(Interview by Mat Snow - New Musical Express - Dated 7 September 1985)
JUNE BRIDES COME in all sorts of peculiar shapes and sizes. Shod by Shelley and clad by Oxfam, these five overgrown Adrian Moles hide behind the Buzzcocks' cast-off potato-print shirts, the cutest hint of a post-adolescent skin condition and sundry pairs of customised NHS gig lamps. Yes, in the harsh glare of a South London Saturday afternoon, it is plain that as popsters go The June Brides are not of the powdered, prinked and periwigged persuasion.
But, as they say, handsome is as handsome does ...
"MOST OF THE WORLD'S ills are because people are afraid to admit what they feel and afraid to talk to people honestly and say they believe this or that. They're scared of looking silly or weak, scared of making a fool of themselves. Everybody puts on a facade, trying to be something they're told they ought to be. "It comes into lots of our songs, the idea that people don't really communicate. It's my biggest gripe about the whole world . . ." Echoing down the years, the authentic voice of Holden Caulfield (pocket hero of Catcher In The Rye) issues from the lips of Phil, head honcho June Bride. They're not the first pop group to find the adult world a purgatory of compromise, duplicity and disappointment, nor the first to set those feelings to a few quids' worth of honeyed twang. But for my money, they're currently the best.
The June Brides follow a venerable and peculiarly British tradition of pop where bright guitars and untutored crooning shine as a beacon in a barbarous world. And despite a pop mainstream where dullard plonking and manicured hipsqueak contrive a funny old world indeed, that venerable tradition is staging something of a comeback. The Smiths leap smartly to attention, as do their proteges James. Indeed, Manchester has much to answer for: of all that venerable tradition, none banged out more boy-next-door winsome wisdom and knock-out music than the Buzzcocks, The June Brides' favourite group.
The Buzzcocks were out of place, out of step and out of sorts, romantic idealists continually struggling with a world too crass to connect. These themes are no more baldly stated than in the neglected masterpiece 'Why Can't I Touch It?' ? Marxist alienation and Sartrean existentialism find incisive expression in an absolute beaut of a tune. And tunes were where the Buzzcocks really scored. People said pop, but Shelley, Diggle, Garvey and Maher never played a straightforward, blushing pop tune in their entire career. Love was never true, young hearts never ran free. Yet the resulting frustration produced its own off-kilter exhilaration. A different kind of tension indeed. The Buzzcocks legacy? Aztec Camera, Orange juice, Josef K, The Fire Engines. the Sound of Young Scotland circa 1980. And now, just when you thought the six-stringed esprit of wimp militant had disappeared forever up Tears For Fears' chart position, the Sound of Young Lambeth rears its tousled head.
TEATIME CHEZ BRIDES is an informal affair. Fierce-looking flatmates are glued to Grandstand, so we repair to one of the kennel-sized bedrooms for Nescafe and ginger nuts, drawing lots for the available chair. Next to me on the bed is Jon (trumpet), from Crawley, Surrey: "I could tell you a few stories about The Cure. Well, one or two . . ." Then moving from left to right, we have Frank (viola) - at 25 the group's eldest by two years and also known as Richard Berlin - Bees on guitar, Ace (bass), and Phil on guitar, vocals, words, earring and leadership. Bees and Ace hail from Shrewsbury, Frank from Lewisham, and Phil from Coventry via Norfolk. Since it is DHSS policy that all pop musicians are multimillionaires, their surnames must languish in obscurity. As for their drummer, temps fill the hot stool at the moment. Candidates for a permanent position should 'phone 01 ?582 1683. Breadheads need not apply.
International Rescue (no relation to the current group of that name) was the JBs first incarnation, the year 1980, the place the London School of Economics ... "It was at the time synthesiser bands were very prevalent." "Or doing joy Division cover versions." "So we formed this wacky band which did no rehearsals and played Buzzcocks songs." Apart from winning a college battle of the bands, International Rescue achieved little of note during their 12-month existence. Music was put on the back-burner whilst Phil, Jon and Bees wrestled with the intricacies of urban politics etc, passing with drooping colours straight onto the dole two summers ago. Time to dust off those guitars. "At that time the only guitar bands around were Echo And The Bunnymen and U2, and we didn't really want to be them." "We wanted to be Josef K." "In between the two," confesses Phil drily. "I'd been doing things on my own, making Throbbing Gristle type noises, banging my head against the wall." Bees: "You couldn't really do that in a group '
A group. It's funny how we take groups for granted. Yet more and more loose affiliations, studio whiz-kids and musical journeymen demonstrate how over the last few years people just don't seem able to stick together to bash out a tune. And music has suffered, both artistically and as a live, grassroots event. The revival of live music - indeed music period - these last couple of years has taken place, with few exceptions, in the format of disparate elements joining forces. That is, groups. Jon: "We're not like a gang. As a group we don't meet all that often. We don't practise incredibly often; we couldn't really - we don't function that way." Phil: "It's really healthy (Phil. uses the word healthy quite frequently) to interract with as large a number of people as you can. And I suppose The June Brides is our main gang, but there's other people we know, and I would like to maintain that, because otherwise you can get really stale. "But there's a fine line between a bunch of friends and that horrible rugby club mentality where it's all lads having a piss-up together." Jon: "We played a gig in Glasgow and we got up early so we could go to Liverpool, where we had a gig, via the Lake District so we could have a picnic by Lake Windermere. We could have stayed in Glasgow and got drunk down Sauchichall Street, but we didn't!"
This is the most genuinely shocking on-the-road story I've ever heard.
"We're more, a Boy Scout troop than a street gang!" "Dib dib dib!" Very James, and indeed tests prove that three out of five June Brides are veggies. "We don't go on a crusade about it." "I don't think we're as fey." "Besides, we've got a viola and trumpet. That gives us a bit of an edge over our competitors, like marge and butter. A bit more width." That trumpet and viola have integrated with the trad guitars, bass, drums format with surprising inventiveness, taking their full part in the thrust of a song rather than merely adding colour or stock counterpoint. But further borrowings from the bandbox have ceased. "There's a limit to how many people you can fit into a transit van. And that limit is now." "Besides," says Phil, "we never wanted to sound big." Nor do they. They sound human size.
LAST YEAR THE JUNE Brides made two singles on the Pink label, 'In The Rain' and 'Every Conversation', fresh, witty and thoughtful vinyl. And even more brilliance is soon to be heard on a mini-LP titled 'There Are Eight Million Stories', to which one mentally replies, 'In The Naked City'. But The June Brides are no TV fetishists: as Bees says, "With the real, everyday personality, there's far more contradictions and complex things going on that are far more interesting than any old rock myths." And should you wrap an ear round Phil's dry bones of a voice, you'll hear nary a whisper of gender in what are mostly I - you songs of love and its lack. When NME's Neil Taylor remarked on this last February, Phil uttered the following peculiar words "To me, lyrics that don't refer to he's or she's are much better than the average cliched lyric, For instance, I find the supposedly liberal lyrics of Bronski Beat every bit as offensive as macho male lyrics. I-need-a-man blues is every bit as bad as I-need-a-woman-blues : they both carry the same sludgy, sexual connotations." I take him up on this: what's so sludgy about sexual connotations? "It doesn't seem to have any respect for the person you're lusting after. Lust doesn't seem to be a very healthy or intelligent way of approaching people, as individuals. "Direct references to sex offend me. It's awful! I sound a bit puritanical . . I like the idea of 'I Only Have Eyes For You', though. It may be a bit wimpy, but the slow process of getting to know somebody, slowly being attracted to them, building something up, is a much healthier way than picking somebody up at a disco and jumping into bed with them ..... What am I saying!?!" "I don't know," ruminates Jon. "It's a bit hypocritical . . ." "It's a fine line," continues Phil quickly. "I don't want it to be Victorian again, but just to bring it all out into the open seems to take any of the magic there might be out of it. "When I was young I was very readily influenced by a lyric, by an attitude the band put across. If you like the music, you'll take their views very seriously, very readily accept without questioning. And I want people to question rather than just point them in one direction. "Everything that comes along I question and worry about. I think that's a healthy thing to do. The words do reflect my own self-doubts ... Most of the things are there in the music. The words try and say something, but they follow. Mine are made up after the music. The music suggests feelings, and the words hint at those feelings."
What, then, sums up the music of The June Brides? Doubt? "I think it's
more ... doubtful optimism." "We think there is something there to be
tapped," Bees waxes; "and hopefully music can spark that feeling inside
you. There is a charge, hopefully, from the band to the audience and back again."
Phil: "When 1 went to see The Undertones years ago, I came out feeling YES!!!
It just reaffirms the things that life is worth living for. There are very few
times you actually feel that positive charge, and the more that can happen to
people, the better. The more you feel good, maybe the more you'll question why
things are so bad. Why isn't this happening more often to me?"
Bees: "But we're not men with a mission, do-gooders or social workers like
The Faith Brothers."
Phil: "It's, we're here and you should be here as well. We're having a brilliant
time and you could do it as well. It's a piece of piss!"
Participation rather than consumerisation: I'll buy that.
Bees: "Hopefully it doesn't come out as some total mish-mash of watered-down
ideas. There should be something you can't pinpoint, and the best bands have
that. And that's what we're aiming for. If you can get your own personality
across standing on stage, then that's a very hard thing to do, because you're
in a very strange position, if you think about it. "So, how to present
yourself in an honest way without appearing as a rock'n'roll star? I suppose
that's the thing we grapple with . . ."
Is that all you want?
"I want everybody to know what they're missing!"