David Balfe interview

19 May 03

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So we'd got that and then we put out Let Her Go.

Was that expected to be as big a success as Since Yesterday?

Yeah. We didn't think it was quite as strong, but we thought it was strong enough to be a top ten hit. But again, you learn as you go along. Looking back now it obviously isn't as strong a pop single, although I really really liked it then.

It sounds a worthy successor to me, I'm surprised it didn't do pretty much the same thing as Since Yesterday [when the band signed to WEA in summer 1983 Let Her Go was thought to be a strong song and was planned to be first single].

People thought it wasn't quite as strong, it didn't have the hook daaa-da-da [fanfare motif from Since Yesterday], it didn't have quite the same rhythm intensity. If you can imagine playing records at a school disco, Let Her Go is a bit too gentle for that.

It's one of the two tracks that were re-recorded to MAKE them more smooth. Let Her Go and Who Knows What Love Is were originally recorded with David Motion, then re-done with Phil Thornalley who did a smoother gentler job on them.

Maybe that was what went wrong. I also always thought of Let Her Go as being more of a Jill song and Since Yesterday as being a bit more of a Rose song because it had a bit more oomph. And Rose's voice generally had a bit more of an edge to it, Jill's was a little more rounded and a bit more soft. But anyway, I can't remember what position it got to but it was a major disappointment.

Something like number 40.

And then basically, when you face that kind of thing you're all over. They had an album that got put out, there was a third single that got put out.

As a pop band we lost all indie credibility with the top five single, and the video which was totally down to the girls. It was done by Tim Pope who was an incredibly trendy video director and did the Cure's singles and won awards for them. The girls and he fell in love and ended up doing what I consider to be a far too lightweight video; very entertainment, very good for kids TV. I thought it was a very big mistake we did. I thought it was a good video in terms of being entertaining, but it was just wacky. If you're The Cure and you do something that wacky it's one thing, but if you're girls who wear polka dots and ribbons and you do something that wacky, it just looks wacky, it doesn't look a kind of ironic-wacky, it just looks lightweight-wacky.

I think that more than anything made them see it's just all about pop, and once you're a pop band that doesn't have hits it's all over. I think we gave it one shot after we couldn't work out what was wrong with the second single, and then we were into desperation mode for I don't know how long before Jolene came out, and that was just a real desperate thing. If you could get back in the top ten you were back in the game, and if you can't, we knew it was all over.

Whose idea was Jolene?

Jolene had come from the girls and their boyfriends. I think it was Peter, Jill's boyfriend, said 'why don't you do Jolene with an I Feel Love backing thing?'. We had a John Peel session or a Kid Jensen session or something like that, and we went in and I programmed a thing to go dududududu [I Feel Love bassline] and you can actually sing Jolene to that and it worked great, and we did it.

Then we took it into the record company and said 'this could be a good single' and we got a guy [producer] Clive Langer in to do it who'd done the Teardrop Explodes and was famous for doing Madness and he'd done the big Come On Eileen Dexy's thing. I got hold of him, I was doing the programming. For some reason - which I argued with him about but he insisted on it - he changed it from that I Feel Love thing that could have worked in a disco to this dun-de-dundun-dun thing. It sort of sounds like some programmed hopalong cowboy beat. I think he was probably too scared of doing a straight pastiche of I Feel Love. It's quite a modern phenomenon now, bunging two things together, and we liked that.

He did it and then Bill and I went and did some additional production on it, and one of the most memorable recording moments of my life was when Bill had the idea of getting the harmonica player Larry Adler. We were in the studio and he came in, and he was famous in his day for telling anecdotes. Within fifteen minutes of arriving he'd already dropped incredibly famous names - 'oh, when I did this with Jacqueline Kennedy' - almost compulsively he would be mentioning these people. We said we just wanted something to weave in between the lyrical lines and he went and did this stuff that I just LOVE. It was one of the most amazing times in a studio with a musician. He played all this stuff, he did it first take. We did another take just to have a choice, and that was it.

We put that out, we worked it hard, and I think it got to number twenty something or other.

It was further down than that.

It was a flop anyway, and that was that.

Now we get to the difficult more controversial bit. Things were still running on and the record company were losing their faith now, I think. Time goes on and you've budgeted for a year or eighteen months of costs. At some point I had to say to the band, 'I'm going to have to stop your wages in however many weeks, and also paying for your flats. You're going to have to think about what you want to do cos we're running out of money and I can't get any more money out of the record company'. They were saying 'we really really don't want to do this, what can we do?' They had some money put aside for tax, and I said 'you can spend your tax money if you want, but it's a big risk; you wouldn't have anything put aside to cover everything'. And they insisted that they did that, they didn't want to go on the dole. I advised them strongly against it.

The idea was that something would come together and we'd get a new deal and get some more money out of them in the end and it would work out and we'd avoid the horrible thing. But nothing did come through.

The girls would be arguing and I wasn't sure if they'd always had this tension between them and as they'd gone on they'd introduced me to it, or whether it was something new. As I said, Rose was quite a hard nut, not in a particularly nasty way but just very tough, I think she'd come from a background where you had to be tough, whereas Jill was very soft and very neurotic and agoraphobic and had real difficulty coping with everyday life.

They started arguing about things - I can't even remember the specifics, it wasn't any big musical differences. Although Rose was hanging out with people like Genesis P-Orridge who I found a little bit too weird even for my taste. They were each complaining of the other, although mainly Jill complaining about Rose.

About what?

I can't remember specifically. It always happens, when things start going wrong people start having plans for how to fix it and people are less likely to agree about it. When things are going well people always have ideas but they don't really get upset, everybody says yes to everybody's idea. When things turn to difficulty then 'ideas' become 'solutions', and solutions are something you desperately have to get everybody on board for.

I think Rose always had the vision of herself going on and doing whatever she went on to do. Jill I think always felt that Strawberry Switchblade was her thing and that would be it. So Rose had a slightly different perspective, and also Rose was happy to go off and do weird things. Rose was also pretty unreliable, she would say she was going to do something and then change her mind at the last minute.

Jill was very different. We had some success in Japan, we did gigs there. It costs a lot of money to go to Japan and put somebody up and we did take her boyfriend. It was a weird relationship because although he was her boyfriend he later came out as gay, or declared himself as gay although he wasn't having any gay relationships, he was a bit of a Morrissey character in that respect. [Peter says this story was a wind-up that Balfe took seriously]. She kind of relied on him, but we said, 'look, he can't come with us to Japan, the record company won't pay for it'. Rose wasn't taking anybody, Rose was completely independent.

We tried to go and at the airport she had a freakout and wouldn't get on the plane and we had to organise for him to come and lost the flight and all this mad stuff. That was kind of typical of Jill, that she'd be panicking and having fits about things. I mean, she was a lovely lovely girl, and she was trying her hardest, but she was very very very neurotic and had real difficulty with panic attacks and stuff like that.

I think because of these different attitudes they started rubbing each other up the wrong way. There wasn't any specific big issue. As I said, in general Rose was into a more angsty indie gothic thing and Jill was doing soft and fluffy cats. But I liked both of them a great deal.

The Japanese success made them think, 'well maybe we can have something going on there', that's what also led to the record company carrying on beyond what they might have done if it was just a UK situation.

We did a first promotional trip, then we went back to do some dates. They were massive dates, 2,000 or 3,000 capacity theatres. I think we did two nights in a theatre in Tokyo and one in Osaka and one somewhere else. They were all two and a half or three thousand seater places, all sell-outs. That was when I hired [Farmers Boys bass player and Jill's future husband] Frog in and a guy who later became one of M People. I hired a couple of keyboard players, musicians to play with them just to make it look more like an act, although a lot of it was on tape and stuff. In those days that was quite a normal act, you'd have two musicians who played various things and then the focus in the middle. It worked really well, we had a bit of slide show that had been organised by Peter who was also a musician. It worked, it was a great thing.

Also Peter - who I liked a great deal but he was a very irritating personality, very opinionated, he had nothing going for him in life except that he was Jill's boyfriend - he was a smart guy and had some really interesting ideas but he could be very very opinionated and irritating. We were organising these dates and I got this tour manger in who I knew was a great tour manager, he'd done lots of big bands. I'd said, 'look, this'll be a week in Japan, it'll be really fun', and he organised it, got a quick crew together for lighting and sound and all this. I was going to be there as well to do work as part of the crew. He went off to the first rehearsal to meet the band and get everything organised, and he ended up - I can't remember if he punched or headbutted - Peter!

I'd warned him, I'd said, 'watch out for Peter, he can be a bit irritating but don't let him get to you'. I still don't understand what happened that made him do it, this big tough Irishman. He had to get the sack then and this was about three or four days before we left so I had to take over his duties, it was a real nightmare. But they did these dates and they were big in Japan, as the old saying goes. I think they always thought if they could get another good single they could get another deal together in Japan alone. I think that was always hanging over them.

Jill and I had a little bit of a fling romantically towards the end of the band. It started off that Peter was her boyfriend, but he announced to everybody that he was really gay, and I said 'haven't you guys had a physical relationship?' and he said no. Some drunken evening I'd ended up snogging with Jill and something had happened then, although I was living with a girlfriend at the time so it was all kept quite secret. We started having this thing that whenever we were away at work we'd share a bedroom.

The big problem that happened was they split up. They turned up at Eden studios one day - I can't remember what we were doing in the studio, mixing or something - and they said they were splitting up. They'd had a big discussion the two of them the night before and they announced it to me, and I started saying, 'well you're gonna have big problems you know, you've spent your tax money'.

I was telling them they were running out of money, they'd spent their tax money, and it is THEIR money. A manager is a very weird position in that you're essentially an advisor. You can't tell them you CAN'T spend this money. Following on from this situation, I wouldn't even MENTION tax money to bands, I would tell them 'you're out of money' and not even mention what's aside for tax. You put the right percentage aside for tax and you'd always get some deductions for various things and that would end up covering the accountants bills. This was a big lesson I learned from Strawberry Switchblade was that I should never have let them decide about their money. Basically it all went dreadfully wrong.

Jill, who ended up being fairly stationary in one place and a very good middle-class girl, ended up being hit by the accountant's bills to sort it all out and doing deals where they were paying off the VAT and various tax bills for years. Rose just ended up being a kind of gypsy and disappeared and wandered round all over the place and paid bugger all as far as I know.

I got very annoyed with Rose cos my management company had signed off on the leases of their flats because they were company lets. They needed a company director because the law was slightly different at that point about the rights of a tenant on a company let than the rights of a tenant who dealed direct. So I signed off on them and they used to pay me the rent and I'd pay it on. Then Rose stopped paying. She had a very good flat and she just kind of left it, she left stuff in there, locked it all up and just went wandering round. I'd be writing letters to her and ringing her for months, literally sitting outside the flat for hours waiting for her to come back when I didn't even know if she was living there or off on her travels. I was paying out a fortune and I ended up getting taken to court by the landlords and having to pay all the back rent, even though I said, 'look, this is the real situation'. And I never got any of the money back off Rose.

But I think Rose, being a tough cookie, would think, 'fuck it, Dave Balfe's got money, I've ended up out of pocket for this thing, he can have his problem'. Whereas Jill wouldn't do anything like that, so she was a nicer character who ended up with, I think, a lot of financial troubles for years.

I think that was also a difficult thing because it ended. Rose had left Jill in the lurch more than Jill had left Rose in the lurch and there was all this money owed. I was still organising, but essentially I wasn't going to pick up any of the bills, which might have been ungenerous of me but I wasn't that well off at the time and they'd made decisions against my advice which had left them in this situation.

I think Rose and Frog, who Jill ended up having a romantic thing with after the Japan trip, always blamed me. It's an easy blame to make, a manager. Musicians are always likely to say it, rather than 'oh I should have spent a little bit more time thinking harder about financial things', it's very easy to say 'the manager ripped us off' or 'the manager left us in the lurch' - it's a very easy thing to say to yourself and to the people around you.

And who knows - if I can accuse other people of kidding themselves maybe I'm kidding myself. But the logic I employed at the time was that I'd advised them not to spend this money and they'd spent it. They owed tax money, they owed money to accountants. I tried to organise it for a long time, I ended up leaving it direct between the accountants and the girls themselves.

I don't know how I discovered this, I think I spoke to Jill three or four years later, one phone call, and she was fairly embittered and Frog was very embittered. I think Frog was doubly annoyed with me cos I was somebody who had slept with his wife and left her with all these financial troubles, as far as he was concerned.

I didn't really have any communication with them after that, which I've always been sorry about. Maybe I should have done more. I really genuinely mean that, maybe I should have paid off the bills, maybe I too easily accepted that they had the responsibility for using the money I'd put aside and maybe I shouldn't have let them. At the time I just didn't want to take responsibility myself financially and on a straightforward level I did tell them it was their choice.

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