ALL ABOUT EVE
ALL BECAUSE THE LADY LOVES...
In that peculiarly brattish way we British have, there is a tendency to regard anyone who broaches the charts as suddenly becoming a senile delinquent, who turns rapidly from a normal, convivial, trivial person into a maliciously shallow-minded, unbearably smug egomaniac with a hall full of mirrors and a loft buckling under the weight of decapitated squirrels and half-digested choir boys. Normally of course this is quite true but there are exceptions to this far from golden rule and the politely absent-minded All About Eve, aghast at what they achieved in so short a time, when half way through their career they thought it was downhill all the way, are happily beyond reproach. Almost too nice for their own good, but hopeless at enacting a sneer, they could be engulfed at any minute by the big bad Business if it wasn't for a charming, totally natural stupidity that at times borders on the uncanny!
They have up their unbearably colourful sleeves certain songs which a typical elephantine band would give the full ‘epic' treatment, which they can only sit back, staggered by, unable to do it anything but the finest justice. No pomp or circumcision, just sleepy, wistful, fluttering bullets which rarely kill but bring down the intended targets anyway, foaming in resignation at their wounds. Try as hard as you might, there is no ignoring the charm. To achieve such halcyon melodies when they often plummet into disused wells through misreading life's childishly simple reference points is just part and parcel of this weird operation. It has always been that way and when it stops happening by almost, and here's a word appropriate to them, freakish good fortune then the chances are that they will have lost the truly magic spark. If that happens they could all follow their other predestined course - being the next Dr. Who assistants.
Their history is a balmy, convoluted one, easily worked out with a slide rule, atlas and tea-leaves. Tim and Andy we shall ignore for the moment, imagining them, chums since their undercarriages dropped, preparing to join the windy Northern band, Aemotii Crii, who never actually made it on to vinyl, and we shall follow instead the course of Julianne Regan, forsaking her Midland bedroom where she had hidden herself away with a collection of Japan records, as she hits London, determined to be. . . a music journalist! Remarkably enough she almost did it too, talking her way into writing a minuscule piece on Gene Loves Jezebel for ZigZag. I shan't embarrass her by reprinting any of it, apart from the opening line, ‘At last, a welcome enema has been shoved up the weary backside of a stagnating scene'. At the same time she predicted that fellow Coventry soulmates ‘I', a band who took to wearing monks' habits, would have a surprise Christmas hit in 1982, and blow me if they didn't! More disturbing was her frank admission that Wasted Youth had become an addiction. (‘After a week I get withdrawal symptoms.') Somehow I don't think I should be telling you this, but isn't it fun? Further, apparently sensible, pieces appeared on Vane, The Passage and Modern English. then she was gone, joining the ranks of Gene Loves Jezebel on suppositories and bass.
"I can't even believe I was in it," she now claims. "I do feel they took me for a ride a bit. I was such a starry-eyed kid, thrilled to be in a band, to learn I could play an instrument and just giving all the time. . . . they took all the time. There's no malice there because they did stick their necks out taking me on and I'm grateful for that."
When this fell apart Julianne peered around her, taking stock, without a hint of shoplifting, falling in with Manuella Zwingmann who had just vacated the drumstool of X-Mal Deutschland. Together with a most unlikely choice, the fop-haired Chris Club of Vague fanzine, entirely untainted by musical talent, they considered something that would fill up their time and fill their minds with bravado. Tim Bricheno, having left Aemotii Crii, stumbled into view. Andy Cousin would do likewise, first stopping off to make a record with Pink And Black, ‘Sometimes I Wish', featuring Rob Stroud (ex-Sex Gang, now Cosmic 666) and Michelle Yee-Chong (now Junior Manson Slags).
Operating briefly as The Swarm, with Tim firing off his guitar and some Ferguson chap on drums, the songs took shape, one of them being ‘D For Desire' that would emerge as the debut single in 1985 on their own Eden Records, clad in a 23 Envelope sleeve designed by Vaughan of that celebrated company. With James Richard Jackson on bass they managed to get through their lean cuisine, deflecting Cocteau's comparisons, just, with a sturdy energy and the great line, ‘I cram my head with your sanity' on the B-side, ‘Don't Follow Me (March Hare)'. Taped evidence of other songs, including ‘This Isn't Heaven' show nicely rocketeering drums, as ‘A Trembling Hand' quivered with strident squalls of wandering vocals but they all outstay their welcome, usually rescued by neatly watchful guitar. Julianne's voice didn't sound anything like it sounds today, rendered more through a funnel, her sponge-like awareness of what was going on around her restraining a natural flow.
Andy, bass held like a Napoleonic musket, jutting from the hip as though he wished to invent phallic imagery, joined them for a second single, an ethereal toast rack entitled ‘In The Clouds', which should be eagerly sought out by collectors for the strikingly evocative flips of ‘End Of The Day' and ‘Love Leads Nowhere'. This time with a drummer called Matt Kemp they not only found their feet, but managed their finances better, using a child's artwork for the sleeve.
"The last sleeve, ‘D For Desire', cost nearly two thousand pounds," Tim could laugh afterwards, "More than the recording!"
"Vaughan did it for free," Julianne chips in, "but he's very meticulous about printing and apparently it was a very expensive print, so we thought we'd cut as many corners as possible on this one and exploit an under-five year old."
Could the lyrics accurately be described as Hippy shit?
"Yes, I've got no defence for it," Julianne shuddered. "That's exactly what it is. How embarrassing! I was very into God lyrics at the time and one day Tim said do you think you could get it together to write some non-God lyrics? When you look at the words it's a bit dodgy, because they're so dopey and naive that somebody could really laugh you out of the room when you put it on, or sit there and go like this (wobbles head) like everybody else."
Remarkably this still holds true with some of the lyrics now! They work against the odds, which suggests that Julianne knows more about the secret world of witchcraft than she lets on.
‘In The Clouds' was a 1986 release, as was their track ‘Suppertime' on the ZigZag/Situation Two compilation album, ‘Gunfire And Pianos'. They hadn't exactly shocked record companies into offering vast fortunes after seeing their nervously humming live shows, although Cherry Red proved to be in mischievous mood, calling the band in to make them an offer they could all too easily refuse.
"We didn't laugh," Julianne remembers, "because there was such disbelief."
Tim: "Oh God, it went really quiet! The big guy who runs it disappeared when it was time to mention money, sent his lackey in to break the news. Tried tarting it up with, ‘We'll do a photo session, we'll get you on telly' but the bottom line was it was 750 quid."
Before something truly momentous happened to the band, as it would, they found paranoia as easy to embrace as the next band, worrying that their lack of personality onstage was putting people off, that ‘Goth' was an albatross hung round their collective necks and an image, something frightfully different, had to be the answer. And maybe it was, although not what they originally had in mind, which was to wear white from head to foot and paint the instruments the same colour! No doubt the drum machine ("It's just like a servant," Louise Raygun learnt. "It doesn't merit a name") would have been slipped into a strategic and diplomatic pillowcase. Honestly, some people!
Julianne, as you will know by now. provided backing vocals on The Mission's albums and this alliance proved to be the turning point in the band's troubled past. As well as going on The Mission's tour as beaming support, Simon Hinkler and Wayne Hussey produced the third single and Mick Brown pounded the worried drums.
Things were looking up, ringlets permitting.
‘Our Summer', which sadly didn't get close enough to crease the charts, let alone dent them, was a celebratory pop bash, complete with sublimely meaningless lyrics, but over on the other side. . . ‘Lady Moonlight' and ‘Shelter From The Rain'! Explanations were the order of the day when I tracked the band down to their hotel after taxing live work had taken its toll, and I was shocked. These people weren't just laid back, they were moonlighting (oops!) as spirit levels! Having escaped the ‘Goth' tag, as planned, they were heading, totally unaware, for a potentially fatal weir.
They were quiet, their hair cascaded and, worst of all, Andy said ‘man' a fair amount. As the table filled with glasses, opticians being such careless folk, the tale unfolded.
"It's not that bad," Tim rallied, stung by Hippy accusations and folding up a purely metaphorical teepee. "It's just a joke isn't it?"
"NO!" Julianne shrieked. "It isn't." "No," Tim resisted, manfully. "It is. ‘Man' and ‘baby', we don't mean that when we say it."
Tough talk from a man I heard say, by way of an excuse-me, at the Marquee, "I've just got to go and talk to this cat!"
"We've always been closet Hippies," Dr. Dolittle continued.
"It's the love vibration we've been talking about for so many years," laughed Julianne, as well she might.
Tim: "Yeah!"
Andy: "Man."
Julianne: "Oh dear!"
Oh dear? Make that oh dearie, dearie me!
"I don't think it's as obvious as you're making out," Tim whispered. "We haven't worked it out but we realised we were playing up to the little audience. We did a massive showcase at the Clarendon and we thought we were going to be signed and it was all hanging on the gig and it was bloody awful.
"We realised then.. . we were trying to be this hard, fast rock band with a girl singing over the top and it didn't work. It wasn't us. Then it started changing. We Just decided to do exactly what we wanted to do, what we'd always wanted to do. We realised we were going wrong somewhere, so we stripped it right down, chucked out all the dirty guitars and started doing some really laid back ballads and stuff, building it from there and gradually introducing some faster songs and now we've got a good balance.
"It was a big risk, but we didn't really have that much to lose, did we?"
"At the moment," said Andy, feet in mouth,
"we're just rocking. We're on a rocking vibe."
Julianne: "That was a really intelligent comment! We're into songs in a big way."
So, on all extents and purposes, Julianne's influence won through?
"Yeah, I suppose," Tim allowed, "because all I wanted to be was in some horribly glammy trash band when I came to London."
"Definitely," yodelled Julianne. "When I first met this man he was wearing a leopard skin collar. And bangles. Oh, how he's changed."
Tim (stonily): "How we've laughed about it. It's been nearly three years now and because we know each other very well it's just happened that way really, just everyone's been dead honest about how they feel. I don't think we were ever a real rock band. We wanted to be but we didn't really have what it really took to be A Rock Band. It's the sort of stuff we like to go and see and listen to but it wasn't what we knew we could do ourselves. I can't imagine us doing something like Ghost Dance."
I think they should take out insurance just to make sure!
The Mish of course turned out to be their saviours. All About Eve were swift to scotch comparisons.
"They're very hippy, trippy stuff," said Julianne, "but it's very rocky, whereas our stuff is on a more dreamy level. We were like this before they got to us."
And changed people after the tour, a rollercoaster ride into social misdemeanours.
"At Glasgow." Tim recalls, his bosoms heaving with pride, "it was ‘YEAAHH!'!' for the first few numbers. I got my acoustic out and there was this sea of flob towards it!"
"We were really upset," Julianne wept, "but apparently in Glasgow it's still a sign of appreciation."
"An extension of themselves'," Tim mutters, somewhat unconvinced. "So I went to bed a happy man that night."
And not just that night we suspect, being the foulmouthed readers that we are.
Following the release of ‘Our Summer' came the record with the sleeve that actually cringed at its own title. ‘Flowers In Our Hair'. Julianne, ever the gullible girl, had her own explanation.
"The point was, that the flower children got it wrong the first time round. So the song's about what it's supposed to be all about, without the trivia involved. It takes more than a joss-stick and a kaftan to be a sunchild my friend."
Their version of Rambo?
"I think it's too much of a tall order globally," Julianne piped up. "But for me personally, and my immediate friends... (she starts laughing uncontrollably)... I'm going for it!"
It? What does ‘it' involve?
"I think it involves loving each other actually. We're on a big honesty trip. I'm afraid I feel like giving the kids a lot of love in there somewhere. How EMBARRASSING! I think people are suspicious, and rightly so, of anyone with a touch of Hippyness about them. A year ago Ian Astbury was Guru of Hippy and now he's Mister Heavy Metal! It's back to Peter, Paul And Mary. Rather than being Hippy it is ‘Of The Past'. Rather than being terminally Curved Air we're more The Seekers. I think if we found ourselves disappearing up our own bottoms we'd all tell each other."
I can now reveal that they carried flashlights with them everywhere they went, just in case. Fat lot of good they did them. On the B-side of ‘Flowers' you can find a version of Cliff's ‘Devil Woman' that some people have rashly described as ‘a cover'.
With all ‘Goth' tags long since buried, but the Hippy accusations turning into a war crimes and witch hunt the band did little to clear their names. They re-released an improved ‘In The Clouds', Julianne suddenly cast into a ‘seductive' role in the video, cleavage perspiring, and there on the back was a nonentity, ‘Calling Your Name' and a ‘traditional arrangement' of ‘She Moves Through The Fair' which was distinctly folk in the Clannad vein. No-one from centuries past was credited with this song, so if it was their own, and hadn't been released before
Tim is a sensible fellow. Julianne made perceptive inter-band comments in the Raygun interview when she said, "..... but Tim, he has this knack of bringing Andy and I back down to Earth, do you not Tim? You bring Andy — a human timebomb that boy — down from his pop star fantasies, and he brings me down from this artistic guru figure! He puts everything in perspective."
Tim: "The anchor man of the Eves."
Julianne: "Exactly."
That album! That sherbet dab unfolding in Chris Roberts' long-johns, wasn't it a scary bruise at times, the way all the things you felt you wouldn't like, ‘Wild Hearted Woman' and ‘She Walks On For Bleedin' Hours' aside, suddenly rear up like Moby Dick, sans condom? Four singles (boo, hisssss), including their seventh, the timeless ‘Every Angel'. with an ever-so traditions on the head, as they revealed in two Melody Maker interviews, with Chris Roberts and the Legendary Stud Brothers, as David Stubbs planned his infamous spoof, ‘Julianne's Diaries':
"But I must be ever so careful not to sneeze, for that will break the spell and we will fall down. Besides, a little elf will die", or how about, "Dearest Daddy has been a bit of a Mr Grumpy ever since last week when I drew all over the bathroom walls in pink crayon to cheer up the water babies that bathe there at night."? It's not fair is it? Not fair at all. Just hilarious, and Julianne takes the mocking of dream worlds very well, considering.
"It's the kind of thing you can switch on and off. You don't have to go through the gates of madness and get trapped in Fairyland and never come out. You can step in and out of that little world, and I enjoy being there. It's just that I used to live there and now it's an occasional holiday. I'm capable of depth and shallowness, and recently I've been on a shallow pleasure-seeking level. My last stint of shallow has lasted a long time. It never seeps into the music, that is deep. So I stress I'm going to get through a hermithood for a while soon and come out renewed. Tim always worries when I say this: he thinks I'm going to get the blanket out and read Nietzsche again."
Tim is a sensible fellow. Julianne made perceptive inter-band comments in the Raygun interview when she said, "..... but Tim, he has this knack of bringing Andy and I back down to Earth, do you not Tim? You bring Andy — a human timebomb that boy — down from his pop star fantasies, and he brings me down from this artistic guru figure! He puts everything in perspective."
Tim: "The anchor man of the Eves."
Julianne: "Exactly."
That album! That sherbet dab unfolding in Chris Roberts' long-johns, wasn't it a scary bruise at times, the way all the things you felt you wouldn't like, ‘Wild Hearted Woman' and ‘She Walks On For Bleedin' Hours' aside, suddenly rear up like Moby Dick, sans condom? Four singles (boo, hisssss), including their seventh, the timeless ‘Every Angel'. with an ever-so traditional ‘Martha's Harbour' and ‘Gypsy Dance', which sums up the character of the band and Julianne's particular lyrical approach, which causes such confusion. Julianne can get herself hopelessly tangled up with rosily romanticised images, such as the gypsy campfire, and while that particular song is a quaint bucket of bilge, with the lyrics marginally less trite when written down —‘In a circle, in a ring, Gypsy dance, Gypsy sing, Gypsy dance to the tambourine, in fields of Green' — their naked honesty and freshness in the pop world of ‘be a void and void those bowels', suggests that the woman who once wrote of enemas has become one! Carramba, metaphysical or what? Where, asked Chris Roberts, stumbling into a now still battlefield, had all the grief gone? Cleansed by the burning fire of love, Julianne had seen it peel off "like some really heavy molten grey eyelids", which proves a way with words if nothing else.
Best of all, there is included on the eponymously titled album a song called ‘Never Promise Anyone Forever', which takes bitter recriminatory love angles, inside and out, rolls them into a ball and kicks it into your cornflakes. Julianne has come of age as a songwriter, and the band's music now matches the mood perfectly.
Quizzed by The Luminary Studebaker Brothel over the whole sorry Hippy episode, the band were equally sorry, and short on good excuses.
"A lot of it came out," Andy thought back, remembering the thrashings meted out by the press, "because of ‘Flowers In Our Hair'."
Julianne: "Dumb move, wasn't it? I think we were asking for it really. The thing is, it wasn't totally to rip everybody off, I was dumb enough to actually believe in it for a brief period. And then I realised I was being a prat and grew out of that little stage. It was just another stage."
The world breathes a sigh of relief and disbelief.
"Sometimes we're a bit green you know," Julianne continued, "always ready to believe something until proven wrong. We're just a bit daft and wet behind these ears sometimes. Gullible."
So they have old folky imagery running riot through their tunes? So it's woodland glades rather than Everglades, so they're Good, rather than Bad, so they still believe in Father Christmas. Doesn't that somehow mean a lot? Don't you wish more bands maintained such a divinely simple faith in all around them? Don't you wish somebody would wipe the smile of that man from Wet Wet Wet?
For the final, perfect picture of what All About Eve are about, let me carve up some quotes from the Chris Roberts piece.
"We're always aware we often say, ‘Oh, please, look, we're ordinary'. But we're not. We just keep it down. Like I'm sure John, Paul, George and Ringo had depth, but they assumed this armoured car of wackiness.
"I never thought it wouldn't happen. It wasn't ego, it was that I never let it cross my mind for fear of what on Earth I would think about then. Now things are a lot easier thanks to the good fairy Phonogram, but we'll never become complacent. We're staying firmly in obsessive perfectionist mode."
All About Eve are utterly fabulous. A farce to be reckoned with.
© Mick Mercer - Gothic Rock Black Book
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