Jill Bryson interview

Before the band

Q: How long since you last did an interview?

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

Q: Generally, how does it feel looking back? Are you proud of it?

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?

[considers] erm, yeah.

Q: Was it understood properly?

No, probably not.

Q: In what way?

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’?

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?

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

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

Yeah.

Q: What were you doing there?

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?

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?!

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

Writing songs, forming the band

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

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?

No.

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

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 the 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.

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?

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?

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?

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?

It might have been a bit earlier

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

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.

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.

Absolutely.

Q: How did the band actually get started?

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?

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: How quickly did it develop?

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?

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!

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?

It might have been ’81 I suppose. ’81 or ’82.

Q: How do you know it was December?

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

Q: And you did it anyway?

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.

Jill and Rose revisited the Spaghetti Factory in September 1985:

Writing together, the band becomes a duo

Q: Were the band any good at this time?

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?

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!

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.

Yeah.

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?

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?

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?

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.

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?

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?

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?

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?’

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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?

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?

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?

Yeah! But there was the whole thing that we were writing and we [Jill and Rose] were committed and they [the other two] 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?

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?

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

First recordings; BBC sessions and Trees and Flowers

Q: So how did you get signed?

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?

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?

No!

Q: Isn’t that weird?

Yeah, really weird.

Q: Do you know how many tapes Peel got, and yet he hired you people who he’d never heard?!

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.

[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]

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 an earlier 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 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.

We did that 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.

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. 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: Did 92 Happy Customers exist before? The catalogue number is HAPS001 which implies it’s a first release.

It was Will out of the Bunnymen’s label, I don’t know if anything else ever came out on it. [There was only one other release on the label, Sergeant’s solo album Themes For Grind, released March 1982].

I remember going to this studio in London and having all sorts of people coming in, the drummer and bass player from Madness, and Roddy Frame [from Aztec Camera].

Q: It’s an incredible pedigree for a session, getting the rhythm section from Madness and Roddy Frame to play guitar, and at that time when they’re at the peak of their powers. I see the connection with Roddy Frame from Postcard Records, but what’s the connection with Madness?

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 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.

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

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.

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.

Q: Did Trees and Flowers do well?

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

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 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?

[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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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

Recording the album

Q: Did you gig much?

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.

No, it’s just a few here and there. We did some recording with that band with Robin somebody who used to produce Sade…

Q: Robin Millar.

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?

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

Q: How far did the sessions get?

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]

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

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.

I remember going to Liverpool, on the Wirral somewhere and doing some demos in somebody’s house which was just really weird as well [Corndon House in Birkenhead, run by producer David Hughes who’d previously been in Dalek I Love You with David Balfe – three songs were recorded: Go Away, Who Knows What Love Is?, and 10 James Orr Street].

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

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

Q: ‘kinnell!

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

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.

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: So where did Phil Thornalley come into it?

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.

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

Q: How quickly was the album done?

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?

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 70s 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: Was it easy working with David Motion?

Dead easy.

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

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.

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?

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.

Q: Did much get changed that late on?

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 ogiinally titled Dance, and had been recorded for the BBC Jensen session in October 1982]

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

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: 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?

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?

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.

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?

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]

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.

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.

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

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

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

Q: That early?

That was towards the end, after we’d done the album. I remember [Jill’s partner] Peter 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.

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

Q: Was Korova just Drummond’s imprint on WEA?

Yes. Had they not already released stuff on Korova? Was that not what all the Bunnymen stuff was released on?

Q: Yes.

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.

Stardom: the big hit, promotions, fan mail

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

It was dead exciting!

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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?

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?

That was little girls.

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’?

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.

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. 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?

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.

Splitting up

Q: So it came to splitting up rather than being dropped? Your history is so undocumented that I wasn’t sure.

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. 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.

Q: If you had’ve kept with the indie thing would it have lasted longer, would there have been more to it?

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.

Q: Had she always been like that or had it come out of her with the commercial success?

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].

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’ve nothing against magic, but I had no time for what Rose was doing. It wasn’t scary, it was more reckless and silly.

And also she got into Nazi memorabilia that her and her husband would buy. In her daughter’s room they had a huge Nazi flag and I just thought that was shit, I really thought it was shit.

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? She started wearing black rubber. I remember them spending a huge amount of money buying a Nazi youth dagger, her and her husband, and it’s like, why? What’s that about?

Q: Was this still at the time you were together?

We were still as a band, yeah. 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?

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?

They said they didn’t want to lose their flat.

Q: But if everyone else is signing it….

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. It was that sort of thing which was shit. I just thought she’d lost the plot then, totally lost the plot.

Q: Who instigated splitting up then?

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.

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: On a tape of late demos there’s Beautiful End, Cut With the Cake Knife, Dark 7, and Michael Who Walks By Night. Whose songs are whose?

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?

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.

Q: Afterwards, did you do much on your own? Is there much recorded and unreleased?

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?

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?

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?

It was all done through Alan McGee so it’d probably be someone of his.

Q: How did the gigs go?

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.

Yeah.

Q: Were you still doing Strawberry Switchblade songs?

No.

Q: Just new stuff?

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.

Videos, Jolene, 12 inch remixes, Japanese singles

Q: Have you done any music since? Have you written any stuff?

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. 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?

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.

The second one he did [Let Her Go] 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.

Q: There wasn’t really anything to make a video for after that was there, apart from Jolene. How did the Jolene single happen? Why that song?

[laughs] Well, we were just desperate by that point. They wanted us to do something like that.

Q: Who suggested it?

You know, I can’t remember, I think it might have been Balfey. 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.

Yes!

Q: It’s such an in-yer-face and literal medium it’s important to be overt that there’s another element.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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??

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!

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!

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’!!

[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: 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?

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.

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.

It’s an unwritten law.

Q: Was Ecstasy really late on?

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?

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 gel] 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. 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.

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?

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.

And she didn’t want to, 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?

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.

Red Wedge, contemporaries

Q: Have you heard any of the stuff she’s done since?

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: 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.

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?

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.

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 1980s 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.

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.

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?

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

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 Smiths coming through and Soft Cell just gone. Which of it were you listening to at the time?

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.

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.

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.

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

Agoraphobia

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

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.

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…

…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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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 Keiyo, 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?

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 [Jill’s boyfriend] Peter 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?

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: 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?

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’-ed 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.

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?

Not usually, no. Other people’s songs, yes. I listen to a lot of music but I don’t listen to us.

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.

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?

No.

Q: A couple of things sound like it to me. Belle and Sebastian, for one.

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.

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’.

Wow! Really?

Q: Absolutely, I thought it sounded exactly like Strawberry Switchblade but with live musicians. That track is just gorgeous.

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.

That’s where my and Rose’s lack of musical education paid off!

Q: How many people have heard Sibelius’ 5th symphony?

It’s not something you grew up with in Glasgow, d’you know what I mean?

Q: Do you still get much in the way of royalties?

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?

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.

Clearly they didn’t ask us did they? I would certainly have binned all those.

Q: Have you seen Rose recently?

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.

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.

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

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?

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?

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 One] sessions. I quite like listening to them cos they’re much much more naive, there’s something quite nice about it.

Q: Is the outside world still interested in Strawberry Switchblade at all?

I wouldn’t have thought so really, no.