Jill Bryson interview
9 June 01
So the album's done and Since Yesterday was the flagship single and the one really big hit. The record company were clearly expecting a lot more.
Obviously, I think they expected us to have another hit.
What's it like having a hit single? Anybody born between 1955 and 1985 and brought up in the UK has got to have wanted to be on Top Of The Pops. What's it like going on Top Of The Pops for the first time?
I was terrified. Shaking like a leaf. You've got all these twatty dancers round you and you want them to piss off! It was great. It was really funny. The BBC are strange, the dressing rooms are real utility, classic BBC. But the studio was just weird, all the cameras on us and cranes and things and we're just standing there going 'oh SHIT!'. We were SO SCARED. Really, if we'd had to sing live....
And yet on the performance you're grinning your heads off all through it.
It was dead exciting and absolutely thrilling, really thrilling. Really. I remember we went through it, the rehearsal was much worse that the actual thing. Once it all got going I just remember being 'MY GOD, what are we DOING?' Just being there, you know.
Top Of The Pops was such an iconic thing. Maybe it's changed now cos people are growing up with MTV and music television is freely available on tap, whereas at that time it was about the only thing apart from The Tube and Whistle Test.
I can remember seeing all sorts of people on it, and desperately waiting for it to come on, and we didn't have videos so you couldn't tape it when I was 14 or 16. You were there, you were waiting.
And not only was it on rarely and not tapeable, but music was so CENTRAL to youth culture up till the 90s
Any of it you did see you were glued to and everybody watched it. I remember as a young teenager watching Top of The Pops and seeing glam-rockers on it, T.Rex and Bowie, and when I was a bit older Be Bop Deluxe were on it. I really liked Be Bop Deluxe.
I remember the New Wave bands, you'd get all this absolutely shite puppetry pop, then on would come The Jam and I'd go 'THAT'S what it's about', the people who stood out, the people who look like the shouldn't have been allowed on there, those were the ones that were great.
I know! I know our song was poppy but we were a weird looking pair.
Yeah, but it's clearly not Dollar, clearly not employing stylists.
It was DEAD exciting.
Having a hit certainly made the journalists attitude towards you change - most of the interviews after Since Yesterday are really shallow and trivial.
The first interview we ever did was the NME about Trees And Flowers time, just a page. The minute we had a single in the charts it was only about ribbons and what make up you use.
You expect it from the kids mags, Number 1 and Smash Hits, that's what they're there for. And Beeb magazine; a one-page interview with a double-page picture in a magazine that's got Peter Duncan on the front. But even in stuff like ZigZag, which was a serious music magazine, it's still a fairly crap interview.
I think because we dressed up people couldn't get past that. I kinda forgot that the songs even meant anything cos nobody ever asked us. EVER. They'd ask 'how did you get your name', but they didn't actually want to know cos if you mentioned Orange Juice they'd [blank look]. They didn't go into it in any depth, just asking questions and ticking them off the list.
There doesn't seem to be anything out there, which is why I'm doing this now cos there's a need for it - people are still listening to Strawberry Switchblade. It's not like Hear'Say selling 300,000 in a week when, two months later, most copies have had their last ever play. Your stuff is being tracked down by people who part with sizeable sums for it, it still means something to people. And yet your history isn't documented. This is exactly what the internet is good for, so that the people who want to find this information can get it.
Most people had an angle on what they were going to do and they didn't deviate from it. Also it was difficult cos Rose was quite resistant to talking about anything in any great depth as well, and then when things broke down between us it was difficult.
Or else it was just hysterically funny, we'd just be having a laugh, which then doesn't really do you any favours.
There's an interview when Jolene came out where you're having a laugh, basically playing word games around Western imagery, which is fine for a conversation but it's not an informative interview.
Nobody really asked us anything, then they figured there was no depth to us so they wouldn't ask us anything. How could it progress from that? People had made up their minds.
Did that bug you a lot of the time?
It was mind-numbingly boring. With most interviews you were shoved in a room for half an hour with someone so they weren't going to get an in-depth interview, and you'd be doing it all day.
Before, I remember someone came up to interview us in Glasgow for the NME and there was a photographer there and he spent the day with us. I think that's why NME interviews were generally a little bit better, cos they spend time with people unless they're really big. If they get hold of bands before a major label's got hold of them, they'd spend time with them.
A couple of old press interviews make references to getting letters. Was there a lot of fan mail?
Not a lot. Most of it was really nice, there were some people who wrote more than once. But then once you get to a certain point you just don't even see the letters. To begin with we used to write back, and at that time people were still interested in the band and the music.
Who were the people who wrote?
To begin with it was indie kids who liked the fact it was girls doing stuff. That was when there was the radio sessions and stuff. But after Since Yesterday it was loads of little girls.
There's a reference to getting very long letters from nutters as well.
Yeah, Rose used to get the mad letters more than I did.
In one interview she says she got a letter blaming her for the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
I never got anything like that, she got all the nutty stuff.
What about gigs, who were the people who came to the gigs?
Before the album was released it was an indie audience. I remember one of the Jesus &Mary Chain being there, all the Glasgow people like the Pastels and Orange Juice, students, just indie people. That was the audience wherever we went. After the album we never toured much, and when we did do it, it was with Howard Jones so obviously it was all going to be little girls. I remember standing in the Albert Hall going 'it's like a Sunday school outing, really well dressed kids having a jolly good time, 'nice' and 'wholesome'. It wasn't like that before.
What about in Japan?
That was little girls.
Given that you've got a hit and the record company start using their publicity machine, did they ever try anything more direct on steering your image? Did they ever say 'don't wear that, wear this instead'?
The record company struggled with us, but they couldn't imagine doing it any other way. If they could've just cleaned us up, washed the make-up off and brushed the hair out a little bit, had the outfits but much cuter, got rid of the thick black eyeliner and blue lipstick, they would've done. I remember they got a stylist to come up with some cute clothes; they were really nice, really well done, but they were CUTE and girly and frothy and sweet. Little strawberries on them and things. Good grief! What do you think we are?! She'd done this presentation with drawings and little bits of fabric, but well the whole point was we just shoved our clothes together, made them really badly, that's why they look the way they look.
I remember the worst thing, the thing where I thought 'I don't want to do this any more' was round the time of the third single. The second single [on WEA, Let Her Go] hadn't gone into the charts and so they really wanted to push. They wanted me to go out with Mike Read [then Radio 1's inane breakfast show DJ and twattish TV 'personality', not to be confused with Mike Reid who plays Frank Butcher on EastEnders, an even grislier sexual prospect]. He phoned somebody up and said he liked me, and we'd done Top Of The Pops and I think he was presenting it and he was chatting to me and I was [uncomfortable squirm] and he'd got in touch with the radio promotions guy and said he'd like to go out with me. They'd tried to arrange for me to go out with him. I was going out with Peter, and they knew him.
They wanted me to go out with this guy, to go to some awards ceremony with him as his date. I was like, 'HELLO?' I remember Balfey saying 'I'll come and sit outside the place in the car so if you want to leave at any time you can'. I was like, 'HELLO? EXCUSE ME? Am I a prostitute?'. Mike Read used to turn up at things, he'd turn up at studios. They'd obviously told him where we would be, and I was NOT INTERESTED, they knew I had a boyfriend. The promotions departments in record companies seem to be peopled by folk with no morals, they just want you to do ANYTHING. And I said no. The mind boggles cos we weren't exactly glam pretty girls, we were weird hair-extension freaks. I would not be the Spice Girls. You look at them and think, god, what must they get? Someone saying, 'ooh, I fancy that one' and some sleazy guy in radio promotions going, 'I really think it'd do you a lot of good if you went out with him'.
I remember going with the radio promotions - radio promotions seem to be the worst - to Langan's Brasserie, that posh restaurant, to have lunch with Mike Read, ostensibly just to chat, and it was with Rose and Balfey and radio promotions guy and I'm like 'I'm not sitting next to him, you're not putting me next to him'. And they put me right next to him. Can you believe it? Just for publicity, let's get a photo. That is NOT why I was doing it, and I thought fuck it big time, I'm not doing it, that's not what I want to do. And at that point I was not getting on with Rose and her kind of losing proportion of the whole thing.
In what sense? What kind of thing?
We just kinda went off in different directions. She did lose proportion, she got a bit - Spinal Tap where the sandwiches aren't the right shape - she got a wee bit like that. There was obviously a lot of pressure and she just wasn't used to stuff like that and she didn't know how to handle herself and she was greedy. She was 'this is my thing, it's not yours, just keep in the background', you know? Which is tiring after a while, you need a bit of mutual respect if we're going to do this. I mean I know a lot of people in bands hate each other but there's still some kind of respect there that holds them together and makes them recognise what the other's doing is good. By the time it got to this stage I couldn't even recognise that, it was just silly.
I think you find out about people when you're under stress. It's not the best way to get to know somebody under those kind of circumstances, it puts you under a lot of pressure. I really enjoyed doing things with somebody else, with another woman, but it just didn't work out. I just didn't feel like there was any kind of mutual respect. After we'd done the album there wasn't really much co-operation, we were just kind of growing apart. I thought the good thing about it was to work together, to write together. It got to the point where she and I were writing separately, and I'm just not interested in doing that. That's why I didn't really carry on afterwards because I didn't want to work on my own, I want to work with other people. I think that's the kind of dynamic that works well with a lot of people in bands and that write together, there's a dynamic between two people that doesn't work on their own.