Rose McDowall interview
29 Jan 02
[Change of tape - comes back in on...]
It was like this when I talked to Jill, four hours of tape!
We're a pair of gabs, I tell you!
Totally! It's uncanny, it's so obvious that you worked together. And when you were talking about writing the songs, you used almost identical words to hers about the process.
Really?
Yeah, really emphasising how much of a laugh you had doing it.
Yeah, and bouncing enthusiasm off each other was just great.
And like her I've got a list of questions but I just need to look at it once in a while and cross off the ones you've answered in the course of just talking.
It was great, we used to get together and think, 'the theme is red and black today' and throw everything that we possessed on the floor - beads, jewellery, earrings, everything that was red and black - put it all on then go out, jangling everywhere we went! People would hear us coming from half an hour before we got there!
Recording the album, then.
We actually recorded the album in quite a few different studios which, instead of going into one studio and recording the whole album, we travelled around and did different songs in different studios.
Jill said you did two songs with Robin Millar. What was that?
Yeah, he didn't like women.
Really? He produced Sade and things at the same time.
I think it was Jolene we did with him, was it not?
No, wasn't that with Clive Langer?
It was HIM that didn't like women. He didn't even talk to us. His engineer did most of the work, he just put his name on it. The engineer did most of the work, I can't remember his name. What tracks did we do with Robin Millar?
You recorded Secrets and...
Oh yeah, Secrets and Lost In Space. We changed that to...I think it was called Lost In Space then, actually. Secrets and, it could have been Poor Hearts.
Yes, it was those two. [Robin Millar believes there was a third track, known as Lost In Space]
You know the guy I met in the pub up there? That's the session he worked on. I liked his studio actually. All the other studios were had green carpets and stuff, his had a really nice blue carpet!
Why didn't it work out with Robin Millar?
I don't know what happened. We weren't continuing any further, that was quite near the end, we were recording new songs for the next album, doing demos for it and stuff like that.
The Robin Millar stuff? I thought it was before then. In Jill's memory you did two songs with him as a trial producer with a view to him doing the album, but it didn't go down well.
Well it couldn't have been Poor Hearts then cos Poor Hearts was written much later.
[This appears to be incorrect: it was recorded for a Janice Long BBC session on 11 Feb 84, which is almost certainly earlier or contemporaneous with the Robin Millar sessions]
It's definitely Secrets and Poor Hearts.
I liked working with Robin Millar, I think it was afterwards, I'm SURE it was afterwards.
Why would you re-record Secrets?
It's all a jumble in my head. I've probably got the date on a tape somewhere. I actually quite liked working with Robin Millar, so that [not using him for any released material] would have been a record company decision. I liked those demos.
Did the record company hold that much sway?
Well, we met loads of producers. We met all these guys, they'd come in and say 'this is what we're going to do', and I'd think, 'no, that's not what we're going to do, these are our songs, we have a concept, we created them and we want to see it through to the end, so we don't want to just hand them over to you and say Here you go'. There were a lot of producers we knew who were completely like that, who were completely the producer's more important than the artist sort of thing, like HE'S the artist. We met a few like that who we didn't want to work with.
Then we met a couple that we tried things out with, and the one that we ended up with, David Motion, he was meant to be a try-out as well, to see how it would go. I was quite unsure - I really liked David Motion, a really nice guy, he was really easy and pleasant to work with but I was really unconvinced at first because I didn't like some of the sounds that were coming out. They were going 'give it time, give it time,' but the more time you gave it the more money was being put into the project and the more fighting you would have to do with the record company. So in the end we ended up caught in that trap, basically. And in a sense as much as I love Motion I probably wouldn't have gone that way.
What would you have preferred to see it come out like?
I would have rather it sounded less dated, I would have rather we used more real instruments, like Trees And Flowers for example with oboe and french horn. I know we did have that on some of the other tracks as well, people like Andrew Poppy did a couple of arrangements and David Bedford did another couple where we'd have an orchestra and that's really nice. I would have rather worked with real instruments to be perfectly honest and not all synths and stuff like that cos it was not my passion at the time.
Having heard the tapes of the Radio 1 sessions and other early versions, the bombast of a lot of the released versions is quite overpowering by comparison.
I know. It was quite weird really, cos it was a medium that I wasnae that familiar with - synthesisers and stuff - not being very technically minded. I could work the mixing desk, I'd engineer for him and stuff like that cos I really liked doing that. I do like synths a lot more now than I did then, I buy them now and I use them now. But I kinda always really liked the sound of Trees And Flowers, the fragility of it and the beauty of the pure sounding instruments that are played well, it just sounded really really nice. I would have liked to have done a bit more of that, especially when you get little hook lines in something like On The Journey From Home [Being Cold] with the melodica parts, melodies like that. If you have really strong melodies, OK we played them on melodicas and we were playing harmonies over each other, but I would have been so nice if some of the other songs could have been that rich. They wouldn't have dated quite as much. I know loads of people are back into 80s stuff again.
It's in a revivalist way though, superficial and nostalgic rather than creative.
Yeah and kinda kitschy. I would love to do that album again, I think those songs just weren't done justice to. I don't want to say anything that would reflect badly on anybody that was involved in it cos I liked everybody that we worked with, but I really think they [the songs] weren't done justice to, they could have been SO much better.
It's difficult with new technology to spot what's going to date badly, you can't tell what's going to be superseded and what's going to stick around.
Well of course, I know, of course. And there were some great sounds actually- I love that whale sound on Deep Water which was a synth sound. I love that sound, it gets you in the gut. I really liked quite a lot of it but there were bits of it that are too rinky-dink for me. You know what I mean? Like, press the sequencer and everything just goes dut-dut-dut-dut-dut, there's nothing organic in there. Where's the breath? Where's the human in that? Everything's digitalised. I like analogue, although I use digital now as well, I do like that REAL feeling about music when you can actually hear somebody's breath or you can hear them play the guitar, you can almost hear the fingers touching it.
I love acoustic stuff where you can hear the fret squeak as the fingers move on the wound strings.
When they squeak and it's a good squeak in the right place I like it, but if it's a squeak that's 'that wasn't supposed to be there', I don't like that actually. Although I'm guilty of it sometimes. I like deliberate ones though. Music's just one of those things, it does something different to everybody. I think those songs could have been SO much better if we'd gone with the same approach as Trees And Flowers and done it with real instruments, and we should have blended it a bit, but it all went dut-dut-dut-dut-dut. And some of the songs, my voice is so shrill, it's really high and I just think, god, I sound like a chipmunk.
But it's that which gives it the fragility, the delicate touch. Harmonies build it up but it's the high voice that creates that gorgeous fragile bit, that's the thing that gives it its real sensitivity, its real power.
I like them, but I like them when they have a bass harmony down there somewhere. I like harmonies that are really close, that kind of resonate almost, like they're the same organic thing. A lot of things I do now I like to put really close harmonies so it has almost a Gregorian feel. Then I like to put really high things over the top. But some of the first album I did in Sorrow I went overboard on harmonies, harmonies everywhere, put on another one! The second album round I thought, 'you're being too predictable putting harmonies everywhere just because you can,' so I pulled back from that a wee bit.
But it's good to experiment. I want to record an album that's all vocals, all the different melodies are vocal melodies. Maybe just a bit of simple heartbeat drumming a bit of flute or something like that, but mostly all vocal melodies coming from all directions. I really want to do that, something to completely surround your head and get drowned in.
I did a gig recently and a guy came up to me and said 'your songs really haunt me,' and I thought that's a real compliment. And we did this gig - this is not about Strawberry Switchblade - we did this gig in America and the whole audience started crying, it was amazing, it was totally amazing. First of all this girl started crying, then someone else started crying, her boyfriend started crying, it was fucking amazing. What a compliment, to make all these people cry, you know? A whole bunch of them - ten of them - got a plane and came over when we played Whitby last year.
We did one gig in Germany, the venue had a lot to do with it, it was this massive big monument and it was circular. We opened with a vocal piece and then bagpipes came in, really really soft and gentle at the beginning. There was a little glass dome at the very top of the monument and just as I started singing the sun came through this dome and put a ray of light where I was stood, it was fucking angelic! And this girl who was in one of the other bands, the cellist with Backworld, she came back afterwards and said when the ray of light came through her eyes just filled. If somebody tells you that you can make them cry it's really touching. You're touching people then.
The thing that separates good music from bad whatever the genre is a thing Mick Jones from The Clash said. He said he was sick of seeing all these big bands doing enormous gigs that just took your money and put you in a field while they played and at the end of it you were exactly the same but older and poorer. They just take your money and time, they don't GIVE you anything. He said he wanted to be in a band that gives more than it takes, something that move people, make them feel different at the end than they were at the start. That power to affect is the thing that separates all good music from the bad. Whether you're listening to Dead Can Dance or Nirvana, they both pass that test.
I totally agree with you. Music is there to move you, it's there to play with your emotions. Even when I was growing up the stuff I was drawn to was the stuff I could FEEL, it's the passion in music - whether it's tragic or beautiful or whatever - it's that passion in music that makes music so powerful, which gives music the power over you as a human being.
I remember I just love Jah Wobble's bass playing cos it used to thud you right in the gut, right in the solar plexus. Some people's music just has that. This Is The Day by The The, that accordion part, god, I used to play that over and over on my walkman all the time. Whenever I was feeling shit or depressed I'd put that on and I'd go [sings melody] I just loved it so much. I got an accordion, I needed to play that melody! There are just some things so brilliant that will stay with you forever.
This is why people still want to talk to you about Strawberry Switchblade or why people still listen to the Mary Chain, when nobody wants to interview a contemporary like Nick Kamen about his records. It's the difference between who means it and who doesn't.
People keep asking me to release this demo I did just after Switchblade split up, the Sunflower Demos. A lot of the songs are like the Switchblade album, and some of them aren't quite so 80s sounding. I thought, 'I don't want to release it, I sound like a chipmunk,' and then I just thought OK, so I'm going to release it quite soon. It's ready to go out, I've just got to do the artwork for it, and that'll be stuff that I was working on that might have been on the second Strawberry Switchblade album. Loads of people have been writing to the website saying they've heard about it and want to hear it, I've been nagged so much by lots of people to release it, so I'm going to put it out.