry Switchblade album.

Loads of people have been writing to the website saying they’ve heard about it and want to hear it, I’ve been nagged so much by lots of people to release it, so I’m going to put it out.

[Rose released the Sunflower Demos in 2004 under the title Cut With The Cake Knife, and reissued it in 2015]

Q: After you split with Jill, she said you did some gigs with someone else.

Rose: I did a couple of Strawberry Switchblade gigs, but it wasn’t with someone instead of her, it was me with two of Primal Scream, Lawrence from Felt, two of the Weather Prophets. It was kind of a wee bit like a Creation supergroup!

One was the best gig I’ve ever done. I took a tab of acid before I went on stage, which I would never recommend to anybody, and I would never have thought that I would’ve done it myself. First gig after Strawberry Switchblade have split up, so what does Rose do? Something completely fucking off the wall!

Before I went into the venue it was a full moon that night, and I thought, oh cool. It was in Brighton, and there was the full moon reflecting off the ocean, it was just gorgeous. I went into the venue and I was really nervous, and I took this acid. I went out on stage and I swear I don’t know how I remembered the songs! I think it was because of the moon, because I looked at the back of the hall and there was a spotlight, and I was thinking ‘Wow! Cool! The moon’s come to my gig! What an honour!’ Because I was so elated about the moon being there, I wasn’t thinking about the songs, I just played them naturally. It got reviewed as being the best pop band ever!

A lot of the songs were new songs, they weren’t old Strawberry Switchblade songs like Jill and I would’ve done. It was me moving on and still keeping the name, basically. Cos it was my name in the beginning, cos I got it from James Kirk. But Jill didn’t like me to use it because it was associated with both of us, and so I ended up not using it. Although I should’ve still used it if I was going to keep doing that sort of stuff. I thought it was silly to fight over it. I know people associated it with Jill and I, but things change and people change and bands change, and sometimes bands keep the same name but the people in the band are different.

Anyway, I only did two gigs, one in London and one in Brighton, I think it was the Escape Club in Brighton. The one in London was a bit of a nightmare, I’m afraid. MTV were at that one. They only filmed one song, Angel, and they did that mostly in the soundcheck. It was just those two gigs with a bunch of people from Creation Records that were in bands that I liked and were mates, basically.

And it was really good fun, and it sounded brilliant cos they were all brilliant musicians, the guitars, it was just orgasmic. The keyboards and everything just sounded brilliant, they all fell into the songs really really well. It was good fun being on stage with a real group, not a machine, not a bunch of session musicians. Being in a group, you could turn and look at your friend and smile, you were all there together, it was really good fun. I loved it, it’s one of my best memories of playing live.

Jill: She didn’t want the band to split up, and she actually tried to continue after I’d split the band up. She got this girl from Glasgow and they played a couple of gigs as Strawberry Switchblade. I had asked her not to, but it was that kind of final thing, ‘well you’ve got nothing to do with it, this is my band’.

She used to do a lot of shouting, in studios especially, she would be, ‘it’s my band! It’s my band! I’ll do what I want!’ and people would really be taken aback. She’d get to a point where she felt that I was doing something that she liked that she wanted to do, she’d build up like a pressure cooker and explode. I remember her throwing things in one studio, just throwing things about in this little room next to the control room and thinking ‘uh-oh, this is scary’.

That wasn’t all the time, but to deal with it at all was quite tricky and it wasn’t much fun. I remember coming back from studios in taxis nearly in tears because of another ridiculous outburst.

It affected her very badly, the whole thing. In some ways she was quite an innocent. Although she’d been brought up in such a terrible area she had a lot of the innocent about her. I don’t think she could handle it, and also being taken up by somebody like Genesis P-Orridge and manipulated which was just a shame.

And I thought you’ve got to be kind of sad if you’re hanging on to this Strawberry Switchblade thing. That’s it, you know, we’ve split up, do your own thing. You’re capable of doing your own thing, you’re capable, you’re not stupid, you can write your own songs, do that. Don’t try to hang on to something else that’s been and gone and isn’t anything like you any more.

I went to a lawyer to write them a letter and she told them to fuck off and she’d do what she wanted. And she’d gone to a huge music biz lawyer to fight me about how it was her name and James Kirk had given it to her. What’s that about? Just do your own thing, you know? Probably now I wouldn’t bother, but I didn’t want her to do it, at that time it was important especially with the Nazi stuff and I didn’t know what she was going to do.

I was saying ‘you can do what you like, you’re your own person and you can do anything, Rose’. As you said, the drive she’d got was phenomenal, and if she wanted to do something she’d do it. She didn’t need me, she didn’t need the name. That left a bit of a nasty taste in my mouth. It’s a shame cos I still like the records but I didn’t want to do anything with her, I don’t want to get in touch with her again. I just wanted to get on with my life, I got married and had a kid and I do my artwork.

Q: What is it you’re doing?

Jill: I’m working in glass at the moment, doing stained glass panels and painting and sculpturing. And I’m enjoying that, it’s something I feel I can do. It’s something I did and put on hold, cos the minute I finished art school that was us off.

Q: Have you heard any of the stuff she’s done since?

Jill: She sent me a copy of her CD which I thought was quite nice, but I didn’t listen to it much. I thought her voice sounds nice, but there’s too many things tied up with it, too many images of having things thrown at me! [laughs]

I do have some happy memories of recording the album and some not so happy. It just depends what mood she was in. You couldn’t really say what was going to happen, you didn’t know when she was going to…go. And it was obviously all about control, and I wanted to be part of a partnership, not be fighting with somebody the whole time. That does seem to be what happens unfortunately, it’s not unique is it?

At that point I used to shake if somebody mentioned her name, now it doesn’t bother me. I don’t want to remember the bad things. It’s a shame cos I don’t think she’s like that, I don’t think she’s a bad person at all. It’s just bad influences. It’s a shame cos she’d a lot of the innocent about her and to come from that kind of background and do what she did is pretty good. She’d a lot of good points and it’s a shame to ruin them all. She’d a lot of creativity, but she wouldn’t allow anybody else to have any credit, it was ‘me me me, I don’t like that, I’m not having that’, it really gets you down after a while. We’d do interviews and she’d be ‘I do this, I do that’ where I would always say ‘we’. You can only do it so long.

Q: Have you seen Rose recently?

Jill: I saw her a couple of years ago. We’d got some money, there was a cheque written to the band and we don’t have a band bank account so we couldn’t cash it. I said I’d speak to them [the cheque’s issuers] and see if they can split it and send it to each of us. Rose said she needed the money sooner than that, so she came up to London to see me and we tried to open an account together. She’d kept an account in that name and she wanted to put it in there and give me the money, but after everything that had happened I didn’t want to do that.

Q: You say you didn’t trust her with money ‘after everything that had happened’, but you’ve not given any implication of any dodgy dealings in the past at all.

Jill: Rose’s partner came with her that day and was saying he’d be the manager and deal with everything. I don’t know him so I’m not making any judgements about him, but why should he be managing anything I’ve ever done? There’s no need to – it turned out it was easy to sort it out so we’d get separate cheques.

The last time of contact had been her saying the band was nothing to do with me, ‘it’s my name and I’ll carry on’. You can’t trust somebody who does that, so I didn’t want to trust her with the money, and more to the point I didn’t trust her partner who I’d never met before. That’s the only time I’ve seen her in a long time. It was weird because she was very very friendly. She wanted to be friends. She was very open and very nice.

Legacy

Q: Are you one of those people who has songs going round in their head all the time? Do you still get your old songs going round your head?

Jill: Not usually, no. Other people’s songs, yes. I listen to a lot of music but I don’t listen to us.

Q: I was in a band over ten years ago, I haven’t listened to our old stuff in years, but I still get the songs playing in my head all the time. I just wondered if you were the same. Not singing it to myself, but really hearing it playing. I get stuff set off cos someone says a phrase that’s in a lyric.

Jill: I’ve got 10 James Orr Street now cos you mentioned it. I can hear the whole thing. I get it with other people’s, but with ours I’ll only get it if the actual song is mentioned.

Q: Maybe it’s to do with having a retentive memory. You said the other day that you’d picked up a guitar and couldn’t remember how to play any Strawberry Switchblade songs.

Jill: It’s really sad! It’s not like they’re difficult! There’s always one chord that gets me. How can I not know it?

Q: Do you see yourselves as having had any influence? Do you hear bands who’ve incorporated something of Strawberry Switchblade into what they’re doing?

Jill: No.

Q: A couple of things sound like it to me. Belle and Sebastian, for one.

Jill: Do they?

Q: Yes. I mean, it’s a common melodic melancholia, but there’s something in the use of harmonies that’s really similar.

Jill: I suppose I wouldn’t be arrogant enough to think it!

Q: I also clearly remember the first time I heard Linger by The Cranberries, the harmonies she does with herself made me go ‘I’ve heard that before’.

Jill: Wow! Really?

Q: Absolutely, I thought it sounded exactly like Strawberry Switchblade but with live musicians. That track is just gorgeous.

Jill: I see it with other bands though. When the Housemartins came out I thought the were so like the Farmers Boys [Jill’s husband Frog’s band in the mid 1980s – see this video of their cover of Cliff Richard’s In The Country].

[Frog is in the room and concurs about Linger]

Q: I’m glad someone else spotted that as well.

Frog: It may be completely accidental, sometimes when you’re writing something you don’t realise that you’re regurgitating part of your past.

Jill: A bit like David Motion and Sibelius! I suspect he actually knew about that!

Q: To use that riff is one thing, to do it with fanfare trumpets like the original means it’s deliberate, surely.

Jill: That’s where my and Rose’s lack of musical education paid off!

Q: How many people have heard Sibelius’ 5th symphony?

Jill: It’s not something you grew up with in Glasgow, d’you know what I mean?

Q: Do you see any influence of Strawberry Switchblade in anything that’s come subsequently?

Rose: It’s happened a few times actually, but I can’t remember what. There’s that band that quite blatantly called themselves something like Strawberry Switchblade. What was it? Some American band [Switchblade Symphony?] You always see little interviews in goth magazines and stuff like that. And they used to wear polka dot dresses right at the beginning of their career. They said that they weren’t influenced by us, they weren’t copying Strawberry Switchblade. The polka dot dresses would have given it away, really.

Q: The one that really got me, I remember the first time I heard Linger by the Cranberries, the way she’s put the harmonies on herself, it’s so Switchblade. The gentle swoony guitar is similar too, but the vocals are spot on.

If you see Strawberry Switchblade as part of that Postcard Records thing, there’s certainly an influence from that scene. There’s a big indie sub-genre of bands that clearly love their Postcard records, the most prominent I’d say is Belle and Sebastian, where there’s a delicate and intelligent pop thing going on. It’s really noticeable when Belle and Sebastian put the two female voices together.

Rose: I’ve heard a couple of Belle and Sebastian things, I got them on a compilation that came with a fanzine. I do want to go and see them, I’ve heard they’re a really good band.

My mum has called a couple of times when she’s heard something on the radio saying it sounded like me! There have been a couple of things where I thought, ‘that really sounds like me! I don’t remember doing that track! What was I on that day?!’

Q: Is the outside world still interested in Strawberry Switchblade at all?

Jill: I wouldn’t have thought so really, no.