Rose McDowall interview
29 Jan 02
We've talked about how much control you had over choice of producer. How much control did you have while the album was being made?
We could say yes and no to things. If we really didn't like something we did have the power of veto. But also, there were so many bloody cooks in the kitchen, d'you know what I mean? At first there was just me, Jill and David Motion, but then Balfe would come along and put his tuppence worth in and Drummond, and then the head of the company. But we did have a lot of control over it in the end actually, about how it was mixed and stuff like that, but if you're having control over something you're not a hundred percent in love with it doesn't mean as much.
The one thing I don't like about that is that the guitars are hardly audible at all. There are guitars on that album believe it or not, but they were mixed so low cos David Motion doesn't like guitars, so low that Jill and I were almost mixed out of the album, apart from vocally. Not all, there are obvious bits where our presence is there, but I think that I would've done things a wee bit different. But it was that 'just give it a chance, give it a chance,' and then the album's finished and you're listening to it, and then what do you say? 'I hate it, we've spent £250,000 and I want to do it again'? We'd just been round all these different studios and that would have really fucked them off.
I was objecting to some of the stuff we were doing, right at the beginning of the recording sessions, thinking, 'hmm I don't think I like the way this is going', and it was all 'keep trying, give it a chance'; acquire a taste for it, basically.
For your own record!
Exactly! And I was 'hmm, I still don't like it', and at the end of the day there were so many layers of things on. There were a lot of things I DID like about it, but, you know. But if I'd been recording it myself it would've been very different. I've a recording studio through there now, so what I do, I do it myself so I've got complete control. And that's the way it should be really. I mean, if you write a song you should see it through to the end.
OK, once it's on vinyl or CD it belongs to whoever buys it, that's my opinion anyway. Send your baby off out into the world and people will listen to it and get what they get from it or not, but you've done your bit then and you're happy with it when you send it out, and it's a much better feeling than not being happy with it when you send it out, or being doubtful.
It was so confusing, everything was going so fast, we were off doing this, off doing that, then back recording something else. It was kinda hard to be focussed on 'DO I like this or not?', do you know what I mean? It was really confusing. A lot of pushing and shoving was going on and I think Jill and I were wiped out by the workload we were doing. Especially when we were doing crap stuff, spending the whole bloody day doing a photo session, it was the most boring thing in the world. I didn't mind interviews so much but I hated photo sessions.
How did Jill's agoraphobia affect having to travel and go out to do gigs and interviews and stuff?
Some times it was worse than others. I mean, there were times where the tour van was sat outside and she would not come out of the house, and there'd be all sorts of bribes but she just couldn't get out of the house. Eventually we'd get her into the van.
She'd had valium given to her from the doctor once when we were going to Japan, and she had a fit in the airport. She just started screaming and saying 'I'm not getting on the plane'. She didn't like planes anyway, that's a whole part of the agoraphobia as well. 'It's unnatural for something that big and heavy to fly, I'm not getting on it'! So I ended up getting on the plane myself, off to Japan the first time. Well, I wasn't by myself, David Balfe the manager was there and our translator from the record company was there. Jill was left at the airport. We were supposed to be doing gigs as well.
The record company had to buy her boyfriend a ticket cos she could travel with him sometimes. He got a ticket and they flew over the next day or the day after that. But I had to deal with the press stuff and it was just madness, I was so exhausted, it was so mad and I couldn't wait till she got there, cos it's better when there's the two of you.
It affected quite a lot of things quite a lot of times. Sometimes I'd have to go down to London on my own to do meetings with the record company or do auditions and stuff like that which I really didn't enjoy doing. I don't like saying to somebody 'you're not what I'm looking for,' especially when they're well respected in a circle of musicians. It was things like that that were really difficult.
We were going to do the second album - or we were talking about doing the second album - with Ryuichi Sakamoto. We had the big meeting in Japan with him and he was really up for doing it but we had to go to Japan to do it and stay in Japan for two months, and Jill wouldn't do it. She wasn't having any of it, 'can he not come here?'. David Balfe was a massive fan of his and he was like, 'can you sign this album?' ! But Jill couldn't go to Japan and stay there. So that was a hindrance. We couldn't play New York, we couldn't play Hong Kong, cos we had gigs in places like that. We were supposed to go to New York on bloody Concorde and come back on the QE2! I was, 'oh wow, that'd be so fantastic!', but Jill would say 'I can't go'.
And then there was supposed to be some big opening or something in Japan and we were supposed to go to that, and we couldn't do it. I would have gone myself cos one of us is better than none of us, but at that point there was a wee bit of ego shit going on in the band, so it wasn't gonna happen.
It kinda steadily got worse, the agoraphobia, because we were being asked to do more things and go further afield. Someone said to Jill once - the guy who supposed to be doing the sound on tour, the road manager - he said 'I think you're in the wrong profession if you're agoraphobic,' and she got really really upset and her boyfriend got really upset with this guy and there was a massive big row. The guy punched Jill's boyfriend on the nose.
How was everyone else about it, how tolerant were people?
I think most people were really pretty tolerant, actually. She'd always had agoraphobia as long as I'd known her. It's a horrible condition to have, when she was panicking she was REALLY scared. It's not like 'I don't want to do this,' she was really really scared, scared for her life, that kind of fear. And I know what that feels like from a different kind of angle, being scared for your life - I've felt that before but not through agoraphobia. Most people were pretty tolerant I think. Her boyfriend was really good cos he'd go places with her.
At the end she was seeing hypnotists and stuff, we'd tried everything, the record company had tried. She'd meditation tapes and all sorts of stuff, and she went to group therapy where people had all sorts of different phobias. And sometimes she would get better. It was completely unpredictable, that was the worst thing about it, it was so completely unpredictable. If it was like PMT and you knew it was coming then you could avoid it!
From my point of view it would be really disappointing. I was really disappointed we couldn't go to Hong Kong, but I completely understood why. And maybe we could do it later. And New York, I really wanted to play New York but, well, we've hundreds of other things to do. But I did want to go on the QE2 and Concorde!
Surely you must've been aware at the time that that kind of opportunity isn't going to be there forever?
I know, I know, exactly. But it [agoraphobia] had always been there, so we'd lived with it from the beginning. But there were real opportunities missed, like going to Japan for two months and doing the album with Ryuichi Sakamoto, which would've been really interesting. We had a really funny time when we all went out to dinner with him and we were chatting about it with him. We were all talking about different things around the table and that end of the table was talking about food, this end of the table was talking about something else. That end of the table started talking about dogs that were popular in Japan as pets and I turned to Ryuichi Sakamoto and said 'do you eat dogs?' and David Balfe just looked at me and went completely bright red, cos he was the Big Fan.
I was always saying inappropriate things to people, not deliberately but things would slip out. Like we were at the Rock and Pop Awards and all the big guys in the business were there and I'd go 'I'm just off to the toilet to touch myself up'. I was only talking about my make-up, but everyone was chins dropped to their chests. [laughs] I'd go 'oh!', realising what I'd just said. I used to do stuff like that all the time.
So, Balfe was like, 'there she goes again! You've completely humiliated us now!'. But the Japanese eat dogs anyway. It's no big deal.
I didn't realise the second album had got as far as sorting out a producer.
Oh yeah, yeah definitely. He [Sakamoto] looked like the one we were going to go with. Balfe REALLY wanted to go with him.
How close did it get to starting?
We split up quite soon before. We were supposed to go back to Japan really soon and do a tour there, a couple of months or something like that. We had songs ready, the next single was going to be Cut With A Cake Knife. We had a whole year or two's plans ahead of us.
We were working with [video director] Tim Pope. That was one of the major upsets for me. I loved his videos and I just thought Tim Pope and us were a perfect combination, we had good fun working together. We talked to other video directors and they came up with the naffest ideas like Jill sitting on a bed with a box of chocolates and real girly sexist shit, real crap, no sense of art or anything, just boring video.
Then the Jolene one came up and we talked to Tim Pope about it. With Tim Pope we put ideas together, jumbled them up and came out with something good. But we went with this other company - well we were forced into it basically; 'just try it', famous last words. So we did this video with somebody else, because if we do THIS then the record company will let us do THAT, something we want to do that they didn't want to do. It was like that all the time. We shouldn't be in that situation, we should be calling the shots because this is our art form, it's what we DO. Then we did the video and I loved bits of it but a lot of the best bits they didn't put in cos they thought they were too risqué for 1985.
What sort of stuff?
I don't know if you saw the Jolene video. You know the cage bit? There's a bit where I'm dancing in a catsuit, a full-body catsuit with hands and feet and everything. I was dancing in a cage with flowers. There was a camera on rails, and I had shackles and handcuffs on and chains, and I was following the camera; it was really pretty fetish actually. And they just cut out all the best bits that I thought were really really good and that said 'this is Strawberry Switchblade'. We have people who like that side of us as well, it's not just people who just like Strawberries; some people like the Switchblade.
They cut out all the bits that would make people's heads turn round and make them stop saying 'they're twee'. THIS is how we get out of that, it's not by turning into someone who looks like she should be singing in the West End or on Dallas or something like that. This is how we get out of people calling us twee, just by letting us be who we are, because we're not twee. Just let us express ourselves completely. But that wasn't going to happen.
Also there was this dance scene that was supposed to be shot in a club, the cage was in a club. I thought, if we're gonna have all of these extras let's get all our friends. Actually I don't think Jill wanted to get her friends, because I think she thought some of my friends were too weird. We ended up getting all these extras who looked like a bunch of wankers. It was so cheesy, a bad cheesy eighties club thing with guys dancing about in tights.
Jolene's a fairly cheesy song to have done though, isn't it? What was the idea?
It was Bill Drummond. Loved the song, loved Dolly Parton, thought 'you have to do this song'. And that was another thing - we should have gone for the Marianne Faithfull one when they wanted us to do that. They wanted us to do a cover.
Which Marianne Faithfull song?
The Marianne Faithfull one was put to us much earlier on, it was As Tears Go By, which is a beautiful song and I love it. I actually have done a version with Dave Ball which was not released, but we did a version of it. Rob Dickins loved that song and wanted us to do a version, but we at that point didn't want to do a cover. It was too early in our career to do a cover song. I think it was just after Since Yesterday or something like that, so we didn't want to do a cover that soon cos then we're going to get into the covers thing, and we want to our own songs, so we bluntly refused that.
But then after a couple of other singles the Jolene thing came up and that was one of those 'you do this for me I'll do that for you' things. Things were all falling apart by that time, we couldn't use the video director we wanted. I actually liked the song Jolene and I liked Dolly Parton, but it was still a trade-off and I was anti it purely on the principle that it was a trade-off. They wanted it to be a club thing and I wasn't into that scene at all. I didn't care if the records got played in clubs. We're not releasing records to be played in clubs, we're releasing records cos we're musicians and that's what we do. They wanted to do it cos it would make more money and blah blah blah.
So that's when it started falling apart basically. That whole Jolene era was too many compromises and not enough comebacks.
Did both you and Jill feel like there were too many compromises?
Yeah, I think so.