plastic yard

Trees & Flowers (Peel Session) - Strawberry Switchblade

Originally a demo of Strawberry Switchblade, the duo of Jill Bryson and Rose McDowall. After their split Jill Bryson re-recorded this song, you can find it on Soundcloud and Bandcamp

https://theshapists.bandcamp.com/track/daddy-ill-drown

https://on.soundcloud.com/hBtnb

Daddy I'll Drown - Strawberry Switchblade (original version)

A Shoegaze renaissance classic, first time on vinyl.

The shoegaze renaissance classic The Millia Pink And Green EP by Sway has influenced many a modern musician, shoegazer and non-shoegazer alike. Now, Saint Marie Records gives it the long awaited vinyl treatment. The record now weighs a bit more, thanks to the bonus track ‘Channel’ and its 180gm Coke bottle green transparent vinyl.

Sway began making noise in 1999, in Ventura, California. At the time, they were a four-piece garage rock outfit consisting of Andrew Saks, Amber Carlson, Seth Eubanks, and Vince Alatorre, playing shows and confusing audiences up and down the West Coast with its blurry wall of sound. They’re most known for the shoegaze renaissance classic The Millia Pink And Green EP released in 2003.

Andrew’s songwriting and sonic ideals are deeply rooted in the music he was surrounded by while coming of age: late ‘70s and ‘80s pop music.  Falling asleep nightly while listening to 1980s pop and R&B, and then waking up late at night in a dark dreamlike haze with New Order, Swing Out Sister, Talking Heads, Pet Shop Boys, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam whispering through his Walkman’s headphones, the sonic memory of such experiences keep Sway from ever giving itself over fully to the traditional shoegaze elements. The quest to recreate these musical properties is what later led Sway to embrace and be further influenced by the blissful textures of dreampop visionaries such as The Cocteau Twins, Medicine, and My Bloody Valentine.

In 2011, This Was Tomorrow was released by Saint Marie Records.  It was Sway’s first full-length release and its last.

SIDE A
Fall
Sounds Like Everyone
Sullust

SIDE B
Ever and Ever
Opentillate
Channel (Bonus Track)

Sway - Fall

06 Eau D'Bedroom Dancing

video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2G8eMrJDdI

saw there was a light

School Daze and RPM proudly present a compendium of the demo cassette generation from the early 1980’s, filtered through (principally British) independent women of the post-punk era.

‘Sharon Signs To Cherry Red’ began life as the archetypal independent single released on the obscure Lowther International label by archetypal independent act, The Kamikaze Pilots, the review of whom by Danny Kelly in the NME gives us the starting point: “Disturbingly, also from Norwich…comes this plaintive tribute to/assassination of all the earnest misery gobs ever signed to Cherry Red’s roster, with particular reference to the Tracey Thorn pantheon”. What was a gentle mocking of The Marine Girls et al is now the starting point for this meander through the 80s’ underground, a period which enabled more involvement from women in independent music, a slight, if not complete, freeing up of the male-dominated hegemony that had existed before punk. Many of these artists were night-time John Peel session regulars, fighting for daytime coverage in the press, walking the fine line of questioning from the NME (hip young gunslingers asking sexual politics) and Smash Hits (Milton Keynes readers asking which hairspray they used).

‘Sharon…’ is but an overview of a fertile time, when the democratization of music through punk had resulted in new viewpoints, talents and perspectives finding their voice. The breadth here is a joy: from the sugary Dorothy (originally on Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial Records) to ex-Dolly Mixture Debsey Wykes’s Sarah Goes Shopping,  from the punked scrawl of The Petticoats to the avant funk of Bristol’s Scream & Dance, the one thread all these groups have in common is their fierce independence. That and their XX chromosomes. Some of these recordings are surfacing for the first time on “Sharon Signs To Cherry Red,” while others are from rare 7”s and compilation releases.

School Daze is a new imprint to the Glasgow-based Night School, focusing on discovering and sharing the past.

Strawberry Switchblade - Seaside (Go Away)

1982 4-Piece Demo” is the first official, fully-licensed and unreleased material to be released under the name Strawberry Switchblade in 30 years. Since disbanding amid major record label acrimony and personal differences in 1986, the already-cult band have since grown in stature and legend. Trailblazers in many ways, the band’s mythology justifiably centers around the charismatic duo of Jill Bryson and Rose McDowall, but that isn’t a complete picture.

Bryson and McDowall’s growing friendship, having met some years earlier on the punk scene, became a creative partnership: Bryson’s art school background and McDowall’s history in avant-punk group The Poets meant Strawberry Switchblade was a band pitted against many established norms. The band’s very first incarnation, an all-female 4 piece, recorded one demo at Glasgow’s Hellfire Club and played a handful of gigs. Friends Janice Goodlett and Carole McGowan completed the line up on bass and drums respectively. Strawberry Switchblade would eventually pair down to a duo and go on to chart success but it’s in these raw, passionate recordings that the songwriting and vocal elements were being hammered out and explored in real time.

“Spanish Song” is a previously unreleased song. With Rose McDowall’s instantly recognizable lead vocal dovetailing with Bryson’s harmonies and lead guitar, it’s the first glimpse at an alternative history of Strawberry Switchblade. This incarnation could easily have been featured on a Nuggets compilation or a precursor to the indie-pop revolution that would take over British bedrooms a couple of years later. Trees & Flowers is instantly recognizable, a bona fide classic that would earn the band its first record deal. Here it’s given a more forceful rhythm section: Goodlett and McGowan’s playing is in fact accomplished and doesn’t hint at the bands’ youth. Go Away would also surface later on the band’s debut LP but here it is a moody-garage stomper with a psychedelic, haunting refrain. These 3 songs point to a tantalizing future of the band that was never realized.

Remastered and restored by Sean Pennycook from the original cassette, with artwork based on a single photographic contact sheet (the only visual evidence of the band in this form) and with a booklet of photographs and new text from contemporary Stephen Pastel.

STRAWBERRY SWITCHBLADE - Spanish Song (from LSSN048 - 1982 4-Piece Demo)

Night School Records

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