STRAWBERRY SWITCHBLADE Let Her Go



Lets get personal. I was born in 1983 to a mother who was a "punkpopper". She danced in Taboo, Recession, Dumbfounded and Fucked. I was brought up not in schools or nurseries but in squats filled with punks, pinkpunks, electric-hippies, LSD remainders from the 1970s and the nu-wave queens&kings. I don't remember much of it all being so young but i knew I was surrounded by loving people who'd decided the cultural revolution was still going to happen. Strawberry Switchblade were always in the background & were the soundtrack of lite-disco and reflexive electrosplash that always profused warmth, politics and change.

So returning to the land of Scotland, we've decided its only right, moral & ethical to remember one of the best girlbands' that ever existed. It hails from the very early 1980s but you will hear that Let Her Go is indeed timeless. You can hear traces in all of their records in all the mainstream pop songs of Girls Aloud, Abba and Madonna. It seems culture has completely forgotten about Strawberry Switchblade. All Wikiepedia states is this:

"Strawberry Switchblade was a Scottish indie pop-rock female quartet sporting gothic sensibilities. Formed in Glasgow in 1981, the band became the duo of Jill Bryson and Rose McDowall in 1982, and had a minor hit in the mid-1980s with their song "Since Yesterday".

There is so much more than that! Strawberry Switchblades' material was the sound of the pop future. The b-side to Since Yesterday, Secrets, sounds like nu-Xenomania while the demo tapes recorded when they were still a foursome in their Glasgow squat are Goldfrapp/Franz Ferdinand without those poncy overtones that often restrict the emotional essence of these supposedly post-modern pop acts.

I can't think of St.Etienne, Scissor Sisters or Girls Aloud without some ghost of Strawberry Switchblade haunting the electronic pulsars emitted from such wonderful albums. Stunning!