David Balfe interview

19 May 03

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They both shudder when they talk about some of the stuff that was done just for money near the end of the band, the Ecstasy single, the car adverts in Japan, the jingle for the Shock Waves hair gel advert. They're really embarrassed about that and say it was you cattle-prodding them into it.

Yeah, but we had financial problems.

The level of the financial problems didn't come over in the interviews with Rose and Jill, the emphasis was on 'Balfe was pushing us to make money all the time'.

There's a zillion types of manager, and there's an argument for nearly every way of approaching it. One of the things I was doing was saying, 'OK we've got enough in the bank to pay everybody's flat and wages for however many weeks'. OK, I earned 20%, but if they earned two grand I wasn't going to get a fortune. That's all it'd be for doing that Shock Waves thing. Literally, my neighbour invited us over for a drink one evening and she happened to be an advertising executive. She found out I was in the music business and said she needed a radio jingle for Shock Waves. I said I'd got this top five band who could do it, thinking Great, how much can we make out of it, a couple of grand. It's not as if it went out with their names on it.

Ecstasy did go out with their names on it.

What is Ecstasy?

It was a song done for a Subaru advert in Japan, it's this excruciatingly squeaky cheesy sanitised Motown pastiche which was given to them that Rose rewrote the lyrics for. She was doing a lot of Ecstasy at the time and it's written so if you know that's what it's about then you spot it, otherwise it just looks like it's talking about being happy.

Oh it rings a bell now, I'd forgotten that.

It's this abrasively cheery bouncy thing that wasn't written by them, it came out as a single in Japan with a picture of a Subaru on the cover and everything.

I remember that now, yeah. I think at that point it was totally desperate financial straits and we were cashing in whatever we had going for us. Also, the record company really wanted us to do it in Japan, and Japan is a weird and wacky market.

Over here doing a TV ad for cars would severely mess with your credibility.

It's totally different over there. Well, I don't know, but Japan was sufficiently different and we were in sufficiently difficult straits that that I wasn't going to say 'we're not going to do it'. Especially as we got paid a lot, I think. I can't remember. We were living from hand to mouth for months and months, and literally they might have had to pack it all in and go home to their mums and dads, and that was the difficulty.

They were mortally scared of losing their wages, not that they were on a good wage. In actual fact, when the shit did hit the fan they did manage to get social security to pay for the flats, so they'd lost a lot of money but it wasn't as bad. They thought they'd have to leave London and by that time they didn't want to leave London. So that was that.

I'm surprised they haven't mentioned the tax problems they had afterwards. I don't think Rose ever had to pay any of them, whereas Jill did, I think.

That is a bit weird. They were both really open and candid, I think they just lump the financial stuff in together with the other Stuff They Didn't Like, like the record company pressure to be more commercial, pressure from the promotions department to be a bit more cutesy or go out with Mike Read cos it'd get a picture in the tabloids. I think they throw in with that, 'oh god, AND we did these adverts as well', things that they were never in a band to do any of.

I was never managing them to do those things. If every single had been number five we wouldn't have had to do it. We'd probably still have had to butter up to Mike Read but we wouldn't have had to do those advert things, it would have been considered beneath us. But at that point I had no other group who were earning me much money. I wasn't getting them to do it for the £400 commission I'd get on a two grand thing, I would be getting them to do it so they would have wages for another couple of months.

You've got to know what kind of energy you've got, and a pair of pop girls making pop music - and I don't say pop music in a totally trivial way, I mean, the Beatles made pop music - they weren't the Velvet Underground. I think they liked the idea, though there were elements that were Velvety.

They totally loved it, they were Smash Hits kings at the time. There were all these hits magazines, Smash Hits, Number One, aimed at teens and pre-teens, and they LOVED doing all those things. They did all the 'tell us about how you do your hair, tell us where you buy your ribbons, let's take you out shopping', and we did tons and tons and tons of those press things and they were brilliant at it and they loved it. It was a real poppy-pop thing.

Once you've started playing that game, that's the game you're in. You don't start playing netball and then suddenly decide you're going to switch to Premiership football or something. That's a very bad analogy but you know what I mean.

Did it ever occur that it could have taken a different route, that it could have stayed as an indie thing or something? You've got Jill having the whole agoraphobia thing, psychological problems about pressure and having to do stuff against her will; you've got this dark intelligence to the music that's going to be largely negated by being in Look-In magazine a lot.

The problem with being an indie thing is that it sounds good but the budgets you'd operate on within an indie framework wouldn't even be able to pay the band to play live with them. We would have had to go in and record stuff with just them doing it, and it would be so FEY. I mean, you should have heard a lot of the demos. The demos were quirky and interesting but very very fey, and I just think we could probably only have expected to sell 5,000 albums or something like that.

Some people DO do it with very quiet simple records, such as Cowboy Junkies.

It's very hard for me to explain. I thought they were always a pop act. I thought they were an interesting pop act rather than a boring pop act. It had a darker side to it and that's what interested me - if they had come to me and they were called Strawberry I probably wouldn't have got involved. From the name, from the onset, it's what pulled me in. We made no big decision that it was all going to go pippetty-poppetty, we were just trying to make the songs sound good, and it would have not sounded good. They ended up sounding, for me, mediocre a lot of the time when they did them in a more than vaguely indie-ish way. They just ended up sounding... Cowboy Junkies are darker, a lot more darker.

A group that are living with their mums and dads and signing on the dole ARE a group and they can go out and do a gig if they can raise the money to hire a van, but these couldn't even do that. They could hardly do a gig, and the same goes for recording. So you have to start saying, 'if we're going to hire a load of stuff and try a load of gigs, what expectation have we of any income? Will we play for the big game of the pop thing where we can expect hundreds of thousands of pounds so you can risk £100,000 doing it, maybe a couple of hundred thousand'.

If you're thinking, 'we're just going to put it out on an indie level', I wouldn't invest £10,000 in that because I wouldn't be sure of getting it back. That means nobody can move to London, it means they can't hire a group, it means you can just about make the record and then how do you advertise it? It all becomes very difficult.

But 'what if?' is one of the big questions. I've NEVER felt... See, the problem is they didn't have the real musical ability. They had SOMETHING, but they weren't strong enough singers, strong enough performers, strong enough players to have really gone and done a Simon & Garfunkel type thing.

For me, the way their voices worked together is as magical as Simon & Garfunkel or anyone else you can name.

But did you see them live?

No.

An awful lot of studio work goes into making it sound that good. We were very happy with David Motion for making it sound that good, and Robin Millar.

It's been really interesting listening to tapes of Jill's - there's early stuff where they're not doing the harmonies yet and Rose can't quite sing, but it's there on the BBC sessions, it's there on Trees And Flowers and on Go Away on the B-side. It's certainly not just a studio thing.

I got the first band together and we got them out and it was all sounding nice but nothing special - if you were a fan you'd think it was alright, if you weren't a fan you'd think 'so what?'. I really don't think it would have succeeded to any extent.

What its merits are is always completely arguable. My job was always to say, 'THIS is worth something, if we do it like this it will succeed, if we do it like that it won't'. You never really know why you're making those calls or whether they're the right calls or whether you've buggered up the whole situation by doing those calls. It's perfectly possible that what you say is right, that they could have gone on to be the Velvet Underground and Nico and written Sunday Morning and dark indie stuff that - while never crossing over to the mainstream - was still so vital that it went on to be a big thing on a smaller level. But I just don't think they were that, you'd be surprised at how even moderate-selling moderately successful groups can be struggling to earn a living.

Anyway, that was the way I decided to push it, that's why they went the pop thing, really.

Did they ever voice any discontent about pressure from the record company on the promotional aspect? They said that they did a lot of good interviews but a lot of really lame ones too and that there was a lot of pressure to be cute. Did they complain at the time about that?

No. Well, yes - there's an awful lot of inane stuff, it's pop music, The Beatles had to do an awful lot of inane things, you name a band who didn't. You don't realise quite how inane it's going to be until you turn up in the interview sometimes. But they did an awful lot of inane stuff incredibly enthusiastically. They complained a lot because everybody wanted to stay in bed a little longer, everybody got bored with it, but a lot of the game is just a sheer numbers game.

Many an act that I've known in the music business, like Take That or Adam And The Ants are two that jump to mind, achieved an awful lot of success through doing incredible sixteen-hour days of work, always going and visiting two or three more radio stations, always popping into the offices.

Yes, they complained a lot, but that's the norm.

It's not so much the schedule as the content that they were talking about.

I think it's unfair for them to complain about the content. They enjoyed it. When they were in the top ten everything was a joy. Later on it was more, 'why are we doing these stupid things?'. Sometimes it was just the sheer hard work, 'we've done this thing this evening but before we go to bed we've got to go and visit this or that, and I know you're knackered but tomorrow morning you've got to go shopping with Pop Hits magazine, shopping round Camden Lock saying how to get the Strawberry Switchblade style for some Little Miss Teen magazine, or Little Miss Teen Japan magazine' or whatever.

But people would be absolutely staggered at how important it is, just the amount you do. It's not the quality. If you're just a punter you don't read that many magazines. I might buy an album because I see something in the Independent On Sunday arts section and it has a little interview with Nick Cave and I think, 'oh he's got a new album out, I'll buy it', and that's often the way you or I buy records. You don't realise that if you do a hundred things you don't catch people a hundred times, cos they only read one of those things. OK, there is some thirteen year old fairly well-off pop fan whose mum buys her every magazine she wants who'll see you in every single thing, but for most people it's not like that.

Most musicians tend to imagine that if you put out a record and it's on Radio 1, everybody in the country hears it and decides at that point whether they like it or not. But we're not listening to the radio all the time, if something's on ten times a day all week - which is probably the most played record on Radio 1 - then I'll hear it probably once. And generally, even with my favourite singles, I didn't realise I really loved them until I heard them the third time, so that'd be three weeks. The same goes for the media, you notice a band cos you've read two articles but the band might have to have fifty articles for your average music buyer to have seen two of them and think there's a bit of a buzz going.

There's an awful lot of that, there's an awful lot of regional radio, satellite TV. Some things are wrong for some bands and would damage their cool, but I never saw Strawberry Switchblade as a band whose cool could be damaged more than, say, the first video damaged it, which they LOVED! See if you can get hold of the Since Yesterday video.

I've got it, I actually quite like it.

I quite like it, but in terms of pitching them somewhere, it pitches them at the Little Miss Teen market.

I think there's a lot or weirdness in it because of the stop-frame animation and the monochrome, it doesn't look sleek or sweet.

I think it's too cutesy, I think it pitched them too cutesy. At the end of the day I always had a love-hate relationship with their image because I always knew it was very strong and it could get them to come across, but I always knew it was too cutesy and it would really work with Little Miss Teen magazine.

I think it always showed more than that. I remember it as a fifteen year old into REM and The Cure and it came across to me as something shiny and poppy but also twisted and gothy, and all my mates recognised that as well.

That's what we were striving for. But who knows what went wrong. Maybe you're right, maybe we should have made them into a goth band.

The writing credit for Black Taxi is Bryson/McDowall/Balfe/Mulhearne. Neither Jill nor Rose have any idea who Mulhearne is. Have you?

I cannot remember that writing credit or the song at all. But Jeanne Mulhearn was my girlfriend at the time, so I presume we wrote something together and gave it to Jill and Rose who developed it into something. But that's a total guess.

You mentioned in passing that Rose had been hanging out with Genesis P-Orridge and folks like that, which you found weird. How much did she change with that, and what specifically did you find weird?

When I first met her she was into fairies and things, that was her big thing. Jill was into cats and Rose was into fairies. Then it darkened into the psychic magic thing. I thought it was all fairly interesting. I knew Stevo who managed Soft Cell and, I think, managed Psychic TV for a while, and I'd heard a lot of stories via there. It was a bit too dark for me, all kinds of weird ritualistic stuff going on at his flat, things that were far more innovative in its day like body mutilation that's probably considered to be fairly standard these days.

But in those days there were all kinds of weird stories about what goes on with Genesis P-Orridge. People getting tied down to dentists chairs and having various sado-masochistic things going on. I took it all with a pinch of salt, and it wasn't an issue for us. I always saw it as something quite amusing and interesting but I think Jill saw it as something else.

They'd been best mates when I got involved with them, they'd been best mates for a while having met up at some indie club and totally gone off on this massive polka-dot stylistic thing where they were the only two girls who looked like that in the whole of Glasgow and everywhere they went they looked the same. These things happen, people come together and form this incredibly close relationship and then in the tensions of a shared project a slightly love-hate relationship develops, and that definitely happened with Rose and Jill. They start to be seen as the enemy in your project rather than the friend who you're going to make the project with. It really got very difficult between them towards the end.

It was weird cos I kind of agreed with Jill's point of view more. There was no big issue, it was just that they were always totally getting on each other's nerves. Mainly Rose would do things that would get on Jill's nerves, but the only thing of Jill's that was getting on Rose's nerves was that she was getting on Jill's nerves. Rose is one of those people who I've got to admire even though I got on better with Jill. Rose always did what she wanted to do and didn't think twice about it, which you've got to admire, really. Whereas Jill would worry about everything.

Jill mentioned that Rose had some Nazi memorabilia. Do you remember anything about that?

It doesn't ring a bell. I wouldn't put it past her. She was into quite heavy stuff. And I think it was a bit embarrassing to Rose the way Strawberry Switchblade was this frothy poppy thing and all her mates were into weird stuff.

Rose said they'd sacked you as manager just before they split.

No, I don't remember that. It's possible.

If you remember being told of the split you must've still been around, surely.

Yeah, definitely; I was in Eden studios with them, I can even remember what room it is. They weren't getting on with each other, but then they went along for a long time of organising. Oh yeah, I remember what happened! As I said, I'd had a problem with the tax thing, I was sorting it all out and I said, 'look guys, this is the problem'. I was trying to say I can understand why you want to pack it in but you've got a lot of financial troubles and stuff.

A few weeks earlier I'd listed to them what the situation was, asked the accountant to tell us what the problem is, to tell us how much they're going to owe in tax and how much they'd got, and I sent them all off a statement about it. Then they came in and said this is a big problem. I said I don't know what the taxman could do; with the taxman if you tell him you're fucked, you're broke and you can't pay it then sometimes they take you to court and sometimes they just say 'tell us when you can pay'. I said I don't know which way they're going to react. And it was really weird cos [Rose's husband] Drew, who had been this really sweet nice guy, said 'you're going to pay for it'. I didn't quite understand and said, 'I'm not paying for it, I told you guys it was a good thing to put money aside', and he goes, 'No! YOU'RE gonna pay for it!', basically saying, 'you're gonna pay for it or I'm gonna have ya'. I was absolutely shocked and didn't know what to make of it.

At that point relationships really started to break down because I couldn't deal with it. 'I'm not paying for this, you knew it was owed, you knew I'd put it aside and when we discussed it you decided you'd rather risk using it'. At that point either they sacked me or I said I'm not working with Drew or something. I can't remember ever being sacked, though it's possible. At that point things got very very tough because their view was 'why do we owe this money?'. But they knew why they owed this money! But it was 'we owe this money and Dave Balfe should somehow take responsibility for it'. So it all fell apart at that point.

I dunno, it's hard to remember the details, but I remember that meeting now. It was really weird cos I'd got on so well with Drew all the time and then I met him again quite a few years later and he was incredibly friendly to me and really nice. I said, 'what happened that day when you got really weird and heavy with me?', and he couldn't even remember it.

I don't think I've seen Rose since that meeting. I still had to speak to them for ages cos I had the flats situation. I think that meeting might be why it finally ended. I was trying to remember and work it out in my head what happened, I knew it petered out somewhere around that time, but maybe that meeting was why I said, 'well if that's the way you're going to be I'm not dealing with this any more, it's between you and the accountants' or whatever.

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