Rose McDowall interview
29 Jan 02
It was also when you were coming apart as a team as well.
A lot of that was because I really felt really pressured. I mean, I'd come home at the end of the day and out of pure exhaustion of arguing a point with the record company, I'd just burst into tears.
I was SO frustrated and angry cos I always made sure we had group meetings every Friday and made sure we talked about whatever we thought was the right thing to do. And Jill and I would sit down and agree on everything, we'd agree we have to tell Rob Dickins and we have to tell the record company what we don't want to do. But then we'd get in there and Jill would be too shy to say it, and she'd also be too shy to say 'I agree with Rose,' even though we'd said it at home. So I felt like I was bashing my head off a brick wall all the time, cos I was like the baddie going in going 'no no no no,' looking for back-up and it wasn't there. Jill would've probably just gone with it, rather than face the conflict.
I couldn't stand it any more. I couldn't stand always being at a battle, and actually knowing that Jill WAS on my side - on OUR side - but not being able to say something. Sometimes her boyfriend would say something on her behalf, but the record company really didn't like that. It was hard work - I was having to push our point of view but they were saying it was my point of view cos they could probably get Jill to agree if they pushed hard enough, and I was the troublemaker.
I said 'if I can't use Tim Pope it's the beginning of the end for me,' and Tim Pope was saying 'don't do that on my behalf'. I said, 'I wasn't, I was doing it on OUR behalf. We started out this band. Why fix something if it's not broken? We're really happy the way things are and we're not just standing up for you, we're standing up for OURSELVES, it's cos WE like this arrangement'.
The record company were just getting the better of us more often than not. I thought, this is not why I wanted to be in a band, to be stressed and go home at the end of the day feeling that bad, to sit down and burst into tears and think 'shit, I hate this, I can't stand it and I'm going to have to do it all again tomorrow'. I started being really really short with people, being really blunt and telling them exactly what I thought.
I said to Jill, 'if it's going to continue like this I don't want it to continue at all'. It was one of the Friday group meetings, she came downstairs and I said I'm really not happy with the way things are going and if we can't change it, if it's not going to change then I'd rather we split up, I'd rather we just didn't do it any more cos it's not what we wanted to do. She just said that she agreed, or something like that.
It could've been easier you know, we didn't HAVE to break up, we could've sorted it out somehow but there just wasn't the... I don't know. Also we'd just sacked our manager as well, we sacked David Balfe because we didn't trust him because he was manipulating one of us off the other. That's why I always had the Friday group meetings cos when we were a four piece we had the meetings in front of our manager, so that everything was said in front of everybody and nobody could be grouping off into little groups. Cos Balfey's gonna talk to me and say things how he knows Rose likes to hear things, he's gonna say it to Jill how he knows Jill likes to hear things, and I'd say let's get together and hear how we all like to hear things.
It's amazing, talking to Jill and Julian Cope and other people who have known and worked with Balfe, everybody has got specific stories about him that STILL make their hackles rise.
It's funny, Jill started going out with Balfey for a while as well. She had this little sneaky affair with him at one point. I think she really liked him actually. But that all fell apart. That was another thing, 'what's going on there?'. I'd have thought it was funny, except that David Balfe had this girlfriend at Warner Brothers and they'd just bought a place together and she was working for us at the record company. It was really close to the edge, she could really fuck things up for us inside if she found out about that. She was a really nice girl and both Jill and I liked her.
Balfey told all his friends in Madness that he'd had both of us, they had that really male crap. I got really angry with him for that, just a male chauvinist idiot. Once, we'd just come off stage at a TV show and as we got into the elevator he slapped or pinched my backside in front of all the audience. I was so fucking furious that I turned round and slapped him really hard across the face. I said, if you ever do that again Drew will slap you even harder. He said he was sorry and he knew not to go there again. It was so patronising cos we were young girls. It's like, fuck off, I don't care how friendly you are and how much I like you, you do not humiliate me in front of all those people.
He wouldn't do an equivalent thing for a male artist, it is blatantly sexist.
It is completely. More than anything, it was patronising and humiliating in front of the people who were behind us. I was so angry with him for that, he never did do it again. And there were money things that I didn't trust him about.
That's the favourite subject with everyone who says things about him.
Is it? He claims I owe HIM money cos I didn't pay rent at this flat. Which is true, for the last little bit I did owe him £500, but when we went to Japan and we worked out all the money - we were doing gigs and getting paid quite well - and we were going to make a certain amount of money, and that was going to go on the lighting and whatever we were going to take over, and in the end there'd be a certain amount of profit. And the profit never showed up anywhere.
This was just when we were splitting up, we were asking, where's all the money from the Japan thing? I started really getting interested in the money then. Before that we'd just give ourselves a wage and let the accountant deal with it. In the beginning I didn't realise that when you go on TV you get paid for it. I didn't know that, I really didn't. So all those times we went on TV, which was hundreds of times, we were getting paid for it. So hang on, we should have money. And after the Japan thing, where's the money?
Money definitely went missing. Or it was spent on something we didn't agree on. It was in our contract that if Balfey was going to come on tour with us, even as our manager, he had to pay his air fare out of his 20%. I stipulated that right at the beginning, and it was agreed on. I don't know if it ever happened though. We were so busy that we couldn't keep our eyes on everything.
Balfey would always be edgy ringing me up, cos he could never predict what I was going to say about any specific thing he put forward about the band. He said to Drew that it fucked with his head cos he never knew which angle to come at with me.
Imagine him being so scheming he's got think about his angle to come at, rather than talk about something and just see what you think.
Exactly. He'd say something to Jill in one way and say it to me in another way. If he thought I was going to object to something he'd fluff it all up, but I'm not stupid; I know Balfe and I'd know what he was doing so it didn't work.
Once he'd got all these badges done with photographs that I really didn't like and - this is really trivial, it was really petty of me to do this - but I said I'm not going out of the door, I'm not doing the gigs unless you bring the box of badges back. I wouldn't have made such a fuss but I'd said to him before that I don't want to use that picture, I really don't want to use it. Balfe came out with some thing about how they just came back like that and he'd told them I didn't want it with that picture. I said well, we don't use them then. He said we have to now we've got them, I said if you want to use those badges you take them on tour and not me. It was because I knew he had no intentions of ever listening to me when I said I didn't want those badges done.
It's like with the record company saying what to wear, the people around you being unclear about whose band it is, and whose band it isn't.
And sometimes you have to do really stupid petty things like that.
It's not like there's only one picture of you available, so for someone outside to be deciding what picture to use irrespective of what the artist thinks, THAT'S where the pettiness kicks in, and you have to play on that level to get it stopped.
I know. And it got so stupid. I didn't want those little stupid catfights, it was a waste of time, it was a waste of mental energy, it was just not worth it. So I ended up thinking I don't want this any more. It ceased to be fun, it ceased to be what it was supposed to be. And god knows where it would've gone had we continued.
Jill says that before it came apart you were writing totally separately and bringing completed songs to each other, that the writing collaboration had stopped.
That did start to happen a wee bit but it didn't happen completely cos we did actually still do a couple of songs together. We did do things separately, then Jill wanted to sing on the ones she'd written and it was splitting it into two singers now. Well, there was always two singers cos we always both did harmonies and stuff like that. But we did start to write separately, that's because we were communicating less and less.
What caused that?
I don't know what caused it, it just kinda happened. I don't think it was a deliberate thing, I really don't. I can't remember there being any point where one of us decided to do that.
I think actually Jill wanted to sing and she wanted to sing Who Knows What Love Is? and the record company thought if it was going to be released as a single then I should sing it, although she had sung it live. It always reminded me of that band where one guy would start singing and then the other would come in. Was it Tears For Fears?
I don't know; fortunately my Tears for Fears trivia isn't that extensive.
I only know of them cos they were on the same management company as us. Anyway, it just got a bit like that.
It has worked well for some people, like the Clash, or The Beatles.
We did start to write stuff separately, which is why I've got demos of songs that would've been on the second album. I think it was also because we were really really busy and there was less writing time. Time at home was more precious. We did still write together but we did start fighting a lot then as well though, we did have a lot of petty wee stupid little arguments over who was singing what harmony, really daft things.
Actually, very embarrassingly, we were in the studio once and we had a massive fight about who was going to sing a harmony of one bloody note and it was sooo embarrassing, cos there were tears. It was with this producer, the one who didn't like women [Jolene session, produced by Clive Langer & Colin Fairley] and what do we do? We go in and react like a pair of daft women!
I was going, basically we do what's best for the song and if it's part of the lead line then that's where it goes so I'll sing it. But then Jill's saying 'I want to sing it, I sing the harmony lines and I'll sing these ones,' or 'I'm not singing enough', then it got a bit 'you can't play on the thing cos I'm the lead guitarist'.
Like on Deep Water there's the guitar bit 'di-di-di-di-di-di-di-di di di-do', - that was probably the first song I wrote actually - I wrote that little lead line, and things like that became problems when Jill was 'the lead guitarist' and I shouldn't be doing the lead lines cos that's treading on her territory and it got a bit daft like that. Her boyfriend used to say, 'you're letting Rose do too much,' stuff like that. The reason was that Jill was actually ill, she was agoraphobic and quite often couldn't do the meetings or whatever. There was a legitimate reason why I was doing more, why I was travelling to London while she stayed in Glasgow, because she COULDN'T, so it was a necessity.
But then at the end, well, my ex blamed her ex for mixing things and making her feel insecure. I don't know if it's true. But stuff like that was happening, and we just got to the stage where we started to argue with each other about who was doing what and I didn't want her to sing for the band, basically.
How we do it, it works well, we do harmonies and stuff and it's good. And I don't mind that there's a couple of songs that Jill always sang and I did harmonies and I did the lead line on the guitar in some sessions and we kinda swapped roles around a wee bit, which was really good fun cos then you got to do the other side and I quite enjoyed that, I like little toppy lead lines. But then when we did start writing songs separately it was 'I wrote it so I want to sing it,' and it was splitting down the middle anyway, right at the very end. That was the very very end and we were falling apart then anyway cos there was all this stuff that was...