Jill Bryson interview
9 June 01
Were the band any good at this time?
I don't know. People liked us, but I think it's just because we were women and we did little short pop songs. It was the same songs, Since Yesterday and stuff.
So the very first stuff you were writing was the stuff that ended up on the album?
Yes. Most of them. They went through change as we progressed and learned an extra chord. The lyrics got a bit more refined. Some of them changed even at the stage when we were doing the album, and we had a producer saying 'work on that bit there'. But to begin with it was still those songs.
You've just picked up a guitar and you've just started to write songs and it's THOSE songs!
It was literally, 'we've GOT to write some songs! How many have we got now?'. We started doing a few little gigs around Glasgow which kind of pushed us each time cos we'd have to rehearse for them. I remember sitting at home, at my parents, sitting in the back room till god knows what time just strumming, trying to come up with something. I'd come up with a tune and sing the melody to Rose, she'd have to write the lyrics, then we'd sing it to the band and they'd play along.
Is that generally how they were written? Everything's credited equally to the two of you.
Yeah.
And yet there's a couple of references in interviews to the fact that lyrics were never written together. I think you said you wrote By The Sea together and that's about it. Who did what in the songwriting?
When we started off I used to just do the melodies and write the music and she did the lyrics. I wrote Trees And Flowers on my own. Sometimes if I was playing I'd come up with something [lyric-wise] to fill it in, to help with the melody and the flow, and we'd just stick with it. And if I liked it I'd go 'I've got some words'. And as we went on Rose decided she would learn to play guitar as well - if I could do it in three months she could! Then she started to write her own music as well.
So did it get more collaborative or did it make you develop ideas separately?
It did get more that one of us would come in with a finished thing. To begin with I came in with the tune and the melody and she'd tape it and go off and write the lyrics, but as soon as she learned to play a few chords she did her own stuff. But then we'd kind of get together to rehearse it, thrash it out a bit.
Is there any stuff you wrote the lyrics for apart from Trees And Flowers?
Being Cold, and Who Knows What Love Is which is totally terrible and was supposed to be kind of, er, ironic. But it didn't really work out that way.
But set it to music and it just floats, it's gorgeous.
I did that one, and the words and music for Being Cold and Trees And Flowers. I think that's the only ones I wrote words for, because I'm not really a lyrics person.
Did you decide right at the beginning that everything would get credited to the two of you?
Yes. Well I just thought we were signed as a duo and we just decided to credit it to the both of us.
The writing of the lyrics; were there much explaining to each other of the meanings?
No, nothing. None.
So Rose turned up and said 'here's the lyrics' you just did it? Were you not curious about what she was writing about, and were you not wanting to explain your lyrics?
I used to ask sometimes but she never did explain. I never really asked.
Lots of them are like snapshots, taking a segment of a situation between two people and the obvious thing is to ask 'where did that come from, what did it come out of?'
I think it comes out of not thinking too much cos you have to kind of come up with it NOW, you know, and so it often wasn't thought about to much. She was never very forthcoming about what any of the things were about.
There's such a good marriage of the mood and descriptiveness of the lyrics with the melodies, so many of the songs are really of-a-piece, it's really odd they're coming out of separate minds that aren't explaining to each other.
Absolutely. I think it's that kind of instinctive thing, it's not thought of. Sometimes it's better if you just do that. After we'd done that album it was most of the songs we'd come up with - we weeded a few out and obviously we refined them a bit - but basically it was those songs. And once we got 'oh it's serious isn't it? It's like a job, we've GOT to do this', it kind of took the edge off it.
There's an extra pressure and weight when you know you've GOT to do something and you know where it's going to go.
Yeah, and it was awful, that's not really what it was about, it had been a really instinctive spur of the moment thing and that's why it worked. Cos it wasn't high art or anything, it was pop music.
Well yeah, it IS 'just pop music' and you can just hear it on the radio as you go past and you don't have to give it your full attention to get something from it, but the great thing about pop music is that you can go as deep as you want with the good stuff, it can communicate and move you on a level as deep as any other art form, especially when it's the performer's own work. You can't do that with Hear'Say but you can do that with, say, T. Rex, and certainly with Strawberry Switchblade.
Yeah, yeah I know. It's interesting to find out what people are about when they're writing stuff. If they're not writing stuff then it's just a case of performing it and do you like the performance of it or not.
The other people in the band: when did they leave and why?
We didn't actually play that many gigs with them. I think we must have been together about six months, nine months maybe. I can't actually remember what happened. I remember an American woman got involved called Barbara Shaw. I think she was a Postcard fan and she'd come to live in Glasgow and she must've known Alan Horne, and Rose got to know her and she said she'd like to be our manager and we thought well, if you want to do that, fine. But then it all started getting a bit weird as soon as she was involved, it all started getting a bit strange.
What kind of strange?
Well, her and Rose were quite friendly and I think she wanted to get rid of everybody except Rose, basically. At one point she was coming along to rehearsals and playing along with me and I started going 'WHAT? That's a bit weird! Why's she doing that?' That kind of freaked me out a little bit.
Did you ask what she was doing?
Oh, she was 'just learning to play guitar'. At that point she said that the other two weren't committed and they weren't going to do it full-time.
Was that true?
I don't know. I don't think so, I think they were pretty pissed off actually. I can't actually remember what happened, it had come to a point of 'do you really want to do this?', we were going to take it up a gear. I can't remember exactly what happened, I know it wasn't very nice.
You've said you had problems with not being taken seriously because you weren't blokes. Would that not be even more of a problem if you're not a full band playing instruments?
Yeah! But there was the whole thing that we were writing and we [Jill and Rose]were committed and they [the other two]weren't really putting anything into it. But that's kind of how bands work, really, when I look at it in retrospect. There's usually 'just musicians'. And it's not as if we wanted good musicians! It coincided with this woman being involved, and it set alarm bells ringing with me.
Did you mention it to Rose?
I did mention it when there was this bizarre moment when Barbara came round to my house and said 'I think we've really got to talk. I really have to talk about the image of the band'. The other two had gone by this point. She said, 'I think you've got to get your own image', Rose had said 'Jill's copying me and I don't want that', which was just crap, and also I thought very petty. Obviously she hadn't really known me and Rose cos anyone who had would've known different, I remember telling Orange Juice and us all howling with laughter and thought it was so funny. It was such a silly petty thing to do.
Was that being exaggerated by Barbara or was that how Rose actually felt?
I think that's how Rose felt. It's tricky cos she was brought up in a really kind of deprived area of Glasgow, really deprived. I remember going round to hers and I was actually shocked, there was a mattress burning in the street outside. No cars, people didn't have cars, just a mattress on fire in the middle of the road and that was just normal.
She'd grown up in that and it was quite scary. There was nothing in the house. She hadn't stayed on at school or anything, she worked in a cake shop, and because she was hanging round with people who were at college I think she felt at a disadvantage, which nobody else thought. They all thought there was street cred, you know? I see now that she had a problem in that she felt she wasn't as well educated or as well read. She wouldn't know who the Prime Minister was, if you asked her to point out Australia on a map she wouldn't be able to do it, she'd no idea where countries were. Which is not her fault, it's not because she wasn't smart, it's just because she wasn't well educated and she'd just left school and gone to work in a cake shop. For some reason she thought that made her less of a person I think, in retrospect. I think that made her very defensive.
As soon as we got that bizarre trying to oust me, it was, 'well this is our thing, this was our idea', the whole thing is something that we cooked up together and pushed on and everybody encouraged us as a couple, as a duo. To start ousting somebody before you've even done anything's a bit bizarre. To start telling tales and trying to belittle them is sad, but I think it's because of her insecurities. I don't know if she'd think that, but I think that's probably what it was. And she used to say 'don't tell people you're at art school' because she'd think that they'd think I was responsible for more of what we were about. She said 'I don't think you should mention it in interviews'.
Did she say why she thought that?
No, no. She said 'I don't want to mention that I worked in a cake shop', which I'd thought was fantastic. All the punks in Glasgow used to go to the shop she worked in and she used to give them out free pies and things. Her and her friend Lynda worked there and they were sacked for having blue hair. Nobody had blue hair then, NOBODY. They took them to a tribunal and got their jobs back and so they had to be reinstated! That's fantastic, you know! And yet she's, 'Don't mention I worked in a cake shop'. I was, 'it's up to you what you say about your life'. She was quite happy to talk about being brought up on a council estate and all that sort of stuff, but not the cake shop. Why? She was 16, she'd left school young, there's nothing wrong with it.
Especially when you've got a cool story to go with it
It was legendary, The Wee Scone Shop cos there was a pair of punkettes working in it which was weird enough. You'd get all the wee wifeys going in. They could've been sacked for giving the pies away but they weren't, they were sacked for having blue hair which meant they had to be reinstated. It's fantastic isn't it?
By the time I knew Rose she'd stopped working there and then I think also having a baby and being stuck out in Paisley and being married, all of a sudden that's everything gone at nineteen. After she did the gig with her pregnant stomach sticking out she was out of circulation for ages cos she had a baby to look after. And really until Keri, her daughter, was a bit older she couldn't do anything. Then she started to come out again and by that time I was living up in the West End and I was at art school. And I guess she thought everyone else is doing OK and having an exciting life .
That's a phenomenal amount of drive isn't it?
Absolutely. She did NOT lack drive.
With that sort of background, if you feel insecure from it, and then having a kid and everything when you're still in your teens and finding yourself, and then you're responsible for the kid as well; to get out there and do a band on top of all that is utterly phenomenal.
Absolutely. Also with the lack of education, yet she was writing lyrics and doing well. I wish I'd been a bit more understanding at that time. But by the time we'd moved to London and it got huge I just wanted to punch her! It just went to her head and she just wasn't equipped to deal with it. She wasn't equipped to deal with success, and it WAS very difficult to handle. I spent most of the time in tears once we were signed and had to do stuff. It was no fun, I didn't want to do it any more. I was 'what's the point? I don't care whether I'm on TV, I don't care about that crap'. I wanted to do it because I liked her and I liked writing with her and it was funny and we had a laugh, we had a really good laugh. And yet we still managed to do stuff that meant something to us and that we enjoyed doing. There were some great times, some really good times.