Jill Bryson interview
9 June 01
Did you gig much?
No, not really.
It's just you're listing stuff on your own, Howard Jones tour with Balfe, stuff with the jazzy guys, all for a few gigs, it sounds like it adds up to a lot.
No, it's just a few here and there. We did some recording with that band with Robin somebody who used to produce Sade...
Robin Millar
Yeah, a really nice guy, he had studios up in Willesden somewhere and we recorded with him and I enjoyed it, but...
Was this after the album?
No, this was before the album, he was going to produce the album. But it ended up none of us were sure, us, the record company; it had come out quite mellow, and with the band it just didn't work with the songs which were three chord wonders. It was missing the point. There was one we did with Robin Millar, Secrets I think it was, he did a really nice version of it, did a fantastic vocal thing layering up vocals, really ethereal, really beautiful and choral sounding. Just lovely. I thought it was really exciting to do this in this big studio.
How far did the sessions get?
I think we did two songs. [Jill has a tape of Poor Hearts and Secrets. Robin Millar believes there was a third track, known as Lost In Space. Rose also mentions this track, and implies it later had a name-change]
You'd done two songs, one of which is really good, and yet you gave up?
Well I really liked it but the record company didn't. They thought it should be more poppy, and we did too. We did some with a girl called Nicky Holland as well. The girl who played oboe on Trees And Flowers came in and played piano. She's a classically trained pianist, there was a band called the Ravishing Beauties, she used to be in them, they were classical musicians, middle-class southern English girls. Really sweet, really nice girls. So three of them, Kate St John, Virginia Astley and Nicky Holland who were all in this band. And the record company wanted to see how we'd get on with her. I can't remember who was playing with us, I think that was the band as well. But that didn't work out.
I remember going to Liverpool, on the Wirral somewhere and doing some demos in somebody's house which was just really weird as well. Because we weren't a band they were just trying us out with different people. They were trying us first of all with this band to see if we were happy and if we thought it worked, then they wanted to try us with a programmer to see if we were happy with that and it worked. And then we weren't particularly so then we tried with this other programmer David Motion who eventually did the album, and we kinda liked him, he's a funny guy.
What else has he done? I've never seen his name on anything else.
He'd worked - [giggles] he'd worked with Dollar!
'kinnell!
I know! We were saying, 'no way! No way! I don't think that's going to be quite us, is it? Are you really sure about this?' And they were saying he's a really nice guy. We liked David Motion when we met him, we got on well with him, we liked what he did, it was really quirky and kinda weird.
It is quirky to be given those songs and want to put really heavy distorted drum sounds on them.
Exactly. With every song we were like, 'you can't do that David, you can't do that, what do you think you're doing?' We'd come in and he'd ask us what we think of a sound. Like Deep Water, we were like 'WHAT?' But it was great, it just worked, and we said OK, let's go with it. And we did a few and it was, 'yeah, we like this'. It's very 80s when you listen to it now. Which is not necessarily a terrible thing.
It's funny because we did try do play it down, try to keep it folky, keep it poppy-folky-jazzy, keep it quite innocent, quite acoustic, and it just didn't work. We didn't know enough about anything like that to be able to say what we wanted.
There was the whole Sade thing going on, you could've been pushed into the sophisticated wine-barry thing.
And we really didn't want to go there. When we found David and he was really quirky and a bit weird, we thought we'd go with that. It was mostly just him. Occasionally he brought somebody else in, but it was mostly just him and an engineer and us. It was a nice way to work. You have to let somebody help because we couldn't do everything.
So where did Phil Thornalley come into it?
There were a couple of tracks that we were a little bit iffy about. And Phil Thornalley was somebody I think Balfey and Bill Drummond knew, so we said let's see if he can do a version of them. I really liked him, he was great. We had a very intense session doing it, he got the drummer from The Cure in to play the drums.
He'd already recorded some great stuff with The Cure, which is a whole different attitude than Dollar. Putting your songs together with a Cure attitude I can imagine working in a way that it couldn't with the Sade thing.
It was Who Knows What Love Is we did with Phil Thornalley. We'd already recorded it with David Motion.
How quickly was the album done?
It took a while because we had all these stop-starts with other people. We went to lots of different studios, so it seemed like a lot longer than it was. He [David Motion] wanted to try out lots of different studios, which was fine by us. We were 'let's sample the local studios!', so we did a bit here, a bit there.
Did WEA say to spend all that money cos it didn't matter, you were going to be huge?
Yeah, they were 'whatever'. It wasn't budgetless, you know, and obviously he [Motion] wasn't as expensive as Trevor Horn, and they weren't overgenerous, but it certainly cost. It was great. We went to Chipping Norton to do some of it, a residential studio. I remember taking the cats, Rose had a cat and I had three and we stayed in this studio with cottages that had hessian wallpaper and the cats climbed up it, hanging off like stickle-bricks, one of them was chewing all the dried flowers round the fireplaces. There was tons of gold discs and stuff, the Bay City Rollers had recorded there in the 70s in their heyday. We were 'oh my gosh, this is so weird, it's the English countryside', we'd never been in that before. So we'd do a week there and then a week in some studio in Westbourne Grove then a week in a studio in Finsbury Park. It must've taken about two or three months, all in all.
Was it easy working with David Motion?
Dead easy.
His work is so prominent on it, was there any kind of difficulty with how much he put in?
No, because we got on with him.
But you're having to trust him to take these songs that you've been living with for a long time, he comes in and throws these huge sounds on to it all.
We were kinda gobsmacked a lot of the time, but he always asked us. He wasn't a man that you couldn't approach. We trusted him and we liked him.
Did you and Rose have much input into the arrangement of drums and bass and whatnot?
No, he did it. He had heard fairly complete recordings of the stuff, and if he wanted to do any major change he spoke to us about it and we sat down and he played us through it.
Did much get changed that late on?
Nothing major. Since Yesterday we rewrote the verse. But that wasn't him, that was us. We were sitting together and David Balfe was saying that we should think about the verse and rewrite it cos it was a bit repetitive, so Rose rewrote the lyrics. That was the most major change that we did.
On Since Yesterday, how did the fanfare from Sibelius' 5th get on it?
That was David Motion. I'm not sure he even realised. He didn't tell us. Not being great classical music fans we didn't know! That was his thing, he did it and said what do you think, and we said, 'yeah, sounds good'. It's only afterwards we had to ask 'who's Sibelius then?'.
It's the most prominent song on the album and yet until quite late the lyrics and melody were totally different. How late was it changed?
Pretty late, cos I remember Bill Drummond and David Balfe saying we should work on the lyrics. And not so much the lyrics but the tune to get more melody into it, a bit of variation. It was fairly late on, we were rehearsing together in London for the album and Rose rewrote the lyrics for it.
Out in one go or did she work at it?
She must've gone off and worked at it. I think later on she'd just have said no! I was quite amazed that she did do that, I think that was the only one that she did rewrite the lyrics for.
Listening to the earlier versions of the songs they change a bit but the lyrics are basically in place for everything except that one.
When she changed that little melody bit and it wouldn't fit whatever we had for it before, so she just had to go away and rethink it, and she did. I remember her coming up and singing it and thinking it was much better, fantastic. So that's how it was. At that point David Motion must've heard the demos, it was very late on.
That was Balfe spurring that on - how close was he watching?
Not that much really. He was involved and he would probably have liked to be a bit more involved, but no, he left the music side of it to us. He had another band at the time that he was managing. It's funny cos when we signed with David Balfe and Bill Drummond we thought Bill Drummond was going to be our manager and it turned out to be David Balfe who was the one looking after us, and he was obviously a man with an eye on climbing a career ladder and having his own record label or being a manager and making money. So a lot of his decisions we were wary of, cos it was obvious that's what he was doing.
[Balfe swiftly went on to form his own label, Food Records, starting with Jesus Jones, Crazyhead and Diesel Park West. Then he signed Blur and sold the label to EMI for several million pounds]
He had a band called Brilliant, do you remember them?
Yeah, Youth from Killing Joke and Jimmy Cauty who went on to do the KLF with Bill Drummond. Truly dreadful album, the Brilliant album. I don't know how much you can confirm of this - the legend is that Drummond signed them to WEA for a ridiculous amount of money.
Yes. Which didn't happen with us!
And Drummond got Pete Waterman in to produce for another ridiculous amount of money, and doing the Brilliant album is what paid for Waterman's set-up that gave us the Stock Aitken Waterman unholy trinity in the late 80s.
Very possibly. I would imagine that's the truth.
The Brilliant album deservedly sold fuck all and lost a fortune.
I remember going down to meet Youth. I can't remember why. Balfey was also managing Zodiac Mindwarp as well.
That early?
That was towards the end, after we'd done the album. I remember [Jill's boyfriend] Peter doing some photos for Zodiac Mindwarp. Balfey seemed to know a lot of people, a big network of quite disparate people.
There's the Youth connection with you then - Youth gets a credit on the Let Her Go remix.
Yes, that's right. Him and Balfey were quite big pals.
Was Korova just Drummond's imprint on WEA?
Yes. Had they not already released stuff on Korova? Was that not what all the Bunnymen stuff was released on?
Yes.
So that was him, just Drummond's stuff on WEA. The guy who ran Warner Brothers publishing was Rob Dickins, he became head of WEA Records and he took Bill Drummond with him and made him an A&R guy there. Balfey then got together with another type of manager, Paul King who was managing Tears For Fears, Level 42 and Julian [Cope], so they were the managers and Bill just went off to A&R and took us with him.
So we were signed for shit, you know, we were signed for not much money at all, £20,000 which was nothing compared to what Brilliant would be signed for. And I felt they'd sold us down the river a little bit. I only wanted enough to live on, but we had no money. I remember asking if we could have some money so I could buy a dress for Top Of The Pops. The one I got was really expensive, I got it in Kensington Market and it was 60 quid or something, and I thought it was just OUTRAGEOUS, SO much money. And then I was hacking at it, it didn't have sleeves so I put sleeves on it and did stuff to it. Imagine having to ask! It's your first Top Of The Pops! When you think what bands get spent on them now...
We were getting a wage from the money that we had, but £20,000 was supposed to do us for two years. We had a publishing advance which wasn't very much but we could manage on it, we didn't spend a lot of money. And if you're working in studios and the record company have got a cab account then we'd just go everywhere in a cab, really take the piss, 'just wait for us while we do our shopping'.[laughs] Rose was terrible for that, really bad. Once we had a hit single then they let us have some money to buy clothes. It was a pitiful amount, but we used to make everything ourselves.