Rose McDowall interview
29 Jan 02
Jill says your social lives had become very different.
They had.
She said you were off with Genesis P-Orridge while she was at home with the cat.
She was a bit freaked out by a lot of the people that I was hanging out with.
She said you bought Nazi memorabilia and that really freaked her out.
She said that I bought Nazi memorabilia?
What's the story with that?
I had a Hitler Youth dagger. Somebody bought me a Hitler Youth dagger for my birthday. I've collected weapons since I was really young, starting pistols, ornamental swords and things. I had a crossbow, a slingshots, nunchakas, and stuff for martial arts, butterfly knives. I practised with those things so I had them on that level.
Somebody bought me a Hitler Youth dagger as a ritual dagger, because I was into magic, which Jill was also freaked out by. I've always been into it, since I was a kid I've been into stuff like that.
I was always interested in the supernatural from when I was really really young, cos weird things used to happen, and continued when I was older. Like I set a tape on fire, mentally, because I didn't like a song that we were recording. We were doing this song and I really didn't like the beginning of it, but everybody else thought I was wrong. I thought, the first note's out of tune, I know it's out of tune. I was waiting for the head of the record company to come in and say yeah, it's out of tune. and he came in and said, well done girls it's in the bag.
What song was this?
It was Let Her Go. I thought the first note is REALLY out of tune and I was staring at the tape machine and it started to smoke and it went on fire. Even though I saw it I didn't tell anyone until it was really obvious and they could smell it.
I used to do stuff like that. It started to scare ME actually! I stopped being really into magic when I had my son Bobby, because if bad spirits come in they'll just go for the weakest easiest person to possess. So I stopped being really into it then, because I was bringing spirits into the house.
Jill said it got a lot darker round the time the band split.
What do you mean 'IT got darker'?
Your involvement in magic.
Well, I was always into magic, but I just got into it more, just started practicing it much much more, proper rituals and stuff like that. I did get into it quite heavily really. It was fine for a while, and then I decided not to do it any more cos there were some bad repercussions coming back. When I got pregnant I thought it was not a good thing to do, I had some mishaps, magically. I thought, I can't bring this on two little unsuspecting creatures. I still did tarot and crystal gazing and stuff like that, and I'm still into palmistry and everything.
My great-grandmother was a Romany gypsy so I've always been into stuff like that. I always had tarot cards when I was in Switchblade and crystal balls and runes and everything like that. Me and Jill fell out over that cos she didn't like it cos she thought it was black magic, which it wasn't. She didn't understand what it was, really. I was doing magic to fulfil myself and to better myself, to become wiser about certain things. I was doing it to enrich my life and to become more knowledgeable about things. I was not cursing people or anything!
That's the stereotypical thing you get, not just magic but anything remotely pagan, that it must be dark and dreadful and full of human sacrifices.
I'd class myself as pagan, certainly. Really I'm just into the earth and everything around me and all the natural things which ARE pagan, the things from before Christians came along and swept it all under the...yew trees! You know, which they pretended came AFTER the churches when the yew trees were there BEFORE the churches, they built churches beside the sacred trees and people forgot the trees were there first.
It's not just the sacred trees, there are loads of churches built next to standing stones. Churches were originally built inside the sacred stone circles and the spaces between stones was walled in. Even now there's still a load of churches with standing stones in their walls. This not only gave rise to the tradition of circular churchyards, but the very word 'church' comes from the nordic 'kirk', the same root as 'circ' in 'circle'. Their assimilation of pagan sacred places even pinched the name! To replace paganism they had to demonise it, so loads of old standing stones and wells are called things like 'the Devil's Stones' or 'the Devil's Well', and anyone into pagan ideas and magic is a spooky and dangerous.
There's a well in the east of England - I can't remember exactly where now - not so long ago they found deep in the well all these runes and stuff, all about the Mother and a pagan goddess, whose name is very similar to another goddess. They just changed it very slightly, just to confuse. After a couple of generations, the real meaning of the word's forgotten and people accept the new one cos that's all they hear. And because back then people weren't that educated, not everybody could read so it was very easy to manipulate people in that way.
With modern historical research it's easier to see where religious beliefs have come from, but before all the research had been done and published, you could just take a goddess name and put the word 'saint' in front of it, and a few generations later it's believed to have always been christian.
That whole thing did fascinate me, and that was a part of the magic I was into. It was discovering who I was and why I was.
Also, I did do things to contact people, like my friend who'd killed herself. Her ghost did come to me, her spirit came to me on a few occasions quite close after he had died. I saw things, I conjured things. I was just completely open to all of that and welcomed it into my life, but then it got a wee bit out of control at one point and I was getting a wee bit too obsessed with it all. I was completely like, with runes like The Dice Man or something! It was like, Rose! You don't have to ask the runes if you can have this bar of chocolate! You can decide that yourself!
It wasn't quite that bad, but it got so I never went anywhere without my runes or my tarot cards or something. It was just like my whole life was a wee bag of magic somewhere. I'd disappear off into the woods at night time when everybody was sleeping in a gypsy dress with my crystal ball.
There was this little wood up in Muswell Hill and it'd be poring with rain one night and I'd just run into the wood with nothing on but a T shirt and a pair of knickers and just stay there until the morning. And then I'd go on the bus that the commuters were on, and my hair would be all full of leaves and stuff and my legs would be all scratched up cos I'd been running through the brambles! I just completely completely wanted to be in the woods. I had a really good time at that point in my life. But then after my friend died I got really depressed, really quite manically depressed, I wasn't very well for a while. Which is what made me decide to leave London, it was getting too much.
The reason I used to function much better at the night time - I used to write at night time, used to go out in the woods at night time, do a lot of things at night time - was because everyone was asleep and all those negative vibes weren't there, so that whole buzz that IS London was kind of less of a buzz at night time. I felt much better for it, the buzz was really starting to bug me.
I'd started to distance myself from people, and that was a lot to do with Strawberry Switchblade. When we went to Japan and we'd get mobbed and stuff like that, and then I really started to resent people coming too close to me, just expecting that they could, invading your privacy like that, like you're public property.
I actually now - Jill's got agoraphobia - I've got people-phobia. I actually do. Sometimes I have a panic attack if I'm in a place with too many people, especially if they're all moving in the same direction. Like the Underground, people get off the train and it's really mobbed and they're all moving in the same direction, I will just automatically turn round and go the other way, because it just freaks me out going in that sea of people, I know they're not...going where I'm going and I don't want to go where they're going, I have to just go the other way.
I think it was a thing about when I was a kid, going against the grain, being different from other people, being into things other people weren't into and they'd call you a weirdo for being into. I think it was just a physical way of that coming out when I felt panicky with all these people, all this dead energy and I just had to get out of there. I had to get out of London. I just think it's much nicer out here where you can see the birds, it's much better medicine.
I was diagnosed with manic depression and that was after Kelvin as well - anybody'd be depressed after him - I just thought I had to get out of London, it wasn't a good place for me to be at that time, because I was a wee bit self-destructive as well.
In what way?
Well, I went through this whole phase of challenging fate, doing dangerous things and challenging fate. We were supposed to go to Switzerland one day and I was in the woods at Hampstead. Just a couple of friends who were doing a ritual and stuff like that, and I climbed up this tree. I was taking something off all the way up the tree. Then I fell out of the tree and I broke three ribs. I thought I was going to die cos I looked down and my chest was just black; it was dark and I thought 'oh my god, my heart's falling out cos it's all opened,' but it was mostly just green stuff off the tree. I had scratches, a couple deep enough to scar, but not terrible. But I was in so much pain cos I'd broken three ribs. The ribs snapped and a splinter came out and it was right beside my spleen. They were worried they were going to rupture my spleen. And anyway, I couldn't go to Switzerland the next day, so that was like a magical thing that came in and interfered with Strawberry Switchblade I guess. After falling out of the tree I was in bed for two months cos I just couldn't do anything.
Even laughing's off the cards when you've done your ribs in.
Exactly! My ex-husband was on tour with Psychic TV and I'd just fallen out with Genesis P-Orridge not very long before that and he punched Genesis P-Orridge! He was driving for them and Gen was slagging me off or something and Drew just stopped, turned round and punched Gen right in the nose. He comes up with this and I'm saying 'don't tell me! Don't tell me' cos I couldn't stop laughing!
But I did go through a really bad phase of being depressed and dicing with danger. Like, running into the ocean when it was really really dark every time I went to Brighton, which was a lot. This is all the late 80s really, long after Strawberry Switchblade had split up. I was just being self-destructive, I would cut myself to see if I would bleed to death or if fate would win. I would do really mad stuff like that cos I was really fucked up cos when my friend killed himself I really thought it was my fault, blamed myself for it. Although it wasn't my fault, he jumped in front of a train, and he always said he was going to die when he was 23. But I said I'd visit him that night and I didn't. I didn't cope with death very well cos of what happened to my wee brother.
I started getting into magic again - well I was still into it - but I'd do ritual magic where I would cut myself at a point in the ritual to energise it and sacrifice some of yourself. In order to gain something you have to give, basically, and I was cutting myself a wee bit too deep sometimes, deliberately, just to see what would happen, cos I just didn't really care what happened. That was a pretty negative part of my life, which was when London was doing my head in. I just thought, 'this city is going to swallow me up, I'm going to have to get out of it'. It was a mad time.
It's really difficult to ask you about this stuff. It's so easy to seem sensationalist or prying. I'm really glad there's nobody who wants to look back over twenty years of MY life and get me to talk about all of it, all the bits I'm really glad to have left behind. Coming back to the Strawberry Switchblade era, the magic was something Jill talked about and said it was a factor around your splitting up. I get the impression she didn't ask to much though, she didn't try to understand it.
Understand what?
What you were doing magically.
Oh no, she didn't. She wouldn't ask about it, she never mentioned anything except that she didn't like it and it was scary. She didn't like a lot of the people around the time I was friends with Gen, she didn't like a lot of those people, she thought they were freaks and weirdos, she thought they were all evil really. I still hang about with a lot of those people, like David Tibet and there's nothing evil about him. In fact, he's a Christian now, weirdly.
She didn't really know any of them, she just knew they were kind of... dark, and into things that were not to her liking. They were absolutely fine by me, I thought they were all very interesting, I was interested in those things anyway. I enjoyed meeting and talking to these people and seeing their points of view on things and putting my tuppence worth in and having good conversations.