Rose McDowall interview
29 Jan 02
How soon did you realise it was going to get that busy? Did you think at the start you were going to make a go of it as a really serious thing?
No, we just thought 'let's join a band and have fun', cos Orange Juice were our friends, all our friends were in bands, I was in The Poems at the time and it was just really easy. Punk made it really easy to be in a band as well. When I was a kid growing up that's what I always wanted to do. I remember in school when the careers officer came round and was asking everyone what they wanted to do, and they were saying they wanted to be a nurse or work in a steel factory or a shipyard, and I said I wanted to be a brain surgeon or a pop star, and everybody in the class just started laughing. I remember when we were first on Top Of The Pops thinking 'I wonder if any of them are watching now?'
But I remember when I was younger thinking you have to have a manager and you have to do all those kind of things, I hadn't a clue how you became a pop star or really thought about what that meant, I just wanted to sing cos I always liked singing. I was always singing at the top of my voice along to all my records that were blasting really really loud. None of the neighbours complained, in fact they used to borrow all my records cos I had the best record collection in the street. My dad started taking me out to buy records when I was twelve years old. He was so much into music he was glad he had a daughter he could take out and buy music for. My first seven inch was Monster Mash! I love it!
You'd gigged as a four-piece, but with the other two leaving did it put gigs out of the way?
We started using backing tapes.
Did you start doing that straight away or was that after the records had come out?
It was before the records came out, we had a reel to reel with basic bass and drums on it. My husband would take care of the reel to reel, he was quite technical, and Jill's boyfriend's a photographer so he's do slides and stuff like that. So, the first tour we did with Orange Juice and we used a reel to reel.
Later on we started getting people in, when we were doing bigger gigs. After the records we'd get musicians in to play, which was a nightmare, I used to hate having the whole audition thing. But we found musicians who we went on tour with and it worked out quite well. And some of the later sessions we did are with those musicians. It was good. We worked with the Madness rhythm section.
That single, Trees And Flowers, has got incredible personnel on it; you've got the rhythm section of Madness, you've got Roddy Frame on guitar, you've got Balfe and Drummond producing. It's laden with major figures from the time, this little first indie single.
I know! It was good actually. It was lucky, we just happened to be in a scene that was just buzzing with life, so much talent.
How does it happen to a new two piece with no releases that you can pull in people like that?
We sat down and thought 'we really want to concentrate on the band now, and practise a lot and do gigs'. And we sat down with the other two girls and said 'would you be willing to give up your job if we get really busy?' Jill was at art school at the time, and she was willing to give that up, but the other two girls weren't willing to give up their jobs.
What were you doing at the time?
Me? I was not doing anything except being in Strawberry Switchblade and The Poems and listening to bands and being a mother and having fun and going out a lot [laughs]. I wasn't working, work already was music, I was writing, spending a lot of time doing that.
So they decided they didn't want to commit themselves to the band, so we thought there's not much point in continuing [with the other two] cos we now have to continue on our own if we're going to take it a bit more seriously. And within weeks we had got a call cos Orange Juice had mentioned 'look out for Strawberry Switchblade'. And we did a John Peel roadshow as well. He used to do roadshows and bands would play. It was just BBC roadshows that DJs would do and there'd be a disco he'd compere or whatever. And he did one in Edinburgh and it was Strawberry Switchblade and Sophisticated Boom Boom, which were another Glasgow all female band at the time. So we did that and we did the John Peel session and then we did the Kid Jensen session. We recorded the Peel one first but Jensen went out first.
[BBC archives confirm the Peel session was recorded 5 Oct 82, Jensen 7 Oct 82]
Did you submit demos or anything?
No, we didn't! No, he just phoned my house - not even getting the producer of the show to phone - and said 'Hi, this is John Peel, do you want to do a session?' I said 'do you want us to send a tape?' and he said, 'no, that's OK'. Then David Jensen did it as well just cos John Peel had, they were both trying to be the first one to get us out.
It was mad, everything just happened like that, we weren't asking for anything, we weren't pushing. I was going to people and pushing for gigs and stuff like that but not for John Peel to phone up and say 'do you want to do a session next week? Can you come down?' YES! It was bizarre.
Then David Balfe and Bill Drummond heard the sessions, and they came up to Glasgow to meet us and propose that they two would be a management team for us. It ended up that Balfey was our manager solely cos Bill Drummond had to concentrate on running the Bunnymen and they didn't want him to spread himself out too much.
Then we had a lot of record companies start to get interested, a lot of the independents like Cherry Red and Rough Trade, and then some majors got interested. I think we went with WEA because, well, One: the advance [laughs] Two: the fact that they had a little subsidiary label that was quite cool to be on, it wasn't quite selling out to a major.
Was Korova just Bill Drummond's imprint on WEA? There was yourselves and the Bunnymen, I don't remember ever seeing anybody else.
I really don't remember. There probably was. I'm sure there was in fact, cos I remember people coming into Bill's office and stuff, but I just cant remember who they were now! The first single came out on Ninety Two Happy Customers.
Was there anything else ever on that label?
Well, that label was Will Sergeant's from the Bunnymen, I think he might've done something on it. [There was only one other release on the label, Sergeant's solo album Themes For Grind, released March 1982]. But basically he wanted to put our first single out as an independent before we went on to a semi-major. He liked Strawberry Switchblade so he wanted to put the record out, and we thought 'yeah, cool!'. We liked the Bunnymen, so it was mutual. We were lucky in that sense that we didn't get just thrown out into the commercial soup of pop straight away. There was a bit of dread, because of the people that we knew and that we were involved with at the beginning like Bill Drummond. It was good to put the first single out as an independent before we went to a major.
Do you think it would've been different if you'd stayed on a truly independent label?
It wouldn't have gone quite so quickly, it wouldn't have been as rapid as it was. We may possibly have lasted longer, not split up quite so soon.
I imagine that would be the case anyway, because it [splitting up] was a lot to do with the pressures of the record company and them deciding who was going to do the next video when we were quite happy with who's doing the videos right now thankyou very much - it was decisions like that which would really really piss me off. It would be trade offs, 'OK you can do this if you agree to try this', and then they started trying to get us to change our image. We came as a package, we were already everything that we were when we came to the record company, why are you trying to change us into something from Dallas? We don't want to look like The Bangles, we want to look like Strawberry Switchblade; that is who we are.
The Bangles when they started out were actually a lot like you, a good band in part of a really good independent underground pop scene, writing their own songs and everything, and then they got a makeover from CBS and became MTV corporate froth.
Exactly. And I was just totally opposed to that and didn't want to calm down the make-up.
Was it that direct, and that small details?
Well, they were saying 'you should get into leather' and stuff like that, but I was wearing PVC anyway. But it was 'settle down a wee bit' so we could reach a wider audience. Cos, although we were doing pretty well and we were quite happy doing what we were doing, we weren't quite straight enough for a lot of people who were watching it. People would watch it cos it was interesting, it looked kind of cartoony and fun.