All About Eve - IndieCator 

 It's just past six o'clock in the evening at The Marquee. All About Eve are sound-checking, and Julianne Regan is becoming a mite pissed off with a sound that is basically not happening.

All About Eve have changed profoundly since their last album. The Eves' trademark has always been that of a guitar band playing eloquent rock with a distinctive female voice over the top. The very nature of their music and what set it apart from a thousand other bands has been visited by the 1992 zeitgeist. The result of this is a far more psychedelic approach with the Regan voice set comparatively low in the mix, with breathy harmonies sloshing around.

This appears to be the problem at The Marquee.

All About Eve have always been a pretty powerful live band with enough muscle to attract the more adventurous guitar aficionados to their shows. Having a loud band and delicate voice sitting right in there has left Julianne requiring in-ear monitors so she can hear what she's singing. These are supposed to save her having to adopt the classic folk singer finger-in-the-ear-look-sincere pose. This manifestly doesn't work as she ends up jamming them in each ear with both hands, requiring her to look like a hear-no-evil primate, before discarding them altogether. The alternative, then, is to turn up the wedges in front of her. Problem. A quiet voice requires high gain on the mike. High gain leads to the loud guitars, drums and bass being picked up. The result? Feedback. Lots of it, and sound-check has to finish now. Problems indeed.

Some twenty minutes later, armed with a solitary beer, a slightly less frazzled Regan and cohorts sit in the green room and waste no time in assuring the world at large that all's right in the Eve's camp since they left their old record label Phonogram and joined MCA.

"To encapsulate the situation," says Julianne, "the last eighteen months at Phonogram were a complete waste of time, because they were pulling us in a direction that was [] to make an record like the one before it. Touched By Jesus was therefore a bridge to discovering the kind of album we really wanted to make... You look like you don't believe me," he finishes with an accusatory glare.

Readers should make up their own minds on that one. Certainly Touched By Jesus owes more to Scarlet And Other Stories than it does to Ultraviolet, so transitional? Hmm. Julianne defuses a potentially tense situation by cutting in.

"It depends how extreme you are. I, for example, like every album I've just done and don't like the album before. The only album I can like is the current one."

How did moving to a new label make a difference? Was there any confusion as to where you should go musically?

"No, the very opposite," states Julianne. "All the confusion evaporated as soon as we left Phonogram. We knew we wanted to move to a record company that would give us total artistic control, which MCA promised. We didn't have to accept all that record company bullshit about throwing money at something to make it good, because we did it all ourselves.

"It was completely un-confusing generally. We got rid of our manager and our record company. Those were the things that were primarily causing confusion. After that it was plain sailing."

The result of this confusion-free zone is of course Ultraviolet, with its aforementioned change in sound. Most startling is the Curve-like Phased. A cynic would argue that the Eves were making a deliberate commercial more to curry lost favour in certain journals. The reaction to the mention of Curve is not welcoming.

"I don't see that at all! I've never really listened to Curve, so how can we have been that deliberate?" asks Julianne.

"We're a rock band," says Marty. "Our songs are in a traditional format, theirs are sequenced. Just because Julianne's voice is different in the mix doesn't make it Curve does it? I don't think the change is as bad as you're making it out to be anyway.

"Apart from anything else, I'm fed up of defending what we do. We're a band writing and making music, that's all!"

But you must recognise that the change in direction you've made is likely to alienate dyed-in-the-wool All About Eve fans, One of the big strengths of the band is Julianne's voice, so why obscure it?

"I got awfully tired of being so far out in front of the band," answers the singer. "It was diverting attention away from what was going on around the voice. People would comment on the voice first and the music second. I don't want to be known for having a great 'voice', I want to be known for making great music."

"The reaction to the new material from the punters has been confused, then mostly getting into it," continues Marty.

Mostly?

"Well, one guy in Glasgow did shout 'Bollocks!' after one song the other night," admits Julianne. "It sounds horribly arrogant, but it's like, if you don't like it... I actually had to say that to a few people in Glasgow, because they were pretty heckly. There is this kind of 'you owe us, we made you' vibe. Yes, people did buy our records, did contribute to our popularity, which is great, but if they don't like it why don't we part friends? It should be, 'great, you liked three of our albums, but now it's time to move on,' instead of people saying to us 'please, please come back and be All About Eve'.

"We're not doing this to piss anybody off. All we're doing is following our creative instincts. My biggest fear with this album is that people will think this is our most contrived album. But it's not, it's our least contrived."

All About Eve are making a stand for their own identity with Ultraviolet. In doing so, they have adopted a mantle of defiance to shield them against what they know will be a rocky road ahead. Don't be surprised if the next album sounds nothing like Ultraviolet. After all, like the Eves say, a band has to evolve.