Bill Drummond interview

26 April 03

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Knowing the impact that a major record label would have on the way the band worked, did you try to steer that away from them? They were given a tremendously heavy workload by the promotion department, they were doing interviews with absolutely everybody.

I know they were. It's easy for me with hindsight to say that shouldn't have happened. I don't think we were as aware - in the position I was in I wasn't aware enough - of the problems that Jill had, the fact that Jill found some of these things INCREDIBLY hard and difficult. Whereas Rose was a very very driven woman. I don't know what she's like now but at the time she was very driven.

She's still going at it, she so prolific that you can't get a proper discography together for her cos she's worked on so many records. Hugely prolific.

She was 'I am going to be a star, I am going to be a star'. Although she wasn't SAYING that, you could see that that's what was inside her.

It's rather ironic that you're here today cos about half an hour ago I was walking back down here and I passed a woman who was very short, and I was thinking, 'I wonder if she's as short as Rose?', and I was thinking about Rose and about a time we went down to Exeter together. This is a classic example. We got on a plane, I wasn't supposed to be there, I don't know why I was doing it, maybe it was cos Balfe had a word with the promotions department or whatever. But we had to go down to Exeter of all places and she had to do some cable TV stuff there. I was thinking and remembering that as I walked down here just now.

It was only a matter of time before it would implode.

Did you consciously realise that at the time?

I suppose not. I suppose it's easy for me to see things after the fact. But with the difference in character between Rose and Jill and what they needed out of life...

Had that difference always been like there or had the working arrangements created or exacerbated it?

It may have been always there, but I wouldn't be as exposed to it, to whatever was going on in their heads whenever they're off by themselves. It just became more and more apparent, Jill would need protecting from things.

Did you see this in the working relationship between them, did relations change or was there a shift in the power dynamic?

I genuinely thought they were both equally as talented. What was really good in the blend of their voices, Rose's voice had that cutting edge to it that Jill's didn't. It was a classic Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel thing with the two voices together, even Lennon and McCartney's voices, when you get those voices that can blend in a certain way, that have different textures and then work together in harmony and you get great pop music out of it. They had that. But they had that kind of delicate thing which meant it would always be kind of limited in it's appeal to a big audience, I guess.

As it went on with the commercial pressures coming in, was there any feeling that there should be a let-up in pushing them? At what point did you realise this was happening to them, that it was doing them harm?

Probably too late. And also from a record company point of view there was no big commercial upside. If an act sells a fuck of a lot of records then the record company are gonna go, 'hey, take your time, as long as it takes, that's the most important thing, you as an artist'. If an act isn't selling that many records then a major record company isn't really going to give a shit. Although Since Yesterday got to number five in this country, it was obvious that was the only track on the album that in that day and age could actually be a big hit. There wasn't anything else there that could then take the album to create the financial return for a major record company.

Was it seen like that at the time?

It's just an unwritten thing.

It's just that Let Her Go came out as the follow-up and to me it sounds like such an natural successor. It really quite surprises me that you got such a huge hit with Since Yesterday and Let Her Go bombed when it's got a lot of the same kind of brightness and drive with a dark underside, and yet it's not just Since Yesterday Part Two.

Well I'm not surprised. It didn't have what Radio 1 would want. Even though it has a dark underside, it's now perceived as mainstream pop. If they had been on a Glasgow indie record label and evolved like Belle And Sebastian or something like that, to live in Glasgow without having to move to London and all those things then a cult following could really have built up around them and what they do, and that would have been far healthier. If their careers could have EVOLVED, maybe not having a Since Yesterday top five record but they could have had a genuine evolution which didn't happen. And you can't realise it and go, 'shit, this is bad, let's go back to Glasgow and pretend we never had that hit single and try and start evolving again'.

One of the reasons I'm doing this website is to reclaim it from the image of mainstream pop. A lot of people I mention it to just remember Since Yesterday and think of it as disposable frothy pop. But then now there's some time since all the publicity overkill, and now people have come across Rose for her subsequent work and find Strawberry Switchblade as her backhistory people are seeing it as the unsettled bittersweet thing that it was always intended to be. I remember them at the time and I twigged there was more to them than Top of The Pops and mainstream popularity.

This is me being defensive in a way, but they really really wanted that. And yet again, it was more Rose. It's not that I'm blaming her, because to have pop success you have got to want it, and right then Rose really really wanted it. I don't know about now, maybe she's shifted her drive once she realised that it wasn't a possibility for her anymore, her whole thing's shifted to Psychic TV and that whole area of stuff.

How much control did they have over it all?

At the time they weren't doing anything...they were asked 'would you want to do these promotions?' or whatever. They weren't forced to go and make the David Motion record. It would be a joint thing.

They both talk in terms of things being traded off, of, say, being allowed to make videos with Tim Pope if they'd do some more blatantly commercial promotion.

I think that would be hindsight on their part, maybe feeling embarrassed that they have done those promotional things. They were generally up for doing that sort of stuff, which now looking back I think [winces]. I was once in a band called Big In Japan, I was in my early twenties then, about the same age as Strawberry Switchblade when this stuff was happening for them. I can imagine if we'd been signed to a major record label I would've gone, 'OK, yeah, we'll do this, we'll do that' and I would have done all those things and regretted it afterwards. Later on I would've thought, 'why did I do that?'. It's very easy to get sucked into that thing. And when it's happening you think it's never going to go away.

Everybody does it who's an artist or creative person of any sort, when the spotlight moves on to you it's very easy to think, 'this is my just rewards for all the work I've done, and now that the world can see that I have certain qualities why would the spotlight ever move away?'. And it does, of course it does, cos the world's not particularly interested in you as a person or your artistic worth. It's like, 'we know what Strawberry Switchblade are about now, they're the girls in polka dots, what can we be interested in now?'.

Jolene; how did that happen?

That was a definite record company thing. It was that classic thing of get them to do a cover version, they don't seem to have any other songs right now that can be hits and if we don't get a hit soon the whole thing is definitely over.

Rose said it was you that had the choice of song.

She really liked Down From Dover. She came to me and was talking about Dolly Parton, she was a big big Dolly Parton fan and I think they already did this version of Down From Dover themselves, it was a cover version they would do. [In 1993 Rose released a cover of Down From Dover on the Spell album Seasons In The Sun]. So it was borne out of the fact that she was really into Dolly Parton and they did this Down From Dover song. So we said, 'do you want to do Jolene?'. So that's how that came about. I really enjoyed that record. I tell you what I enjoyed the most about that record, getting Larry Adler in to play harmonica, that was FANTASTIC. Have you got the twelve inch version? I don't know how it stands up today.

The production sounds really horribly dated, but yeah, the harmonica is fantastic.

I remember being in the studio thinking it was fantastic. For a moment I must've thought it could be a hit.

The twelve inch remixes, that mid-80s thing where every single had to have an extended version on twelve inch, that happened to every single they did. Who did the remixing?

Fuck knows.

Rose and Jill both say they had NOTHING to do with it, they'd be working on something then they'd get a call saying, 'that thing you finished several months ago, we're putting it out as a single and we need a remix by Monday', and someone else would do it. The one that's closest to listenable is Let Her Go, which is the only one that has any credited names on. Five names are listed, you, Balfe, Youth and two others.

Fuck knows.

Do you remember doing any of them at all?

No.

You definitely did at least one.

If you told me I did all of them I could think, well, maybe I did. But I don't think I did! At that time the whole idea of a remixer as being somebody special and somebody you pay a whack of money to go and do it, and this is an actual job, it just didn't exist in those days. You made a record and, as you said, you had to have a twelve inch and so you'd just sit around and think, 'OK, we'll double the length of that drumbeat, double the length of that,' and you'd got a twelve inch. It's like asking me who made the cup of tea.

The weird thing is that the purpose of a twelve inch is to have a longer version for playing in clubs, so having an extended version of Trees And Flowers makes no sense whatsoever.

No, it wasn't done for club play.

Was it just gratuitous cos it was on a big bit of vinyl and that meant there were twice as many formats available to sell?

Yeah, almost. Obviously the existence of twelve inch singles came about because of clubs, but then it became a marketing thing, all records had to have more than one format to milk whatever fan following is out there. So nobody would ever be thinking Trees And Flowers could be a club record, it'd be more like, 'this is a great song so let's have it so it plays for longer and you don't have to put the record on again,' something almost as stupid as that.

Do you remember how far plans got for the second album?

No idea. I was with WEA for three years. I don't know if they were dropped before I left or I left before they were dropped, I don't know which way round it came.

What was the first you heard of them coming apart as a partnership?

It was a gradual thing. Obviously, there must have been a point. I just think it was a gradual thing in the difficulties they seemed to be having in their own personal lives. I can't remember an actual point. I can't remember the last time I saw them. I must have just been too involved in other things.

When they split did it seem like it had been a long time coming or was it sudden?

I wouldn't have been surprised. I think Jill's situation was that she was becoming more unhappy with the whole being in London, and everything about her situation. I think it was kind of natural, but I can't remember actual dates and things.

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