“We weren’t trying to change anything. We were just joining in.”
It’s hard to think of a more niche parody song than the one which received its first airing on John Peel’s Radio 1 show on a June evening in 1985. But for those of us who got the reference, Sharon Signs To Cherry Red by The Kamikaze Pilots was almost uncomfortably uncanny. With its bedroom production and accompaniment of tentatively strummed guitar, there was surely only one label that could have put out a record like this. The label that gave us the wistful confessions of Tracey Thorn’s A Distant Shore and the seaside stillness of Jane’s It’s A Fine Day had, by the mid-80s, become synonymous with a weedy strain of indie teen-angst. “We talked and talked for hours and hours as we stood on the garden path,” sang the protagonist of Sharon Signs To Cherry Red, “I promised to show you my poetry/And you promised not to laugh/I didn’t see you for two whole days/And I wished that I was dead/So I put my songs on a blank cassette/And sent them to Cherry Red.”
It was funny because it seemed to be true. There were hundreds of Sharons up and down the country who, ten years previously, wouldn’t have seriously countenanced the prospect of alchemising their teenage poetry into a record. Spread across two CDs which came out last year and now a limited vinyl release, a Cherry Red anthology named after that song is the most extensive attempt to document that phenomenon. Most of the artists here failed to trouble the public consciousness. Most of them didn’t seem concerned with playing that game. Certainly not Etta Saunders, whose group The Avocados could only maintain a stable enough line-up to lay down the lovelorn what-ifs of I Never Knew; or Grab Grab The Haddock’s dewy dissection of discord, Nothing You Say. Then, of course, you had Trixie’s Big Red Motorbike whose magnificent A Splash Of Red remains the go-to record for anyone seeking to prove the truism about necessity and invention. Melanie Litten recorded her vocals for the song in her brother Mark’s Isle Of Wight bedroom. Only 100 copies were pressed. The bass drum you can hear alongside Mark’s choppy funk guitar is a mattress forcefully thumped with a piece of wood. It’s hard to imagine more salubrious circumstances yielding a better results.
By grouping all these songs together, Sharon Signs To Cherry Red offers a different version of the history of independent music — and, in doing so, highlights the degree to which the anti-rock, anti-virtuosity aesthetic of indiepop was shaped by the sudden involvement of female musicians. For Jill Bryson of Strawberry Switchblade, represented here by the pensive Seaside (Go Away), the idea of recording and releasing, even a few years previously, was barely more plausible than that of becoming an astronaut: “You grew up struggling to imagine what it would really mean to be a woman in a band, because there quite simply weren’t any role models. The only sort of girl band I was aware of was The Runaways — and that was just some guy’s idea of a girl band rather than an actual girl band.” Gina Hartman, who played alongside Alice Fox, Jane Fox and Tracey Thorn in Marine Girls, recalls an “altogether different energy” being put out by Britain’s foremost all-female punk bands The Slits and The Raincoats. “Even though they were on proper labels, they sounded like they were finding their feet as they were going along. That totally opened it up to us, because it didn’t seem to be something that boys did.”
What the boys had been doing prior to that point was summed up by Gina Birch of The Raincoats in an interview with Greil Marcus. “The basic theme in rock’n’roll is what goes on between men and women,” she told him, “And it’s based on the exclusion of women and the ghettoisation of blacks. Which is why we want to put a bit of distance between what we do and the rock’n’roll tradition.” If subsequent indie bands — at least not until the advent of Riot Grrrl — didn’t necessarily observe such an explicit agenda, they could at least register that The Raincoats’ truth was startlingly different from the truths expressed in 99 per cent of other love songs. As Simon Reynolds and Joy Press wrote in their 1996 book The Sex Revolts, “The Raincoats pulled the rug from under rock’s heroic postures by dealing with banal, unromantic domains of female experience, like motherhood (Baby Song) or being followed by a stalker (Life on the Line). Shouting Out Loud, the opening song on [1981’s] Odyshape, defines a woman as ‘a man with fears’.”
It really is hard to overestimate the importance of these records. Along with Young Marble Giants — whose shy rainy-afternoon musings would disperse their DNA into records by groups as disparate as Stereolab and The xx — The Raincoats and The Slits formed an ad hoc holy trinity that seemed to inform the spirit of independent music throughout and beyond the ensuing decade. If a fourth band deserves to be added to that list, it surely has to be the scandalously overlooked Dolly Mixture. In their way, the trio who formed in 1977 while still at school in Cambridge were every bit as radical and forward-looking as their more celebrated peers, taking pure pop influences that were regarded as terminally uncool by the music press and assembling their look from jumble sales a good two years before even the likes of Orange Juice and Josef K were doing it.
More importantly, their songs were astonishingly good. Will He Kiss Me Goodnight? sounds like The Ronettes seizing the means of control and coming up with something just as good and truer to life than any Brill Building A-lister could have provided. Looking for a song to get her career back on track, former child star Lena Zavaroni even covered it. “I guess I provided the title for that one,” remembers bassist and singer Debsey Wykes, now with Saint Etienne. We were rehearsing and I was due to go on a date that evening. I said to them, ‘I wonder if he’ll kiss me tonight’. While I was out, they wrote that song.”
“Dolly Mixture were a good example of a band that did everything with the purest of intentions, but still incurred a certain amount of suspicion,” says Michael Robson, who conceived and compiled the Sharon Signs To Cherry Red CD, “Some of that suspicion came from papers like NME and Melody Maker — but it also came from other bands. I thought it was a shame, because what I liked about them was a sort of lyrical authenticity. It was like overhearing conversations between girls you knew at school. They could never have come from a male perspective.”
The problem that faced so many female indie acts seeking to make the transition from indie hobbyists to fully-fledged recording artists was that, without a sympathetic major label, they didn’t stand a chance. Chrysalis signed Dolly Mixture in 1980 and made them record a version of The Shirelles’ Baby It’s You as their debut single. When they appeared on Top Of The Pops two years later, singing backing vocals on Happy Talk by their friend and fan Captain Sensible, it was a pyrrhic victory. If the term “breakout star” existed back then, you would have probably applied it, in this instance, to Tracey Thorn, who formed Everything But The Girl with Ben Watt and took a more sophisticated sound into the top 30 with Each and Every One.
Watching Thorn and Watt achieve some success on a Warners imprint, Strawberry Switchblade clearly felt emboldened enough to follow suit. In January 1985, they eclipsed the success of their Glasgow chums Orange Juice and Aztec Camera with an actual top five hit Since Yesterday. But even before the record even hit the shops, Bryson remembers the entire adventure feeling “unsustainable”. The group’s singer Rose McDowall had a five year-old daughter and Bryson was agoraphobic. “Suddenly, we were in two separate flats in a tower block on Colney Hatch Lane, out in the suburbs of North London. Rose didn’t have any childcare, and I was scared of leaving the house. The week we did Top Of The Pops, we were on with Barbara Dickson and Elaine Paige. One of them was really tall and the other was tiny. It was like meeting a weird parallel universe version of ourselves!”
Poor old Strawberry Switchblade had no way of knowing it — none of the early 80s indie vanguard did — but their work hadn’t fallen on deaf ears. If their eponymous debut album had come out a year later, it would have coincided with an uprising of bands who seemed to have taken their musical and sartorial cues from a bunch of records that had been released four or five years previously — not just on Cherry Red, but Rough Trade and Postcard too. For Talulah Gosh’s Amelia Fletcher, artists like Trixie’s Big Red Motorbike and Strawberry Switchblade signposted a way into music that, a decade earlier, would have been unthinkable. “It was the first time I realised that it was possible to be in a band that wasn’t famous. Listening to Marine Girls, it felt inconceivable that you could ever do anything that good, but equally they were a good place to start if you were going to have a go.”
The de facto uniform of the bands that rose to prominence alongside Talulah Gosh in the wake of NME’s C86 compilation — Shop Assistants, The Primitives, The Sea Urchins — was the unisex anorak, accompanied by similarly non-gender-specific haircuts. This was a largely asexual movement. Singing about love was ok. Singing about sex was crass and rockist — and standout songs like Talulah Gosh’s Talulah Gosh and My Bloody Valentine’s Sunny Sundae Smile observed that distinction. Again, these were preconditions seemed to take root a few years previously. The videocassette version of Cherry Red’s Pillows & Prayers compilation was interspersed with old adverts and post-war evocations of childhood; a similar return to innocence was evoked by the shortbread tin imagery of Postcard Records’ sleeve art. In Smiths records, sex was referenced but in terms so problematic that it seemed to explain Morrissey’s ongoing celibacy.
It wasn’t that everyone had stopped having sex. It was about eschewing a vernacular that seemed ugly, predatory and anachronistic. In the indiepop bubble, men stopped singing about what they wanted to do to women. By a strange unspoken consensus, the vernacular of girl groups, early Motown and teen-pop became the language of indiepop. “In the music press, you had people slagging off bands like us,” remembers Fletcher, “because we sounded a bit limp-wristed and feeble to them, but to me if wasn’t a problem. It sounded like sunny days and all the feelings that I had.”
Even for bands such as My Bloody Valentine, who wanted to swap tweeness for sheer voltage, the challenge was to do a version of rock’n’roll that couldn’t, even for a second, be seen as a pure extension of male sexuality. In The Sex Revolts, Reynolds and Press describe the group’s “great innovation, ‘glide guitar’ [as] a self-devised technique that uses the guitar’s tremolo arm to unleash a droning swarm of distortion… [Their] presence is definitely androgynous: it’s hard to distinguish which songs are sung by Bilinda Butcher or Kevin Shields.”
Few people in their mid-30s have any desire to be reminded what they were doing in their late teens, and in 1999, Tracey Thorn (who politely declined an interview request for this piece) was no different. In her autobiography Bedsit Disco Queen, she recalled her surprise when she appeared on Later… with Jools Holland on the same week as Courtney Love. “Just before the cameras started rolling, she looked across to our stage, put down her guitar and strode across the empty central area to crouch down next to me where I was sitting. ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘you’re Tracey from the Marine Girls! Kurt and I were both huge fans of your band.’” Indeed, when Cobain’s journals were published, Marine Girls appeared on a list of his all-time favourite records. Along with The Raincoats’ first album and Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth, these seemed to be the records Cobain would return to seeking to remind himself that, even if the frat boys had discovered Nirvana, Nirvana would never totally belong to those people.
Back in 1992, Cobain had even travelled to the Rough Trade Shop in West London, looking to replace his worn-out copy of the first Raincoats album. Once he had bought the album, he was duly dispatched by shop staff to a nearby antique shop where the group’s singer and guitarist Ana Da Silva was working at the time. In the liner notes of Nirvana’s Incesticide LP, he recalled that meeting and the package he received a few weeks later, as a result of meeting Da Silva: “It made me happier than playing in front of thousands of people each night, rock-god idolisation from fans, music industry plankton kissing my ass and the million dollars I made last year.”
The encounter seems to have made as much of a mark on Da Silva as it did on Cobain. “For me, that’s the biggest reward from being in a band,” she says, “I wanted to inspire people the way I was inspired. Not just young women, but boys as well. When Kurt walked into that shop, that was the moment I realised it had happened.” Amelia Fletcher elaborates further, “Is it a vindication? Maybe. A little bit. We weren’t trying to change anything. We were just joining in. But if enough people join in, of course, you are changing things.”