marine girls' day by the sea k7

"I think I got bored with it not being my band, plus I broke up with the boyfriend, so I started talking to my schoolfriend Gina about us forming our own band. She came round to my house and with me playing guitar and her singing we worked out some songs. The first thing we recorded was for a friend's compilation tape of local bands and it was a song called Getting Away From It All. It had a very basic drum machine part, Gina singing and me playing rhythm and lead guitar. We decided to call ourselves the Marine Girls.

"After a while I recruited another friend, Jane, to play bass with us. Jane wrote songs too so that doubled the amount of stuff we had to play. We didn't know anyone who could play drums or had a drum kit so we decided to take our cue from the Young Marble Giants and play minimalist quiet music. Colossal Youth was our favorite record. Our favorite bands were The Slits and The Clash (Jane) Orange Juice and The Buzzcocks (me) and Joy Division (Gina). One problem we had was that Gina was hopeless about turning up for rehearsals, so one day round at Jane's house when Gina had again failed to appear we asked Jane's younger sister Alice if she would sing instead. By now I had also plucked up the courage to sing occasionally, so we now had the slightly uneasy situation of three potential lead singers in one band. We recorded a tape of the songs we had at this point, called A Day By The Sea, made 50 copies of it and sold them to our friends.
" This is where it all starts to blur for me. We must have started doing gigs aroundthis time although I barely remember any of them. I can remember a gig in a fire station with some skinheads near the front of the stage. There must have been more. Somehow we met up with a guy called Patrick who had some mobile recording gear and offered to record an album's worth of our songs. Also involved was Dan Treacy of the TV Personalities, who must have seen us at a gig or something, who offered to put us on his In Phaze Label. So we recorded our first LP, Beach Party, which includes some of the songs from A Day By The Sea plus some new songs.

"Then Mike Alway of Cherry Red Records saw us play a gig, liked us, and so we signed a publishing contract with Cherry Red Publishing and then signed to Cherry Red Records. They took over the Beach Party album and gave it a proper indie release. We did our first ever London gig at the Moonlight Club in West Hampstead, supporting Felt, another Cherry Red Band. The night before three other Cherry Red artists had played there including Ben Watt. I missed his gig that night, but he came to the Marine Girls gig the next night and that was the first time he saw me. Also around this time I think, we released a single On My Mind which made single of the week in the NME. At some point Gina had left the band and Alice became the main singer, but I can't even recall when this happened.
"Then in October 1981 I left home to go to Hull University, 300 miles away. The Marine Girls kept going but only in the holidays. We did more gigs, bigger ones now. We played at the Lyceum in London supporting Orange Juice and the Go-Betweens. I met Lindy, the Go-Betweens drummer when she came into my dressing room to borrow lipstick. She became my best friend. We recorded another album, Lazy Ways which was produced by Stuart Moxham of the Young Marble Giants. We did an interview with the Melody Maker and they put us on the front cover. Meanwhile I was so far away from the other Marine Girls that I started to record the songs I was writing on my own. The demos I did of these songs eventually became my solo album A Distant Shore. Also I was starting to work on songs with Ben and we were casually forming a group called Everything But The Girl.

"The Marine Girls did their last gig in Glasgow. It was summer 1983. We weredrifting apart. Alice's boyfriend had somehow tagged onto the band playing percussion. We did an awful gig, no-one listened to us, we had an argument backstage, it was the perfect excuse to split up, so we did.