Jill Bryson interview
9 June 01
Did you play any instruments in any bands prior to Strawberry Switchblade?
No, just did some shouting into the microphone and that was about it. It was good fun. Rose and her husband had a band, she played drums. Quite badly, I have to say, but that was fine, in the punk tradition, you know? She just hit them. I remember going over to see them. They were called The Poems. I remember going to see them when she was about 8 months pregnant; she's out here and she's not very tall so she looked huge. That was quite something.
When did you start writing? Were you writing before Strawberry Switchblade started?
No.
So you decided to start a band and THEN started writing songs?
I was at art school when we started to do it, so I was a bit older. I had a flat round the corner from Alan Horne, the guy who ran Postcard Records in Glasgow. They were just a real strange bunch of people who shared a flat. They were just great. They shared a flat, a very neat flat with a Polish girl called Krysia Klasheski who was an artist, and this guy called Brian Superstar who ended up being in The Pastels. It was such a weird, strange, great place to go. And then Edwyn who was the singer in Orange Juice lived round the corner, and David McClymont who was the bass player lived up the road. The drummer in that group worked at the dole office. We all tried very hard not to work so we could rehearse - THEY all did, I was at art school - but nobody wanted a job in the holidays when they were at college, so him and Edwyn I think, both of them, got grabbed and made to work in the dole office. We'd go down to sign on and they'd be behind the counter going 'you bastards!', a really resentful look on their faces.
We used to go through to Edinburgh a lot, I remember having to sit in the station all night when we'd missed the train back. A lot of bands would play Edinburgh but they wouldn't play Glasgow for some reason. I think there were smaller venues in Edinburgh, so people like Siouxsie &The Banshees would play there rather than Glasgow.
Knowing Orange Juice and that lot, because I lived nearby, they were just like, 'oh yeah, you should be in a band, you should do this, you can do demos with us'. It was actually the guitarist in Orange Juice that came up with the name Strawberry Switchblade. I think it was going to be the name of a fanzine or something, which he'd got from a psychedelic band called the Strawberry Alarm Clock, and it was just his punk version. At that point the guy I was going out with, Peter, he was a photographer, him and Stephen from the Pastels and Edwyn and Alan Horne and all those kind of people, they used to do fanzines all the time. I remember one fantastic article that Peter wrote called How To Fail At Job Interviews! So classic, such a stupid punk thing, such a dropout thing. One of the things was have a really filthy old snotty hanky and pull it out, wipe your nose a lot. The first question you have to ask is 'how much money do I get?'!
There were all these different fanzines. One was called Juniper Beri Beri [see Clippings section for Strawberry Switchblade feature in issue 1 of JBB]. Strawberry Switchblade, I don't think they ever printed any of it. They were just interviews with people. I remember going with Edwyn to interview The Slits. I wasn't that keen on them, they had this attitude, 'hey we're real London trendies and you're just hicks from the sticks'. They kind of tolerated us.
Sorry, this is unstructured rabbiting.
No, this is great. It's not something you normally hear of, punk and indie roots for a poppy band on a major label, this is a really good scene-setting thing.
Did you know straight away that you were really going to try to make a go of it with the band, or was it just arsing around in rehearsals?.
Well, it was funny, people were encouraging going 'yeah yeah, you can support us and support the Pastels' and at that time there were a lot more smaller places to play and there were a lot more groups who needed somewhere to play.
So we're talking, what, 1982?
Earlier than that, I think it'd be about 1980, that sort of time. Me and Rose thought we'd get a band together. The drummer was someone who ran one of the Student Unions. You weren't allowed to get into the Glasgow University Men's Union, but there was a Women's Union, the Queen Margaret Union.
What? Did they have men-only gigs and stuff?
Well, at the women's union men could get in, and it was run by this girl Carol McGowan who was our drummer and she used to let us in. You weren't supposed to get in if you weren't a student, but she just let anybody in. She used to book the gigs and everything. They put on a lot of local bands and they also had discos, we used to go and wait till they finished playing Hi Ho Silver Lining and then we'd all get up when they played their one punk record, fling ourselves around and then get off again. They would intersperse punk records throughout the night, but there was that little to do in Glasgow you would put up with it, you know?
Hi Ho Silver Lining in 1980?
It might have been a bit earlier
What was anyone doing with that record after 1975?
It was alive and well in student unions, probably all round the country, not just Glasgow. We'd have to get suitably, like, [disdainful face with theatrical sigh] for those songs. You know, Freebird by Lynard Skynard. It was really funny, it was just so rigid then, whereas now....
Whatever you're into there's somewhere to go
Exactly. People are a bit more tolerant now. They used to throw things at you if you were a punk in Glasgow. They were so intolerant, you took your life in your hands, especially if you were a guy. If you were a girl it was just insults. Several of my friends were chased through town and punks had the living daylights thumped out of them.
People don't realise how marginalised punk was. There wasn't independent music properly yet, punk invented it. Fashion was a very rigid thing, which is something the 80s broke down completely.
Absolutely.
How did the band actually get started?
I suppose we started getting together at Rose's house. I bought a guitar with the little money that I had.
Had you been playing guitar before that?
No! My sister had a classical acoustic guitar that she knew a few chords with, and she had a Learn To Play Guitar book, Burt Weedon or something like that. A classical guitar's got such a wide neck and I thought, 'never!', the action was so high you were like [straining face] even to play G. So I saved up and bought this semi-acoustic, it was the heaviest semi-acoustic guitar I ever picked up. But it was great cos I could play it, it had a proper neck and a decent action. So I learned a few chords - literally about three - and thought, well we can do it, I know three chords. And we thought we should have something else; I think Rose knew the bass player, the teacher, and I knew the girl from the Student Union and her brother was in a band and he had drums so that was how it had to be. She'd obviously practised on his drums, maybe he'd shown her a few things. We were all really limited in abilities, you could say.
How quickly did it develop?
Really quickly. We got together, wrote a couple of songs then booked a gig! We had to write enough songs to do this gig in The Spaghetti Factory in Glasgow.
What kind of venue was that?
It was actually just a restaurant called The Spaghetti Factory. You can imagine what it was like, a pizza place in the West End. They had a little stage at one end and they had people play there, but not usually bands, I think it was more usually piano and stuff.
You go out for a pizza and what you really want is an inept indie band at the end of the room!
A really really bizarrely dressed up inept indie band. It was in December this gig and we managed to write six songs, which was quite something.
Which year would that have been then?
It might have been 81 I suppose. 81 or 82.
How do you know it was December?
Because it was snowing and nobody could come, the buses were off!
And you did it anyway?
Yeah! And there really was hardly anybody there. And I remember that, cos it was in the West End where we lived, Alan Horne came and Edwyn and basically they were the only people! It was SO funny. And Peter took some photos of us standing there looking like Christmas trees.