Supposed To Understand - Strawberry Switchblade x Pastels

Sandhills (Demo)- Strawberry Switchblade

Little River (Peel Session) - Strawberry Switchblade

Poor Hearts (Robin Millar Session) - Strawberry Switchblade

Strawberry Switchblade - Sixty Cowboys

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

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

A cover of Strawberry Switchblade's most famous song: Since Yesterday, performed by marimarirythemkillermachinegun

#marimarirythmkillermachinegun #strawberryswitchblade #sinceyesterday #sinceyesterdaystrawberryswitchblade #strawberryswitchbladecover

since yesterday ~ marimari rythmkiller machinegun (Strawberry Switchblade Cover)

An early demo version of Let Her Go by Strawberry Switchblade

(IDK WHY BUT THIS VERSION IS SO CUTE I LUV IT!! 💗💗)

#strawberryswitchblade #lethergo #lethergostrawberryswitchblade #lyndastrawberryswitchblade #jillbryson #rosemcdowall #treesandflowers #sinceyesterday

Lynda ~ 🍓StrawberrySwitchblade🔪

Cut The With The Cake Knife was recorded by Rose McDowall in 1988/89 following the break up of her group Strawberry Switchblade. Produced with the aid of several musicians in several studios, the album features songs written for the fabled second Strawberry Switchblade album. More importantly perhaps it showcases the honest, direct and life-affirming songs of one of the greatest unsung songwriters of the modern pop era at a tumultuous time in her career.

Tibet opens the set and could be one of the best pop songs you’ve never heard. The innate sadness of the songs’ content – the loss of a friendship, impending sorrow – is heightened to heart-melting level by McDowall’s pop nous and melodic sensibility. Choruses and hooks are everywhere on Cake Knife, from the outsider take on stadium 80s pop in Wings Of Heaven to the spiraling, ecstatic So Vicious, a glorious anthem that highlights the human fragility in McDowall’s vocal performance, an instrument that has never lost the naïve purity it first exemplified in Strawberry Switchblade’s early 80s recordings. The centerpiece of the album, the title-track, is the greatest Switchblade pop chart hit that never was. Like the veiled melancholy of her former group’s hits, Cut With The Cake Knife hints at a darkness beneath the gloss, a darkness that saw McDowall delve into more esoteric territory with her subsequent recordings and collaborations. Cut With The Cake Knife serves as the bridge between the pop music McDowall had been making with her friends Jill Bryson, Lawrence from Felt and Primal Scream to what became a more extreme, deep sound informed by neo-folk and post industrial music.

Rose McDowall’s role in the canon has always been one of an outsider. Beginning in Glasgow’s East End in the avant proto-noise group The Poems, achieving fame briefly in the 80s and then disappearing into counter-cultural folklore, the emphasis in the internet-age has been skewed towards her image and cultural significance. Unseen to many, her solo work, her groups Sorrow and Spell and her collaborations with a whole host of underground luminaries have still touched lives. As McDowall elucidates: “They're real sad songs, about real life. I've had people come up to me to say I'd connected with them and helped them. I remember a gig in America when we made a whole room cry. It was bizarre. A couple at the front of the stage started crying and then these two boys beside and  suddenly everyone was crying. And I thought, "that's power."

Night School’s issue of Cut With The Cake Knife includes unpublished photographs, extensive sleeve notes from Rose McDowall and 2 bonus tracks culled from the bootleg 7” “Don’t Fear The Reaper.”


ROSE MCDOWALL - Cut With The Cake Knife (from Cut With The Cake Knife LSSN027)

Strawberry Switchblade - Jolene (BBC version)

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 - Jolene (BBC version)

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