Jill Bryson interview
9 June 01
All the Strawberry Switchblade lyrics have this melancholy and awkwardness to it. You've mentioned your agoraphobia several times and Trees And Flowers is clearly about that. How bad was the agoraphobia?
It started when I was about 15, I missed a year of school. I didn't do O Levels at school cos I'd missed a year. Nobody knew how to treat it. Being an outpatient in a mental hospital wasn't much fun.
How did it start? Cos when it first starts you're just going to get called an idle git.
Yeah, they said I just wanted to get out of going to school. The first time that I had it I was 10 and I was at primary school and I remember saying I felt dizzy all the time. I remember being taken to the doctor and he said I was just trying to get out of school, just a hypochondriac, and I was so mortified cos I was actually really frightened and didn't know why I was going dizzy and light-headed. When I was ten I believed the doctor, and if he says nothing's wrong with me then nothing's wrong with me and I just didn't do certain things and kind of got over it I suppose. But then it happened again when I was 15 and I was really freaked and I used to just scream, I used to get into such a state of panic that my dad would slap me across the face to shut me up cos I was in SUCH a panic. I use to think I was going to die cos I felt I was clearly having an out of body experience, I'd be looking down on myself, I wouldn't be able to stand because my head was spinning, I'd be screaming 'I'M GOING TO DIE'. My parents couldn't handle it at all.
And I remember when I wasn't doing that just sitting, sitting, just feeling so depressed, and thinking some weird thing's come over me like some veil's been drawn down and I'm never going to be the same, I'm never going to be happy, I'm never going to be the same again. I remember thinking I'm going to end up in a hospital, I can't cope with anything. It was awful. I think it was depression, it was probably brought about by hormones or something. And since then I've suffered from depression which brings on anxiety which brings on the symptoms of agoraphobia. Agoraphobia is just severe anxiety manifesting itself in panics. It's panic attacks. I was having panic attacks at school. I'd be sitting there shaking and having to leave the classroom, all hot and cold and thinking I was going to faint and thinking I was going to die, my heart pounding, all that sort of thing.
If somebody had explained that to me then it might've helped, but nobody explained it to me until I was about 18 when my dad found a book about it and I read about it. And after that it was never so bad, I still had the panics but at least it was a recognised phenomenon.
You're no longer panicking about panicking...
...which reduces the amount of time you panic. I'd be left on my own all day which is the worst way to treat somebody suffering from depression and anxiety, to leave them alone. My friend Lisa was telling me how she was reading a book by a Victorian female writer who had suffered from depression and anxiety, and at that time they used to confine you to a room and they wouldn't allow you to write, to have paper, pencils, pens, anything so you were just there in a room on your own, you weren't allowed visitors, you weren't allowed to go out; that's the worst thing to do. But women were told 'you're suffering from hysteria'. The idea that the best treatment for it is to shut you in a room with nothing so you can completely rest - you can't cos your mind is plummeting the depths.
It's a typical Victorian way to treat women - if she won't do what she's told then get her out of the way, don't let anybody see her being disobedient.
The idea that they wouldn't even let them write....the best thing I found after being left alone - cos everybody went out my mum worked, my dad worked, my sister went to school and I was left in the house on my own with the silence echoing. There'd be this flurry of activity and then they'd go out. They used to give me all kinds of medication which I never took, I used to throw them out on the floor when I got really panicky and count them, count count count count, shaking, you know? And sometimes I'd run out the front door and run back in again, just do anything to try and snap out of the panic. The worst thing is just to leave you sitting there. I remember my dad brought a kitten home and I used to sit with the kitten and focus completely. She'd sit on my lap and sleep so much, and I'd be stroking her, it was something to concentrate on, something not me. Waiting for everyone to come home, having freaked out several times on my own. It was awful, absolutely awful. It was a year of that.
My friend Marge used to come round after school or after work and bring albums. I remember getting the Patti Smith album Horses. I used to listen to John Peel. I'd read the NME, I got the NME every week, and Sounds. I used to read them cover to cover, that was the best day of the week when they came out. But I'd never listen to music on my own, I'd read stuff but not listen to stuff on my own.
Why?
Well, it would depress me. Music's very emotive anyway, and especially the sort of music I was listening to.
That's really odd, cos so many people deal with depression by having music 'in there' with them, particularly the darkest music, it actually helps by making them feel not alone, that there are other people who feel the same way.
I did listen to it, but I had to do it when there was somebody else in the house, I could never listen to it when I was in on my own.
I remember reading in Where Are They Now in Q magazine and the guy had said 'one of them was supposed to be agoraphobic, yeah right, standing up in front of loads of people and going on Top of The Pops, how very agoraphobic', and this wasn't that long ago. How completely shit, what a horrible sweeping bloody statement to make about somebody. It was like being punched. I was going to write to them but I thought it doesn't matter, and I know it's not true. Jesus, I've been through it. And especially when it still happens. It's the sort of thing that will subside and then it'll come back. It's more to do with depression, depression and anxiety, it's not anything glamorous. Agoraphobia's just a name for the condition. I didn't want to go out, I couldn't go out cos I was scared I'd have a panic. I'd have panics at home where nobody could see me!
I remember being out with [daughter] Jessie when she was about six months old, I was coming home from the doctor's. I was panicking. I took her out of the pram, I thought 'if I hold her it'll stop me panicking; she's a baby, she needs me'. I was pushing the pram while holding her and I was literally yards from the house, and I saw somebody coming down the road. I needed to talk to somebody, just have them walk me to the door. I said to this woman 'excuse me, would you mind walking me, I live just there', and she didn't speak English! She was saying 'attacked? Attacked? Put baby down!'. By the time I'd finished explaining to her it had started to subside. I panicked again once I got in the house.
Before then I'd been thinking I had a baby, I had to look after her, I won't panic. You can have months of it being fine and then it'll just happen.
You put this into Trees &Flowers, putting it out overtly. There's a lot of stigma comes with psychological conditions and mental health problems these days, but twenty years ago there was even more. Did you have any reservations about putting that stuff out and being so open about it?
No, because at that point I'd met lots of people and managed to talk about it. I knew there'd be other people out there - I used to read the NME cover to cover, and there might be someone read ME talking about it and get a bit of hope. Women used to be agoraphobic for the whole of their lives because it wasn't explained to them, it was just 'something that happens to housewives'. It happens to women a lot.
But no, it didn't bother me at all, why should it? Loads of people have it.
While you know you should be able to talk about it, there was always a chance it could provoke reactions from people who could be cruel and make things worse for you.
I never had anything like that. I got over it when I used to dress up and look weird in Glasgow. That helped me a lot, cos it wasn't like me being out, it was somebody else being out. It never bothered me. I'd been at art school for four years and, I dunno - people spend their lives trying to cultivate stuff like that, 'I AM really interesting, honestly, I have problems!' Part of being there, we had to read about loads of artists, and you read that and, jeez, I'm completely sane! There's nothing wrong with me, I've just got a bit of anxiety. I've not got any bizarre real serious psychological psychiatric problems that some people have to live with and deal with. I'm not saying this isn't serious, but at least it's something that'll come and go.
Isn't it odd how people with extreme introspection and self-consciousness end up dressing really outlandishly? Think about Goths who spend three hours dressing up and then are worried that everyone's looking at them. Like if you're, say, a Mod, you can have a day job and no-one would know. But if you're a Goth, it's a full-time thing, 24/7 looking like something out of the Addams Family and yet being nervous of other people and not wanting them to look at you. It's such a paradox of being scared of attention yet dressing up so they'd stand out in a crowd of a thousand people.
But it's a way of hiding isn't it? It doesn't really make THEM stand out, it's a total mask, it's something to hide behind. I can relate to it. I used to wear a lot of make up - get a cotton bud, stick it in black paint and run it under my eye then put a point at each end and then put stripes on of whatever colour I was wearing.
How did the agoraphobia affect things with the band?
I suppose I knew it was going to affect the band. Everybody near me knew I was agoraphobic. I didn't really affect me hugely cos I wasn't too bad at that point. I wasn't good at travelling out of Glasgow. It was tricky. There were several times I didn't get to London. We used to travel at night cos it was cheap, but by that time I'd worked myself into such a state; when dusk falls it's not a good time for depression and anxiety. So I'd be 'I can't go, you'll have to go without me'. That's why we moved to London really, cos we had to keep travelling backwards and forwards from Glasgow. We used to stay in this hotel in Sussex Gardens, the Keiyo, run by Chinese people. It was nice, it was fine, but it was a hotel; we didn't have the cats there and Rose didn't have her daughter there, so we had to move. I couldn't do the travelling, it was SO upsetting. Every time I went back to Glasgow I'd wonder if I would get back to London. London was important cos there were things to do and I'd be letting Rose down if I didn't.
Was everyone around you understanding about it?
Not really. Bill Drummond was OK about it, Balfey wasn't particularly, he thought it was a pain, Rose thought it was a pain. She never said much, but it was clear it wasn't going to stop her. But [Jill's boyfriend] Peter was. I tried really hard. When I first came to London I used to go to sleep listening to this self-help tape. One side was called Good Night, the other's Good Morning, this Australian woman talking. I used to fall asleep listening to that on my walkman. In the morning as soon as I woke up I'd turn the tape round and wake up to it. That was months and months.
I knew Rose wanted to do it [be successful with the band]. I wanted to do it as well, but it was difficult with responsibilities to other people.
Did anyone ever give you any stick, any 'snap out of it' stuff?
No, no. They were all 'it's OK'. But you can tell when people aren't particularly sympathetic. It was very difficult for them to be around, depression is difficult to be around because you're aware that there's nothing you can do to help.
Before you told me who wrote which lyrics, I'd seen 10 James Orr Street as an agoraphobic song, but you say Rose wrote it. What's it about then?
10 James Orr Street is where she lived when she was a child and she really loved it there. It was a council flat so the council could turf you out whenever they wanted. I think they were going to renovate them or knock them down. She didn't want to leave, she loved it. Basically that was it, that's what it's about. I wrote the music for that one and just 'la la la'd the thing to her and she wrote the lyrics. She has much more of a gift for writing lyrics than I do. It's not something I like to do, it's not something I'm particularly good at. She's got the gift so I was happy to go 'this is the chords and the tune' and she'd go and write the lyrics. They were good when they were simple like that [on 10 James Orr Street]. That's the good thing about being part of a partnership, we both had different talents. I was completely happy with that song.