Jill Bryson interview
9 June 01
Are you one of those people who has songs going round in their head all the time? Do you still get your old songs going round your head?
Not usually, no. Other people's songs, yes. I listen to a lot of music but I don't listen to us.
I was in a band over ten years ago, I haven't listened to our old stuff in years, but I still get the songs playing in my head all the time. I just wondered if you were the same. Not singing it to myself, but really HEARING it playing. I get stuff set off cos someone says a phrase that's in a lyric.
I've got 10 James Orr Street now cos you mentioned it. I can hear the whole thing. I get it with other people's, but with ours I'll only get it if the actual song is mentioned.
Maybe it's to do with having a retentive memory. You said the other day that you'd picked up a guitar and couldn't remember how to play any Strawberry Switchblade songs.
It's really sad! It's not like they're difficult! There's always one chord that gets me. How can I not know it?
Do you see yourselves as having had any influence? Do you hear bands who've incorporated something of Strawberry Switchblade into what they're doing?
No.
A couple of things sound like it to me. Belle And Sebastian, for one.
Do they?
Yes. I mean, it's a common melodic melancholia, but there's something in the use of harmonies that's really similar.
I suppose I wouldn't be arrogant enough to think it!
I also clearly remember the first time I heard 'Linger' by The Cranberries, the harmonies she does with herself made me go 'I've heard that before'.
Wow! Really?
Absolutely, I thought it sounded EXACTLY like Strawberry Switchblade but with live musicians. Everything else they did after that was rubbish, but that track is just gorgeous.
I see it with other bands though. When the Housemartins came out I thought the were SO like the Farmers Boys [Jill's husband Frog's band in the mid 80s].
[Frog is in the room and concurs about Linger]
I'm glad someone else spotted that as well.
FROG: It may be completely accidental, sometimes when you're writing something you don't realise that you're regurgitating part of your past.
A bit like David Motion and Sibelius! I suspect he actually knew about that!
To use that riff is one thing, to do it with fanfare trumpets like the original means it's deliberate, surely.
That's where my and Rose's lack of musical education paid off!
How many people have heard Sibelius' 5th?
It's not something you grew up with in Glasgow, d'you know what I mean?
Do you still get much in the way of royalties?
We get some once in a while. We did get quite a lot from Japan cos they re-released the album there.
Did you know that was coming out in advance?
No! I didn't even know afterwards. I only knew cos my friend who's an air hostess got it for me in San Francisco as an import.
They stuck a load of extra tracks on it, the 12 inch remixes and Ecstasy.
Clearly they didn't ask us did they? I would certainly have binned all those.
Have you seen Rose recently?
I saw her a couple of years ago. We'd got some money, there was a cheque written to the band and we don't have a band bank account so we couldn't cash it. I said I'd speak to them [the cheque's issuers] and see if they can split it and send it to each of us. Rose said she needed the money sooner than that, so she came up to London to see me and we tried to open an account together. She'd kept an account in that name and she wanted to put it in there and give me the money, but after everything that had happened I didn't want to do that.
You say you didn't trust her with money 'after everything that had happened', but you've not given any implication of any dodgy dealings in the past at all.
Rose's partner came with her that day and was saying he'd be the manager and deal with everything. I don't know him so I'm not making any judgements about him, but why should he be managing anything I've ever done? There's no need to - it turned out it was easy to sort it out so we'd get separate cheques. The last time of contact had been her saying the band was nothing to do with me, 'it's my name and I'll carry on'. You can't trust somebody who does that, so I didn't want to trust her with the money, and more to the point I didn't trust her partner who I'd never met before. That's the only time I've seen her in a long time. It was weird because she was very very friendly. She wanted to be friends. She was very open and very nice.
Looking back now at the songs and the work, are you generally happy with it?
Yes. I loved it at the time and I still love it now. There are parts of it that I think are fantastic. I don't listen to it that much, but at the time I loved it, really really happy with it.
What are your favourites?
I love Being Cold. The guy who arranged the strings was appalled when I played the melodica over it, absolutely appalled. He was like, 'you can't do this, it's not even in tune', and I was, 'that's the way it is', and I love that, I love the fact there's a melodica over these lush strings, a huge string section. 'No you can't put that on', 'Yes I can, it's my bloody record and I'm going to put it on! It's our record and we'll do what we like'. We'd decided we'd do that; you can't completely erase everything quirky from it. I like that, I like Deep Water and I like Go Away, I think that's good. There's not many that I don't like on it, I was pleased with it. We really had a lot to do with it, if we didn't like something we said, so stuff didn't go on that we didn't like.
That's true of most artists, though - nobody thinks 'let's go and make a bad record', but many still do it. Is there nothing on there you don't like?
A little bit, with the production and some of the, er, over-enthusiastic programming, I don't really think it's very us, I think sometimes it obscures the songs, but generally I quite like it. You've got to make a decision about some things sometime and generally I think it's OK, I think it stands the test of time. I like Trees And Flowers, I really like Sunday Morning, they have a kind of charm to them that the album doesn't have. And I often listen to the [Radio One] sessions. I quite like listening to them cos they're much much more naïve, there's something quite nice about it.
Is the outside world still interested in Strawberry Switchblade at all?
I wouldn't have thought so really, no.