Plan B – the archives 17: Marine Girls

Thought I’d shove this up, to celebrate Marine Girls’ addition to this blog. This is reprinted from the second issue of Plan B (#0.5), which came out – when? – around the end of 2003.

“20,000 leagues under the sea/That’s where my baby said he’d meet me” – ‘20,000 Leagues’

Remember when you used to write your name over everything, in case your friends or relations half-inched it? I still have my copy of Beach Party; with ‘Property of Alan McGee’ scrawled across the label. Alan had just gotten a copy from Cherry Red or somewhere that day and I refused to let him stop playing it, so in desperation – and in kindness – he gave it to me. I still think it’s about the most heart-warming minimal pop I’ve heard. It was the sparse, beautiful melodies that got me, the deceptively shy female voices – the seaside imagery and innate Englishness of Tracey and Jane and Alice and Gina’s early Eighties school-time project. I loved what Sportique’s Mark Flunder calls their ‘un-rock’n’roll’, appreciating Marine Girls are as spontaneous and warm and life affirming as rock gets.

In 1983, I played a show as Everything But The Penguin – two large inflatable penguins looking benignly on as Paul Platypus and I ad-libbed our way through a cappella versions of ‘On My Mind’ (Marine Girls) and ‘Night And Day’ (Everything But The Girl’s first, torched single). I corresponded with bassist Jane Fox via postcard during the Eighties, and played a show in a village town hall with Beat Happening and The McTells, co-promoted by original singer Gina. I have no idea where to start my appreciation of Marine Girls – the stung melodies, the bittersweet lyrics of boy betrayal and stolen travelogues, the beach party sandcastles… Beat Happening, for God’s sake.

I finally met Jane last Christmas in Brighton, and was lost for words.

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Young Marble Giants; The Slits; Beat Happening; Shop Assistants; Half-Japanese; Huggy Bear; The Pastels; Quasi; Some Velvet Sidewalk; Josef K; Orange Juice; Marine Girls; The Raincoats; Talulah Gosh; June Brides; The Go-Betweens…
(Partial list for a proposed book on the International Pop Underground, 2000)

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I recently exchanged emails with singer Alice Fox (sister of Jane, the main co-songwriter, who joined Marine Girls after Gina and Tracey Thorn formed the band one school lunchtime). She’s prickly. Nicely so. Wanted to know why I wanted to interview her. (“Had to make sure you weren’t a blood-sucking journalist,” she explained after.) Asked me three questions:

1) What is it you find interesting about the Marine Girls?
“DUDE! Only one of the single most important bands in my own personal history, for the tunes, the silences, the TUNES, the warm special feeling, the TUNES, the fragile yet strong vocals, the imagery, the humanity, the harmonies and knowledge that less is more, that it’s what you leave out that counts… I did a search on the Internet and discovered that although I’ve never written a proper appreciation of the Marine Girls, I’ve made 27 comparisons to them for other groups I love, trying to explain precisely why I love those groups.”

2) Did you ever come to any Marine Girls gigs?
“A couple of times, but I’m wondering where. ULU, almost certainly… you didn’t play out that much, from what I recall, and I was shy of seeing a band I loved so much.”

3) Do you think there are many people who still listen to the music or are we now a part of pop history?
“This is so easy to answer. I have many students come round to my house, wanting to discover how to be a music critic or something (I tell them they’re idiots if that’s all they want) and – well, maybe I move in rarefied circles because of who I choose to be and hang around with – but I’m still amazed by how many know who the Marine Girls are, and actively listen to them. Even my wife… who, independently of me, has been playing her Marine Girls tape in the car non-stop. Going further back, some of my former famous friends in Seattle and Olympia LOVED Marine Girls… and me! Jesus. Me. A single year doesn’t goes by without me playing my vinyl version of Beach Party to death – and I do love your second  album Lazy Ways, too, just not quite as much.

“Why do I love Marine Girls? For the same reason I love early Ramones, Beat Happening, Misty’s Big Adventure, early Blondie, growing coriander plants from seed, making blackberry crumble, cycling down to Hove Town Library (downhill all the way!)… Marine Girls make me HAPPY, help fill the roaring silence in my head for a second, make me appreciate the very act of being alive.”

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Jane: When I was a kid, I was introduced to music through the school system and having to have cello lessons, both of which I loathed. It was a classic hideous experience. I decided I didn’t want any truck with music.

Gina: I’ve always loved music, and remember even when I was tiny how it could effect your emotions. I especially loved ‘These Boots Are Made For Walking’ and ‘Grocer Jack’, and jumped up and down on the sofa to them. Later on, I picked up on chart stuff, then Siouxsie And The Banshees, Buzzcocks, X-Ray Spex, The Clash… finding John Peel led me onto early Rough Trade records. There were a lot of local bands, too. But I didn’t do anything musical myself until I met Jane and Tracey in the sixth form.

Alice: Music was everything, politics, friendships, love, hate, clothes and hairdos when I was a teenager. I was 14 when I did my first gig and I enjoyed the buzz and attention. I’ve always liked showing off, so singer was good for me. I loved The Clash, Young Marble Giants, Au Pairs and The Slits. My big sis Jane took me to my first gig at the Electric Ballroom and I loved it.

Jane: The whole music thing exploded when I was a teenager and I was suddenly really into listening to music and going to gigs. At the same time, we went into the sixth form at school and there were all these new exciting people I hadn’t met and was making friends with – mostly Gina and Tracey, actually. Also, there was a great, kicking, local scene. There were local bands everywhere – all over Hatfield and St Albans – and the sort of people I was making friends with were all in bands.

Gina: I’d seen Tracey wandering past my classroom with a Virgin carrier bag and nice shoes, and thought she looked interesting. Somehow we all became friendly and, as I’d been corresponding with Nikki Sudden from Swell Maps, we thought we’d do a fanzine, The Wacky Hop. It was while we were doing this I said to Tracey that I’d like to form a band. We decided one lunchtime to start Marine Girls. We liked fishy-themed stuff and remembered the cartoon Marine Boy with his air bubblegum…

Tracey: Marine Girls first came into existence in 1980. I’d been playing electric guitar in a band called Stern Bops. Later, I started talking to my school friend Gina about us forming our own band. The first thing we recorded was for a friend’s compilation tape of local bands, 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. Then I recruited Jane to play bass. Jane wrote songs too, so that doubled the amount of stuff we had to play. We didn’t know anyone who could play drums so we decided to take our cue from Young Marble Giants and play minimalist quiet music. Colossal Youth was our favourite record.

Jane: It was poetry that brought Tracey and me together; we got into this thing where we’d show each other what we’d written. I didn’t feel like a musician in any shape or form, but I was happy to make stuff up on a bass. It was taking completely the opposite approach to cello lessons, where my music teacher had gone, “I think it’s time you give up”.

Alice: It was at a time when everyone bought second-hand guitars and taught themselves to play. It was pointed out to us later that we were the only all-girl band. It wasn’t unusual to us, since we were at an all-girl school. We had to be a bit leery at gigs to combat sexism and the sweet image we disliked.

Jane: We were up to our necks in that DIY culture. People would do gigs in the local village hall after the jumble sale. I was obsessed with music: every bit of money that came my way was spent on it – including school dinner money.

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“Some girls are really obvious/And with a sidelong glance/You see them smile at every word you say” – ‘Tonight?’

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Jane: What would happen was that Tracey might have a guitar part, and I would hum along to it and translate it on to the bass. Then I’d put a sticker on my bass fret where that tune started, and learn where I had to put my fingers. Eventually, I got used to the sound that each note produced and was able to find my way around it quicker. Some people say it sounds dubby – and that’s interesting because the guy who picked up on us first of all, Patrick, was a serious reggae fan. At the time I didn’t get it – I was interested in tunes.

Gina: We did our first cassette tape A Day By The Sea, 50 copies, by ourselves on a ropey reel-to-reel tape recorder from my mum’s work (they repaired them). We had a track ‘Hate The Girl’ on a Hertford compilation record put together by Mark Flunder.

Mark Flunder: It was originally just Gina and Tracey. They put out a song about the Spanish Civil War on a tape of Hertford bands in 1980. They sounded pretty much like Marine Girls – Gina had very girly vocals, so un-rock’n’roll, and Tracey had that folky voice and lightly strummed an electric guitar. Then we did an compilation LP Rupert Preaching At A Picnic that we ran off ourselves, influenced by Peel and DIY. A friend had an eight-track tape recorder and we blagged a basement in an art centre, got 20 bands in a weekend to record. We weren’t so discerning, there weren’t enough of us so we included the old hippies – they were 19, we were 18.

Gina: Then we put out (I think) Beach Party on a cassette through In Phaze and spent some lovely days colouring in the front covers at Rough Trade, who’d agreed to sell it.

Tell us about the shed where Beach Party was recorded.

Alice: Small, smelly, hot, intense, wooden but there and great.

Gina: The shed was at the bottom of the garden of a Thirties semi-detached house in Ilford. It was the home of Pat Bermingham whose job was driving very high cranes, but he also owned the record label In Phaze. He recorded our album there. To get to the shed you had to go through the kitchen, past Pat’s mum who always tried to get us to have a cup of tea or something to eat.

Mark: I put them on locally, and got people very angry with me – saying don’t put them on again. It was a similar thing with Young Marble Giants in Cardiff until they got in the NME. Beach Party wasn’t actually recorded in Pat’s shed. They rang me up and said they didn’t want to do it there, so I found some mates whose parents were away, and they did it in their front room – most of it, and finished it off in the shed.

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It was Heather’s voice that drew me in to Beat Happening – that, and the simple graphics: the cat on the spaceship! I’ve always preferred female singers. I was a big fan of Tracey Thorn’s Marine Girls and their offshoot [Jane and Alice’s] Grab Grab The Haddock, too, bands ‘Foggy Eyes’ reminded me of. I responded to the minimal instrumentation. I’ve always hated extraneous noise, especially unnecessary drumming.
(Careless Talk Costs Lives, 2001)

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Gina: Somehow Mark had got TV Personalities to play at the local college. His band was the support and we were, too. Dan Treacy heard us, and Pat and Dan seemed to agree that he’d release Beach Party as a record. We had little or no say into any of it, just happy to be doing an LP with Dan.

Mark: They did some really good little gigs, Buntingford fire station, Lemsford village hall… Then I blagged the student union in Hertford to let me put on gigs – and I put on TVPs with Patrik Fitzgerald and Marine Girls for 50p, and introduced [TVPs singer] Dan Treacy to them.

Alice: Dan is a knock-kneed simpering hypocrite. Jane remembers more details than me.

Mark: Dan liked them, reissued Beach Party on his label Whaaam!, and ended up selling it to Cherry Red. It’s groovy those sounds have been out there for 25 years even if the people involved don’t get remunerated properly. Gina gets 1/2p every CD. They sell them for what… £13? It goes against the whole tape scene that started it off. But it’s nice this home-grown music can still inspire people and enrich their lives. Marine Girls’ music was so fresh and non-rock’n’roll. It wasn’t contrived in any way. It was honest. It had what was good about real rock’n’roll in there. You don’t have to have long hair and leather jackets. It was refreshing they were women doing it, as well. It didn’t matter.”

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This is a child’s cornucopia of found sound. Bedroom magic orchestrated silences: like the delicate fragile seven-inch singles Jane, Marine Girls and Sarah Goes Shopping released in the early Eighties; like waking up every morning and spotting wonderment in the way the grey clouds shudder.
(Review of Transistor Six’s Johnny, Where’s My Purse, CTCL, 2002)

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How did Beach Party develop?

Jane: Quite often words first, then a tune. Tracey and I would often write together, although we took separate authorship of the songs that we’d instigated. As I got a bit more confident then I would say, “This is what I’d like the guitar to do”.

Gina: Jane and Tracey came up with the songs and then we’d all fiddle around with them and decide who would sing what. We had a lot of conversations at Jane’s house chatting about the songs and making flapjack mixture, then we’d practise them at the Water Board social clubrooms (Jane’s dad worked for the water board).

Tracey: We did our first ever London gig at the Moonlight Club in West Hampstead, supporting Felt. The night before three other Cherry Red artists had played there, including [future EBTG member] Ben Watt. I missed his gig that night, but he came to the Marine Girls gig the next night. We released a single ‘On My Mind’, which made single of the week in the NME. At some point, Gina left the band and Alice became the main singer.

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“Another Friday evening/Staying in tonight/I say I don’t want to see you/You can’t believe you’ve heard me right/it’s not that I don’t love you/It’s not that I don’t care/It’s just that I’ve had enough of/The same old places, yeah” – ‘Fridays’

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What was your relationship with the musical climate Marine Girls existed in? Did you have peers?

Jane: We were just doing what we could… in an environment that was massively stimulating and empowering. It was kind of that combination of it being when, mid-to-late 18s, you’re suddenly going, ‘Oh my God’. We were in the position to go out into the world, and there was really exciting stuff happening. The whole idea of pop stars had been blown to pieces. It was amazing.

Gina: We were very insular, in a good way. We were us and that was all that counted. Also, most of the other bands were male, and most females were older than us. When you’re 17, someone who’s 20 is light years away from you. The only other female bands at the time were The Modettes (older than us), Dolly Mixture (older and too Sounds), The Raincoats (too old), The Slits (too old). It was a lot of fun. My A-levels suffered badly!

Alice: The musical climate was hilarious, both competitive and patronising. We did gigs with varied groups; The Damned, Roman Holiday, Orange Juice, Monochrome Set (very cool), Colour Field. Gary Glitter chatted me up in a recording studio lounge. Luckily, I used it as an opportunity to take the piss out of ‘The Leader’… looking back, what a letch! I was 15!

Tracey: In October 1981, I left home to go to Hull University, 300 miles away. Marine Girls kept going, but only in the holidays. We did more gigs, bigger ones. We recorded another album, Lazy Ways, produced by Stuart Moxham of Young Marble Giants. We did an interview with 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. Marine Girls did their last gig in Glasgow. It was summer 1983. We were drifting apart. Alice’s boyfriend had somehow tagged onto the band playing percussion. We did an awful gig, no one listened to us and we had an argument backstage. It was the perfect excuse to split up, so we did.

Alice: Marine Girls split because Tracey was too square. Jane and I were at art school in Brighton. Tracey wanted to write ballads for estate agents. Jane wanted to throw ping-pong balls onto xylophones. I wanted to do big paintings and make films. The reason Tracey gives about the split, involving my then boyfriend, is total crap. It never happened.

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Forget Belle & Sebastian, already. This is so sweet, shy, and soulful. Dub, like dub has always been played by Marine Girls fans.
(Review of The Microphones’ Tests, The Stranger, March 1999)

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In retrospect, what is it about your music that keeps it going?

Jane: It’s a type of rawness, a type of energy, and a type of raw teenage emotion. I can’t even remember the last time I listened to it, but there’s something refreshing about it, and we weren’t conscious of it at the time.

Gina: It was heartfelt. The sound was clear and true. And it doesn’t date, because it’s about the things that affected us – things that don’t change.

Alice: You know the answer to that better than me. I am amazed at how it does.  Kirk Cobaine (sic) put us in his Top 25 Albums list in his diaries! I haven’t done a gig for 17 years, yet often people say to me, “Were you in the Marine Girls? I loved them”. It is very soulful and human. We deliberately kept in the sounds of fingers on frets, and breaths in singing, and the out-of-tune bits.

Tracey has said that your sea imagery is incidental, but there are direct references…

Jane: It isn’t coincidental at all. I was very taken up by this whole idea of being the Marine Girls. We used to play the Marine Boy theme tune. Marine Boy was a cartoon about a boy who could swim under water with Oxy-gum, which he chewed and allowed him to breath without apparatus. I used the idea of the sea to write some of the songs, like ‘20,000 Leagues [Under The Sea]’. We’d have plastic lobsters and blow-up dolphins on stage. Once, we were billed with this punk band called The Deranged at Welwyn Garden City, and we’d spent a day in Southend, me, Alice and Tracey, and brought back bucketfuls of seaweed. We threw it at The Deranged as they’d changed their lyrics to be extremely heinous about us. We had fun bags full of stickers. We had this thing called Colin the Cod. We made stickers with fish on them…

Gina: We all loved the seaside. I was born in Clacton. Mods kept me awake at night on the seafront on their scooters. Being a Marine Girl made us love it more. Jane and me always drew sea-related stuff. We liked the tackier side of things, rock breakfasts on plates, etc. Maybe Tracey couldn’t help herself. It had got into her…

Alice: It was good for jokes, and I like the mystery of the deep blue sea. We had a group of punks turn up to a gig in a cardboard boat once and dance in it all night.

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“Thinking of the jokes we used to have/Wondering if we’re laughing at them now/Somehow don’t see how we can be/So what’s a smile between us now” – ‘Times We Used To Spend’

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Your opinions on Tracey?

Jane: I wasn’t interested in taking the path she took. I was never resentful, either. I never wanted to be a pop star. I just wanted to be in a band and be adventurous.

Gina: I still love her voice, and I played A Distant Shore over and over again when it came out. Whatever she does, even if some things are a bit bland, she has a great voice.

Alice: Square, mainstream, should write a novel, and leave the Rod Stewart covers to Fame Academy contestants.

Anything else you want to add?

Alice: Being a Marine Girl was the best way to be a teenager. I loved it. My life was shit, but gigs were good. If you’re interested in what a Marine Girl does next, watch my short film Degrees Of Separation.

Gina: I’m an art technician at Broxbourne School, in Hertfordshire. I deal in second-hand, vintage clothes. I do my own art, but haven’t done much musically recently. I want to. Everything went on hold after having a daughter who’s now 12. It’s a long hold…

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It’s taken the entire two-year run of Careless Talk to find a contemporary band as wonderful as Marine Girls – minimal, not easily given over to embarrassment about their perceived lack of conventional training, gorgeous two- (and three-) part female harmonies, songs written in under two minutes, soaring violin, whistling, the barest of bare percussion (blocks, shakers, handclaps), infectious sense of humour, enough Pop knowledge to cover TV Personalities and Billy Childish, songs that double up as diaries and are all the more charming for it.
(ET on Lesbo Pig, Careless Talk Costs Lives, September 2003)

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Jane Fox interview conducted by Jon Falcone.

Tracey Thorn quotes taken from the Everything But The Girl website.