View From the Inside

I first met Rose in 1976 at some Punk gig or other. Glasgow had a small, disparate, rather pathetic Punk scene. We’d meet up at various venues around town. We’d come in our ones and twos, from the suburbs and the peripheral estates. What it was that brought us together I don’t know, maybe only disaffection.

Whatever we had in common was strong enough to have us hang around, with nothing to do other than be in each other’s company. Though Jill and Rose were very different people, they had this in common, it all began with Punk.

I’d seen Rose about but had never spoken to her. She used to run around with a taller, wild-looking girl called Lynda. One day she came up to me and said, “Hi, I’m Rose Up (her Punk name), and this is my friend Lynda Laid”. We became friends.

Rose in those days was particularly distinctive, not only because of her height – she is barely five feet tall – but because of the way she dressed. Rose was one of the most fully realised Punks I’d ever seen. She made most Punks look half-hearted, me included. What happened later to ‘Lynda Laid’ I am not sure. I do know she is the subject of Rose’s lyric on the love song “Let Her Go.” (Lynda is now a working pop artist – I have one of her paintings in my living room).

At the time I had just begun a photography course at the printing college. Rose and Lynda worked in a small cake shop in Glasgow’s East End called The Wee Scone Shop. It was comic to see these two, blue and spiked haired punkettes, in their gingham pinnies serving cakes. I used to go down there at lunch time, and they’d give me cakes and pies for free. I remember Lynda had a flick-knife to “frighten the Neds away” she said. Though I knew she was just kidding.

Rose and Jill Before They Met

Rose was very sweet in those days. You might have said innocent. She seemed eager to please, which is kind of hard to believe when you consider what a wilful little minx she became later. But at the time, I remember her as sweet and smiley, and always good fun. I think Punk had opened her eyes to a different possible future. She was like someone just woken-up and looking around.

I think also, at the time, she had a little crush on me, but I saw her as just a friend. One night, I remember, she nursed me through some teenage alcohol crisis. She was very gentle, almost motherly, which is kind of odd cause we were both just barely seventeen and, as the song goes, “we had a lot to learn.” From those days, I developed an affection for Rose that never left me even when things got bad. Rose is likeable – I think even her enemies (does she have enemies) would say so.

I met Jill about six months later at a Punk rocker’s birthday party. I remember there was a margarine fight in the kitchen. I’d seen Jill once before, on a bus going to Paisley, a small town just outside Glasgow. We were both going to a Punk disco at a hotel called The Silver Threads. For some reason the Glasgow Labour party council had banned all organised Punk events inside Glasgow, and you had to travel to Paisley to pogo. I was disappointed to see Jill seemed to be with a big burly Ned that night, her boyfriend I thought. But at the party she was alone. Or more accurately, with a girl called Marge Broni, who is still a friend of Jill’s to this day.

What struck me first about Jill, apart from the fact she was very pretty, was the way she dressed. I remember her getting a little bit of a hard time from some ‘punk by numbers’ type, at some do, who was saying, “you don’t dress like a punk.” What she dressed like was hard to say. I remember a black and purple padded dressing gown, white plastic knee-length boots, and a purple bow tie. She was sixteen. She seemed to know a lot about music. She owned punk records I’d never heard. She read the music papers from cover to cover. We both agreed, when punk degenerated into merely a costume, Punk was dead.

After Punk

By 1979 Punk was dead. By then Rose had met a boy called Drew McDowall. I had never met Drew before Rose introduced me to him. He was instantly likeable. Very intense, a ball of nervous energy. He was always either reading or writing in a notebook. A very interested person. Although Drew and I were never great friends, he would later save me from getting beaten-up twice. He had the greatest facility for quick witted violence of anyone I ever knew. That is, the instantaneous response. I never had that – I’d get punched twice before I knew I was being attacked.

Once Jill and I gave up on Punk, we kind of lost touch with Rose and Drew. I finished my photography course, though I never really got the hang of it. And Jill applied for and was accepted at Glasgow’s very prestigious School of Art (probably the best art school in the world).

While I’d been studying photography I met and became friends with Edwyn Collins. Then of the Nu-Sonics, later of Orange Juice. He introduced himself by saying, “come and photograph my band, we rehearse in a ballroom.”

Edwyn introduced me later to Alan Horne who was to be the future inspiration behind the “Postcard Records of Scotland” thing, which was (hard to believe it now) vaunted far and wide as the “next big thing” by people like Paul Morley. Postcard, which I named (my big claim to well-deserved obscurity), was to prove instrumental in the future formation of Strawberry Switchblade.

Edwyn and Alan and I became close associates, for a time. By which time, Jill had already begun this weird polka-dot obsession. She never really explained it to me, but I gathered from her Art School work that is was something to do with dots as camouflage. Like leopards spots. Only Jill changed her spots two or three times a day – leopards never do.

Though Jill was getting out and about on her own in those days, she was still, unbeknownst to me, at the time, battling with the agoraphobia that had first struck her in her very early teen years. This would prove an issue later. One I and Rose had to put up with.

Rose Returns

It was at this point (post-Punk), a year on or so down the line, Rose and Drew came back into our lives. Rose was still strikingly dressed but still in a sort of neo-punk style. Surprisingly, for a pair of professed anarchists, they had gotten married. And Rose Porter became Rose McDowall. They also had a little girl called Keri, whom Drew always referred to as “your baby,” when talking to Rose. And so we always referred to as “Rosemary’s Baby,” even though she was the cutest curly haired wee thing you ever saw.

As couples, started hanging out together again. Jill and I had moved into a flat in Glasgow’s West End, on the Great Western Road. And Rose and Drew became, with us, loosely part of Alan Horne’s ever expanding by then Postcard family, which was based in 185 West Princes Street, just around the corner from our flat on the Great Western Road.

The post-punk Glasgow music scene was much more interesting, that is much more original, than the Punk scene, which was imported from down South. Glasgow never really produced a commercial punk band. Post-punk there was the beginnings of such bands as Simple Minds, Texas, The Pastels, The Bluebells, Lloyd Cole, etc. And, of course through Postcard, Orange Juice, Aztec Camera and Edinburgh’s Josef K. There were others besides.

Once Jill and Rose started stepping out together, they soon became famous for being that odd polka dot couple. Rose had quickly adopted Jill’s inchoate early Switchblade style – and together they developed it. Jill was happy with this; she was never proprietorial. In fact, she gave a polka dot dress, of her own design, replete with bows, to my sister Libby, then the singer of the all-female band Sophisticated Boom Boom. Which she wore for their debut gig. Rose was furious. It was “our image,” she said. SBB dumped Libby when she got pregnant, and when she went the dress went – so, so much for the sisterhood.

I don’t know if they always planned to start a band. But the fact that everywhere they went people said, “you two must be in a band,” and the fact that everyone we knew seemed to be in a band, could not have made the possibility obscure to them. Yet it still came as a surprise to me when they announced their intention. Jill, I knew was interested in music, but Rose – like myself – could take it or leave it, it seemed to me. I guess I was wrong.

I suppose I underrated them. Drew and I would stroll ahead talking literature, or more accurately Drew would be telling me about Lautreamont or Mishima or somebody, while the girls trailed behind talking clothes, or something like, or so I thought. At the time neither couple had any money and walking about was about the city was all we could do for entertainment.

Forming Strawberry Switchblade

When one day they announced, they had formed a band and it was going to be called Strawberry Switchblade, it was news to me, although the name wasn’t. I knew it as a song James Kirk, of Orange Juice, had supposedly written (has anyone ever heard it). And the proposed name of an aborted fanzine I had worked on with Edwyn Collins, David McClymont, and Alan Horne.

Rose likes to pretend that the name was a foregone conclusion. However, I distinctly remember us all having a long discussion on possible alternatives. Maybe Rose was simply humouring us?

Although Rose was already playing sort of Mo Tucker style drums in Drew’s experimental band The Poems, I was sceptical, if not mocking. I seem to remember saying something like, “Oh yes, very good, but there is a little thing called being able to play an instrument. Then there’s songs. Then there’s being able to get gigs.”

Within weeks they seemed to have gotten it all. I don’t know about Drew, but I was stunned.

Initially, they worked very closely together. To begin with Jill wrote most of the music, and Rose wrote the lyrics. It sort of evened out later. Rose became very serious about music, but to begin with Jill was the guiding influence behind their instrumental sound. Jill had been a devoted music fan since she was fourteen. She’d gone from Donny Osmond to Led Zeppelin overnight.

When I first knew Rose, she liked the Punk thing, but was annoyed, it seemed to me, by the proliferation of bands you were supposed to know about. In the trainspotting aspect of music Jill was initially well ahead of Rose. Drew was the real music fan in that family. It was Drew who knew about the latest release of this or that obscure esoteric band. The phrase, “I’ll let you hear,” followed by some godawful noise echoes in my memory.

Jill, similarly knew what was what in in the current music scene, and she also had a knowledge of what had been. Also, I was amazed to hear she had been to see bands like AC/DC and Ted Nugent long before Punk turned her head. At these pre-punk gigs she must have been the youngest person in the audience. So, I guess it was unsurprising that it was Jill who first set out musically what Strawberry Switchblade were to be.

Probably the biggest revelation was Rose’s voice. She could really sing, and her voice had personality. Jill, to be honest, did not have much of a voice, yet it worked well with Rose’s. They had a “sound” immediately. Not making any other comparison other than this, but like Simon and Garfunkel, their combined voices added up to more than the constituent parts.

Once they had written, surprising quickly, a full set of songs, they set about looking for some gigs. It was decided that they needed a rhythm section. This always seemed to me an odd idea. Duos were not unheard of even then, and they could have proceeded as such. But on Rose’s instigation they brought in a bass player, called Janis Goodlit, and a drummer, called Carole McGowan. Two women I never really got on with. I say “women,” here as opposed to “girls.” I could never think of Jill and Rose as “women,” maybe only because we met so young. But Carol and Janis were most definitely “women.” The kind of women who didn’t shave their armpits.

So, as a foursome, they rehearsed and played their first gig in a fashioned restaurant venue called The Spaghetti Factory, in Glasgow’s Gibson Street. Things seemed OK at first, but when after a few gigs, Janis and Carole demanded writing credits on the set of songs Jill and Rose had already written, that caused an argument and Strawberry Switchblade’s first short lived rhythm section were dismissed.

After the event I thought the decision to bring them in in the first place was odd. Jill and Rose had a sort of similitude. Janis and Carole had nothing in common with them. I found it hard not to suspect, even then, it was an attempt by Rose to dilute Jill’s power. At the time such a thought would have seemed horribly cynical, but as subsequent events developed it seemed to me more and more the explanation. However, they lasted a few gigs.

I guess because of the way Jill and Rose looked, and the fact that we knew people on the Glasgow music scene, it was relatively easy for them to get gigs. In fact, maybe things came too easy. They had no real struggles in which their partnership might have been tested and hardened. Their working relationship had never really been worked through. Things took off before they had really established anything, and somehow by then, there was no time or space to work things out.

First Gigs & BBC Sessions

Their first gig, with Janis and Carole, was a low-key affair but all the Postcard crowd were there and a few Glasgow notables. Bobby Bluebell – I think Jim Kerr. They I think spread the news.

A few months after their first gig, which was, remember, within weeks of first picking up guitars, they were offered a Peel session and then a Kid Jensen session. Which was amazing, however in the interim, they had sacked the “women.” So, practically speaking, they had two radio sessions and no band.

Principally with the help of James Kirk, of Orange Juice, they started preparing for the two sessions. James not only gave them the name, and Rose’s first proper guitar, he was also their kind of spiritual inspiration. The music scene is full of fake eccentrics. James Kirk is the real thing. He may not thank me for saying that (or he may, with eccentrics you never know). James did all the bass parts and the guitar, as yet, too complicated for the girls. The drummer was initially the then-drummer of the excellent Del Amitri, but he soon dropped out. The replacement was a young Indian man called Shahid Sarwar, whom we labelled Shahid StarWars. Which annoyed him.

Almost Managing

After the Peel and Jensen sessions which, thanks to James Kirk, went quite well, Bill Drummond and David Balfe got in contact to offer them a publishing deal. I had heard of them through their work with the Zoo organisation, but beyond that they were strangers. They offered the girls a deal under the Zoo name, but it soon became clear they were just scouting for Warner Brothers. At the time publishing money seemed like money for nothing. Hopefully nowadays young bands know, it is only “money for nothing” for the publisher. Publishing deals are the loan shark-ery of the music business – beware.

At the time the girls were being informally managed by a big fat American girl called Barbara Shores, or “Ke-Babs” as Drew called her. She had been part of the Postcard crowd and was brought in again on the instigation of Rose. Though she was practically useless, she showed a distinct bias in favour of Rose. Which placed “Ke-Babs,” by then, on firm ground, that is until she queered her own pitch by trying to hit them both with one of the most draconian management contracts in rock’n’roll history, and there have been a few. I still have the actual contract, and it is a testament to her greed, or maybe naivety. As any would be Colonel Tom Parker, worth their salt, knows there is enough bondage inherent in your everyday management contract to keep a truckload of masochists happy, without resorting to extremes. “Ke-Babs” was sent packing.

One incident that displayed her bias towards Rose, and was rather ominous for the future, was the telephone interview she arrange with Rose (without Jill’s knowledge) on BBC Radio 1 where she was announced as Strawberry Switchblade’s singer and major songwriter. Jill was not happy.

Again, the incident was another example of how Rose was ordering things unilaterally to suit herself, bringing in “the women,” and then “Ke-Babs,” even as these things were backfiring on her.

This was the flaw that was to prove the downfall of the duo.

Altered Dynamics

Rose, who was of course the lead singer, had assumed leadership. But worse she was acting like Strawberry Switchblade were her band. It was as if she was rewriting their history. They had begun the band together. It was a joint project, and she only had Jill to share the credit with, and Jill had never been a greedy person. Jill maybe let her believe this, and had always deferred to Rose, and to be sure, the band initially moved along on Rose’s optimism and sheer will, but Jill ended up having to battle Rose just to get some credit for the work she’d done and was doing. They had begun the project together – and Jill had contributed her share of the art, and provided her share of the vision. But it was looking like Rose had forgotten this.

At that point Jill had written the music for what were to be Strawberry Switchblade’s first four singles, and the lyrics for two of these. But Rose seemed to be assuming a kind of overall authorship, or at least by the way she talked you’d think so. Writing credits would even out later in Rose’s favour, but at the time Jill had done more than her share of the work, and the polka-dot and ribbons image, though developed together, was really hers. She was therefore beginning to get alarmed at Rose’s apparent growing conviction that she was Strawberry Switchblade.

Jill was quickly presented with a dilemma. Since being a teen, she had dreamed of being a popstar to help herself step out of her situation. By the time Strawberry Switchblade were getting attention she had put much of her time and creativity into the band and Rose was acting like Jill was a hired hand, to be fired, like “the women,” like “Ke-Babs.” What was Jill to do?

Although it is not for me to excuse Rose’s turnaround, to understand her you have to know where she came from. Rose was the first-born female of a poor working-class family. In such families the first-born female is kind of schooled in insignificance. They are expected to expect very little out of life. They are expected to look after their siblings and become like mini wives to their fathers. Also, there was a degree of family trauma that Rose had had to deal with – she had not had it easy.

Rose was the least well-educated person I ever met. She is very far from stupid, yet she knew practically nothing. She is living proof that there is a class of person, or was, in that society, that if they do not show-up at school after 12 – no-one comes looking for them. Later, Rose would educate herself.

Jill by comparison appeared to have had a comfortable middle-class life. She had a nice home, in a nice part of Glasgow. She had had a good education and had won a place in the Art School. Rose might have been excused for feeling she had a bit of catching up to do. Or was due more to redress the balance.

When Jill mentioned “the Art School,” in an interview Rose would get annoyed and say, “don’t mention the art school, I don’t want people to think we are an art school band.” “No, you’re a wee Scone Shop band,” I’d tease, which did not help much.

However, this is what, I think, brought their collaboration to a halt, Rose’s inability to give credit. Or maybe more accurately her need for more credit. And her subsequent assumption that she had the right to first and last say in what went.

Stardom’s Effects

As they got more attention Rose began to become a little demanding. She began to act the popstar, up till then, we all took it for granted, they were only playing the part.

Maybe background had nothing to do with it, but that increasing presumption that Rose displayed seemed to indicate she felt hard done to deep down, and that she “had a right,” to cause trouble.

Rose’s ability to create and live in a bad atmosphere was something Jill, who is a peacemaker, just could not handle, and the duo limped on. It made life very unpleasant for Jill, but still, she would not just give up. This is the crap fans don’t know about, and probably don’t want to know about. Fame, even 15 minutes of it, plays with some people’s heads – I guess. Rose was becoming a diva – while Jill remained Jill.

Maybe Rose was plotting, or maybe she was out of control. It was hard to know if her attitude, her increasing one-upmanship was pathological, or tactical. I know Drew used to call her ‘Bilko’ when she was at her worst, which Rose hated. Maybe Rose had her reasons to push Jill away, but since she could not do it (Strawberry Switchblade), on her own, from anyone’s point of view, she was sawing off the branch she was sitting on – queering the chemistry they had, and others saw in them.

Jill had other problems too. No home is as perfect as it seems, and she continued to battle with the agoraphobia. People have various theories about it. They are always coming up with psychological reasons but really it is just a chemical imbalance in the brain, it seems to me. For some reason a “faulty switch” is thrown and the brain floods with adrenaline. This causes a panic attack as the senses go haywire. It is very unpleasant. It is trying to avoid these attacks that agoraphobia is. The secret is not to avoid them. The secret is to endure them, till their effects gradually lessens. Knowing they won’t kill you. (“whereas I might, if you don’t get out of the house,” as I used to say to Jill).

It is a testament to how much they both wanted to make records that they both pushed on through these problems.

Professional Management

When Bill Drummond and David Balfe, or “Batman and Robin,” heard about the dismissal of the manager Barbara Shores (Ke-Babs), they expressed an interest in managing. Bill Drummond was a very interesting man, full of odd and eccentric ideas. He was kind of bluff. You could imagine him as a big game hunter, or a polar explorer. In the music business he seemed out of place. Having known him briefly, when I later read, he claimed to have burned £1,000,000 of his music business earnings, I could believe it. Balfey, on the other hand, was a bit of a blank. He blushed a lot, and that was disarming.

They encouraged us to move to London. Unfortunately, by the time we got to London “Batman” had been given a better offer, a job at Warner Brothers, and we were left with “Robin.”

Just before we moved to London the girls did a country-wide tour supporting Orange Juice. They played backed by a TEAC machine that Drew operated. I collected the nightly fee, I think it was £60, about one quarter of what we were spending each night to play. This for me was the most fun we ever had with the band. While touring Jill and Rose forgot to worry about who’s band it was and it was just like old times. We travelled from city to city, venue to venue in a hired car driven by grumpy young Shahid StarWars, the drummer on the Peel and Jensen sessions.

The oddest thing about this tour was the attitude of Orange Juice, and Edwyn Collins in particular. Remember Orange Juice had been amongst our best friends. Suddenly he just blanked us. James Kirk had been kicked out of the band by then (a big big mistake), so it was nothing to do with him.

We were barred from the Orange Juice dressing rooms, and they generally made things difficult for us. Only David McClymont spoke to us, and he did that surreptitiously. I suspect Edwyn did not like the enthusiastic response the girls were getting out of the audiences – an audience only has so much energy to give on one night – I guess? Maybe Edwyn had his reasons – I dunno?

This for me was a major disappointment, because at one point I idolised Edwyn. The girls were getting attention, so it was hard not to see Edwyn’s attitude as simply jealousy. We had a tiny revenge on them when one night in Brighton all of Orange Juice’s rider of two dozen cans of beer was delivered to our dressing room. We kept the lot. It lasted us about three weeks.

People sometimes get what they deserve and Edwyn’s career went into a ten-year nosedive, not because I fear he turned his back on us, but because he kicked James Kirk out of what was James’ band, well as much as it was his. Edwyn may have been the main man in Orange Juice, but I think James was the spirit of the band.

London Life

We moved to London in the summer of 1983. For the first few months we stayed in a Chinese hotel called the Keio in Sussex Gardens in Paddington. It was great. So much more colourful than Glasgow.

Though Balfey was much less imposing than “Bulldog Drummond,” it would be a lie to say he was charmless. He was even then quite good looking, in a goofy kind of way. Rose quietly developed a crush on him, though that is not now something she would admit even under torture. Anyway, it made Rose, for a time, a little bit easier to handle.

Sad to relate, although things were on the up, it wasn’t long before Jill and Rose’s relationship had decayed into a kind of cold war phase, this is how they got by. They were still working but not working together. It amazed me how they both could play at being friends in front of TV cameras but have nothing to say to each other in private. They had come to an understanding, but it was stand-off not reconciliation. For me, brought up on the Monkees paradigm, “four mates in a rock’n’ roll band,” it was all a bit depressing. I could see their potential draining away.

However, we were new to London, and there was still a lot of fun to be had from the situation. As things developed it quickly became clear that Balfey did not have an original though in his head. His idea of promoting them was to encourage Rose to wear rubber dresses. It was kind of pathetic. He seemed to have no idea who they were – or where they were coming from. They were Françoise Hardy meets the Velvet Underground – I’d say. He’d recommend they work with people because, “they’d worked with Thin Lizzy.” All you could do was grit your teeth and not laugh in his face. Bill was sometimes around, and Bill was always refreshingly artistic, he would leave you with hope, but it never stuck around, a bit like Bill.

Tensions With Balfe

Things between me and Balfey soon became difficult. He, I think, saw me as a threat to his authority, not that he had much authority, especially where it counted, that is over Rose. I think he thought I had an agenda – I had no agenda other than to see the girls succeed. At the very least he thought I was in his way. And I guess I was sometimes a pain in the neck, but it was hard for me to keep my mouth shut having seen the girls come so far only to be mis-managed by a kind of oaf, as I (unfairly) thought. Someone who seemed to neither know what to do with them or, more importantly, who they were.

To be fair to Balfey, he never just gave into Rose as most people did. Though I think this was more to do with his view of himself as “the man” rather than on principle. Also, I always got the impression that Balfey thought Rose was low-class, not PLU [‘people like us’]. Balfey was what the working-class Liverpudlians call a “woolly back” – someone a little posher, slumming it with the plebs. He got on better with Jill – which was also to cause a problem.

Balfey was then part of a bigger management organisation called Outlaw. It was a kind of unreconstructed lads affair, it seemed to me. I think Balfey was kind of embarrassed that he was managing a pair of “girls.” That is why, I think, he was so happy when mock-rocker Zodiac Mindwarp came along later. Zodiac was Dennis to Balfey’s Walter.

Again to be fair to Balfey, I guess it would have been difficult for anyone to understand the complexity of Jill and Rose’s relationship and their respective histories. For a middle-class Englishman with no apparent hinterland, practically impossible. This was an intimate affair. Add to this the fact that we collectively kept him at arm’s length, and he knew it, with recourse to colloquial Scottishness and a constant stream of personal disinformation.

It was obvious underneath that cash-crazed businessman was some slack old hippy who just wanted to fuck the world (literally), and call it love. On the subject I asked him once, “why are you such a tart?” He answered, “I find everyone worthy of interest.” For a moment I thought “have I misjudged the man?”

Despite – it all (and more) I personally never disliked the man. In his way he is as eccentric as both Jill and Rose. I sometimes think if he had trusted me more, we could have sorted out the growing divide between Jill and Rose, but maybe that’s a delusion.

Though it was obvious that Balfey was artistically clueless, the void that I was really worried about was the increasing one between Jill and Rose. I knew they were both talented, and I knew they did their best work together. I’d seen this stand-off developing, but how to bring them together? I hoped time would provide the answer.

Trees and Flowers

Meanwhile, Balfey’s big idea was to record Jill’s agoraphobic paean “Trees and Flowers,” and release it on a fake indie label for credibility. Then follow that up with the big major signing. They had already signed to Warner Brothers for a measly £20,000. Balfey got the Madness rhythm section in (strangely and unexpectedly snooty people), and they recorded a good, if slightly too bucolic (for my liking) version with Roddy Frame of Aztec Camera on guitar.

One of my photographs was chosen, and Warner Brothers paid for a big poster campaign around central London. They got some pretty good press for this single. It topped the indie charts, and Annie Lennox and Boy George cited it.

They had a very good press man at the time, a guy called Mick Houghton. He was kind of measured, and seemed to have a very good idea of who they were and how to present them. For me, he had it just right. But Balfey thought he was “too classy.” He and Warner Brothers wanted them on the cover of Smash Hits. Again, to be fair to Balfey, the girls wanted this too. But once you go there, there is no way back. I think Mick knew this, and later he was proved right. When Mick was sacked, I felt kind of sick – he saw them far clearer than Balfey.

After some months stay in the Chinese hotel (Sussex Gardens), the novelty began to wear off. We started looking around for a more permanent address. Someone came up with a two-bed flat in Muswell Hill. We moved in in late summer. Rose and Drew in one room, Jill and I in the other. For a short while it was happy families. Muswell Hill is a nice place to be. It even had a Golden Egg.

I found and rented a part share of a photographic studio in the B2 studio of Metropolitan Wharf in Wapping. There I made friends with a couple of photographers, brothers Innis and Finlay McAlister who became part of Jill and I’s wider circle.

Producing the Album

After an abortive series of musos Balfey produced (not bad just not right), someone came up with the name David Motion. I think it was Jeanne Mulhearn, Balfey’s then-girlfriend and PA to Rob Dickins, the man who had signed them to Warner Brothers.

Rob Dickins turned out to be one of those top businessmen who is also a top guy. I really like him. It was he who stuck by the girls, and financially indulged them, for instance letting them record the song “Poor Hearts” three times because the implacable Rose, and no-one else, thought it was a single. It wasn’t.

The beautiful Jeanne, who incidentally has a writing credit on the Strawberry Switchblade track “Black Taxi,” knew David Motion through his work with the band Intaferon.

Motion and the girls met and got on instantly. More importantly Motion knew how to handle Rose. He had a natural calm authority and, though I did not know it at the time, was some kind of genius.

By this time, late 1984, Jill and I had been together for more than six/seven (formative) years. I’d known her since she was sixteen. We had grown up together. But we had grown into different people. Although we were still fond of each other, and would remain so, we were no longer a couple in the real sense. We were more like sister and brother. We would have separated I think but for two reasons – we were both skint – and Jill’s agoraphobia.

Jill’s Agoraphobia

All this time Jill had been having an on and off battle with agoraphobia.

One of the tactics of agoraphobics is to fixate on an individual. They sort of convince themselves that they will be okay, as long as that person is around. The person Jill fixated on was me. This was okay, as long as we were a couple, but when our relationship ended it became kind of absurd me being her security blanket. And, once I began to get photographic work in my own right, more than a little inconvenient.

Jill would demand I go with her everywhere. And, since neither of us was about to explain ourselves to the hard-faced females who populate the lower floors of record companies, that became more than a little uncomfortable.

Rose’s reaction to Jill’s increasing oddness was bizarre, she seemed to be developing phobias of her own. Balfey, true to form, got the wrong end of the stick. He thought, or maybe preferred to think, I was exerting some sort of sinister influence over Jill. He decided to force Jill’s independence.

I remember one horrendous scene at Heathrow Airport with Jill in tears refusing to get on a plane to Japan without me, and Balfey screaming, “That’s it, your career’s over, you’re finished, you’ll never work again.”

If that was not comic enough, I distinctly remember a young fan standing by patiently, seemingly unmoved, as if popstars in crisis is what you expect to see at airports, all part of the show-business, waiting for an autograph.

Since Yesterday

David Motion made a great job of the album. Despite the girl’s history of conflict and still unresolved “cold war,” he managed to maintain a happy ship. He had done a huge amount of work himself but had maximised the girl’s playing parts on all the tracks.

“Since Yesterday” was released as the single and reached number five in the charts, if only like a drunk man ascending a stair. Still, it sold nearly quarter of a million copies.

Paradoxically, when things should have been at their best, I was never surer they were living on borrowed time. Success had predictably not mollified Rose’s need to have more than her share of the cake. Which was one of the analogies that Balfey used on one of the times he tried to get Rose to behave.

SCENE (Air Studios, Oxford Street, Jolene session): Balfey: “Now Rose, this whole thing is like one big Christmas cake. There is enough for everyone. We can calmly and fairly cut everyone a slice, like civilised human beings, or we can all fight each other for it, and see how much we can claw into our respective corners. So Rose, what’s it to be?”

It didn’t work. But I was impressed. Rose on the other hand probably thought, a man with the morals of a polecat, and the single vector of avaricious advantage, telling her how to behave was a bit rich, even for Christmas cake!

Although Jill and I, and Rose and Drew, had come down to London together we soon developed different sets of friends. Rose and Drew had taken up with the infamous Genesis P-Orridge of Psychic TV fame who, although he had a fearsome reputation, was perfectly nice when we met him.

Rose also began a relationship with the lead singer of a band called “Getting the Fear” a boy called Bea. A very beautiful boy, so pretty you had to stare at him to be sure he was in fact a boy. Drew seemed okay with this, in fact in many ways Drew seemed to have a closer relationship with Bea than Rose. Eventually they move in together – as flatmates.

Jill and I had a different set of friends. She had linked up with an old college friend, Lucinda Sieger a Jazz singer, who had an art school squat in King’s Cross. A large, due for demolition, but not now, Victorian House. She gave the best parties, and knew lots of people, and we became part of that set.

We were also friends with a young couple called Caroline Crawley and Jemaur Tayle. They were signed to Rough Trade Records and recorded under the name “Shelleyan Orphan.” Caroline was some kind of gifted pre-Raphaelite beauty, but never has the term “free love” been more aptly applied. For a working-class boy like me all this free love stuff seemed very strange.

Added to this set was a pair of handsome young men from Watford called Barrington Seabrook and William Learmonth who had a duo called “Tracey Island.” Barrington and William became my closest friends until Caroline intervened in her usual way. These were the fun times – lots of parties and lots of music and lots of wine. Rose and Drew were doing the drugs – we the wine.

These were roughly the two sets we belonged to, not that we never mixed. And it was not that we were antagonistic camps, the was a degree of cross-pollination. Drew especially was always popular, and Caroline for slightly different reasons, well she was a beauty. Generally, though, the two parties stood separate from each other, like Jill and Rose in analogy. A polite stand-off.

After Since Yesterday

The next period for the girls was hectic. They had an album to promote. Like any couple running away from the fact that their marriage was over, Jill and Rose filled their time up with activity. They did radio, and TV. They did personal appearances and gigs. They went to Japan. They met Ryuichi Sakamoto. He was interested in producing the second album. Rose asked him, seemingly apropos of nothing, whether he had ever “eaten a dog.”

We had dinner with Mr Yamamoto who was the head of Warner Brothers Japan. He asked the girls to relocate to Japan. “We will make you big stars,” he said. I was in favour. I hoped in the move we’d lose Balfey. The girls declined. (It was maybe their last chance).

After “Since Yesterday,” “Let Her Go,” and “Who Knows What Love Is” had been released in quick succession. Neither made much impression on the charts. The Smash Hits audience proved to be a fickle bunch. To break the spell, I suggested they record a punk, disco version of Dolly Parton’s country and western classic “Jolene.”

Things were so blocked by then, that only got through by me pretending it was Rose’s idea. It kind of went like this, “Rose, remember that Dolly Parton song you really like,’ (she’d never mentioned it before), well it might be a good idea if Strawberry Switchblade recorded your favourite Dolly Parton song.” It was that silly. And Rose knew it.

I had pictured a real hard arsed disco/punk/country hybrid. When Balfey got Clive Langer in, the Madness producer, my heart sank. As it turned out it was not half bad, and with the addition of Larry Adler, actually quite good. But it was hardly the genre-smasher set to shake-up the apathetic public I’d envisaged, even if it did make The Face’s single of the month or whatever.

This was probably the lowest point of the whole doomed adventure. Jill had a mild flirtation with Finlay, one of the brother photographers, which was okay with me cos I liked him. Rose and Drew finally parted. Drew moved into a house-share with Bea.

Making Ends Meet, Making an End

We were all desperately short of money. They did a couple of ads just to keep going. They were given some music, and I did some naff lyrics for Shock Waves Hair Gel or something. They hoped no-one would notice it was them, but their voices were so distinctive people were singing it to them on the tube. But it paid the bills for a few months.

Jill and I were still living together. We couldn’t afford to live apart. We couldn’t afford the electricity bill sometimes. It all reminded me of that Blondie line, “I sold my one vision for a piece of the cake, I haven’t ate in days.” So much for Smash Hits!

At about this time Balfey had a brief affair with Jill. He seemed upset I was not upset. Rose was understandably put-out. It was hard not to see part of Jill’s motivation as a slight to Rose.

There was a strange dead period then. Then one day the air seemed to clear. I had an odd feeling of optimism. I felt like, if they’ve come this far, they might be alright. For whatever reason, Rose seemed to be somewhat relaxed. I kind of hoped she’d finally understood she needed Jill.

They were still working on songs for the second album. The rough demos were sounding good to me. Then one day, out of the blue, Jill announced, “I’m splitting the band.” Jill and I had been spending a lot of time apart, so I am not sure what precipitated it. I tried to persuade her to record the second album, if only to qualify for the next advance, I was aware she had no money. But she was adamant. “I am not happy, and I’ve had enough.”

Rose seemed to take the news calmly. However, ending a partnership is always more complicated than starting one. It soon became evident that although they never had much money, they owed lots. Like a rat deserting a sinking ship Balfey left them to it.

Aftermath

Rose approached Warners with some solo work, but they were not interested. I think they had had enough of her contrariness.

Initially Rose hung around. I remember going with her to some accountants meeting in an office overlooking Regents Park. He was demanding several thousands of pounds. He claimed he had never been paid. All we could say was, “we never knew you had never been paid.” It was all rather pathetic – nice office though.

On the way out, overlooking what in London passes for a park, Rose turned to me and asked, “Do you think Jill blames me for all of this?” I was not sure what she meant by “all of this.” All I said was, “You’d better ask Jill, Rose.” It seemed to me the closest Rose could get to voicing regret. It was a sad ending.

Soon after Rose disappeared from my life. She had been seeing a very unpleasant (I thought), Korean man called Robert. He wore a little swastika medal next to his chest. It was an actual piece of Nazi memorabilia, I was told. I couldn’t see him without thinking about concentration camps. And I couldn’t see what Rose saw in him. Later, they married.

Jill was left alone to sort out the financial mess, and the subsequent court cases. They went on for years, long after we finally split in 1988. She moved out.

Today

I am still friends with Jill. I am kind of sad uncle to her perfect little daughter Jessie. Now all grown up. Jill has returned to her first love, painting. My life has gone on. I have had happier times and sadder times since Strawberry Switchblade.

Over the years I have thought about Rose, and wondered why she never really had much success. She was driven enough. I think it is because she never met another Jill – someone to whom the chemistry was right.

I’ve met Rose occasionally over the years, bumped into her on the street. She is always very friendly, very sweet, just like she was when I first met her. Jill and I remain friends.