Worlds of Jayne

Well, we were the Eric's (famous Liverpool club) band and everyone hated us because we were dead cocky and dead mouthy. If you walked into Eric's, there was a little platform, and that was our table. Obviously like all our mates we'd come from gay clubs. Before Eric's opened, gay clubs were the only ones that would let us in, because of the way we looked. We'd kind of been into dance music in gay clubs, so we brought that with us, and it was a very bitchy scene. People like Ian McCulloch and Julian Cope were quite young in terms, they're only the same age as Holly and Paul (Rutherford), but we'd been very isolated from our working class background, whereas they'd come straight from it; we were probably a little bit more sophisticated in the way we were looking at life. We were all cynical, we'd been around more, we'd all left home at 14 and kind of got into the same books and the same records. We'd already been well into Warhol and Lou Reed, and we'd sort of got into the New York alternative subculture, and modelled our little scene on that, really. So it separated us a bit from the others, also because all the boys in our gang were gay. So they all really hated us and they formed an anti-Big in Japan society. They got a petition together, and when they had 2,000 names on it we had to split up. Then they got t-shirts with my face printed on them, so they'd all walk around in t-shirts with my face on them, getting everyone to sign these petitions, which we all signed because we were into it you know. "He's got my face on his chest, he fuckin' hates me, I love it!" (laughs) So it was very antagonistic. They were into things like Jack Kerouac, quite dry things. We were just into "camping out" and having a laugh. It was two separate scenes, and then they started to play instruments and wanted to be in bands, which is why they hated us so much to begin with, because we were doing it and they were sort of just coming up. You know I have said that when I saw the first Bunnymen gig at Eric's, when they just had a drum machine, it was the best thing I'd ever seen. You know I did think they were brilliant. In later years we became friends, but it was very antagonistic in the beginning. All through the 80's, Ian and Julian would slag me in the music papers at every opportunity, because that's what they felt they had to do. It was the most competitive I've ever seen in the Liverpool music scene at that time, and it was quite odd because I was the only girl really there at that time, there weren't that many girls around doing things at that point... We miss your music and your creativity Jayne!