All About Eve - Lime Lizard
Four from the Madding Crowd
Returning from the wilderness with a basket of erotic fruit, a tutu and a TV spectacular, All About Eve come back to the future with a piece of the past. Alex Culpin reports. |
All About Eve were never going to have a completely calm voyage, that much was (written) in the clouds. A flawless knack for combining
season-changing melodies with pre-Raphaelite themes and emerging with sparkling
pop tunes gave them a fan base consisting largely of wandering souls still searching
for the love and romance they had first found between the covers of a Thomas
Hardy novel. By the same token all these things conspired to make them all the
more unpopular in the eyes of cynics and critics alike. What no-one could deny
was the fact that they were good at what they did. An eponymously entitled debut
album yielded no less than four top 40 singles. Moreover, two indie chart hits
prior to the LP's release in 1988 ensured an indie credibility that remains
with them to this day, while the trendier sections of the music press (!) continue
to give them copious amounts of column inches. To add to their long list of
ups and downs they lost a founder band member, Tim Bricheno, after floundering
in (slightly dodgy) folk-rock territory in a bid to live up to the success of
that first album.
But that was then, this is now and before you can say erotic fruit, cheekbones or wonder if that really was the sound of a gun being cocked, Julianne Regan and Andy Cousin are before me explaining just why the garden of a certain Jane Delawney was destroyed, a while back by fire. It transpires that, although never caught, a drunken woman in a tutu, a tall fellow in a Sheffield Wednesday shirt and a curious Australasian gentleman in a waistcoat and watch-chain, not to mention the man with the giant safety pin are still wanted for arson with intent to signify and eclipse the past!
Julianne: "We became a bit entrenched in the 70s really. We were nearer a 70s band than a 90s band which is unhealthy, it's fine to have your influences but we thought we were Led Zeppelin for a while back. That kind of atmosphere doesn't exist anymore, it was fun to play at for a while and some good music did come out of it but it wasn't as it should be. Oh God, I've just said we're crap!"