Suzy

Unknown date April-June 1985

STRAWBERRY SWITCHBLADE

If you’d been walking along Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow around 1977 and spotted two girls in the street, one small with red hair, the other even smaller with black hair, both wearing about five pairs of earrings, punk clothes and both adorned with imaginative jewellery in the shape of household ornaments of kitchen utensils, it’s more than likely that you’d have just bumped into Jill Bryson and Rose McDowell [sic].

Both girls used the punk explosion in the late Seventies as an excuse (if they needed one) to dress themselves up and go out to meet people. They reckoned tat they met far more interesting people as punks than they had ever done before!

For Jill especially, the freedom punk brought to her was a particular relief. For about a year she suffered from agoraphobia, a fear of open spaces, and she couldn’t bear even to leave her parents’ house. Jill missed out on a lot of school work, although she later caught up and gained enough qualifications to get into art college. Jill’s mum used to run a flower shop and her dad’s a sales rep. It must have been strange watching their daughter gong from being a troubled kid who couldn’t face leaving the house to become a wildly extravagant dresser who walked the streets wearing half a kitchen!

Like Jill, Rose Mary McDowell [sic] was born in Glasgow. Her dad was a coalman and one of her first jobs was helping her dad with his coal round. Maybe that doesn’t sound quite the sort of thing you’d expect a young girl to involve herself with, but Rose admits to having been a bit of a tomboy. She loved climbing trees and getting dirty. As far as Rose was concerned, boys had much more fun than girls!

Jill and Rose formed Strawberry Switchblade when they were at art college. Originally there were two other girls in the band, but they left when Jill and Rose insisted that the group should be more than just a sort of hobby. Rather than become full-time entertainers, the other two stuck to their jobs, as a teacher and a secretary, while Rose and Jill began to take their first steps towards securing a recording contract. It wasn’t long before their ribbons and bows, polka-dot style started to attract attention and after a year or so the girls did sessions for the John Peel and David Jensen radio shows.

Their first single ‘Trees and Flowers’ had a lot of radio play but was never a hit. After the release of their second single, the girls tried not to build their hopes up too much and were thrilled when the record company phoned them to tell them that ‘Since Yesterday’ had gone into the chart at No. 32. Since then, of course, they’ve released another single, ‘Let Her Go’ and an LP ‘Strawberry Switchblade’