CW - I don't think we're much further forward at all really, though I don't know if we're any further back either. The sexism doesn't seem to have changed much, which is rather depressing, and I don't see rise of celebrity culture - so even bands who aren't that big are in the tabloids, & that merging of celebrity, so it doesn't matter if someone's a musician or a model or just has rich parents, it's all equally valid - as a good thing especially. Capitalism, I don't know, the ability to record at home and upload songs yourself is changing the model, and majors obviously aren't doing fantastically well at the moment, but I think they're a bit like the banks really, they'll find a way to make money, it might just not be the same way - it will be sponsorship, merchandise, ads... none of which is good, as it will mean bands have to conform to what Heinz want or something. Interesting times though.
MH - Although I agree that the sexism is still ever-present, certainly in terms of power structures and some pretty unreconstructed attitudes from the male side, I think one thing that most definitely *has* changed is that it no longer occurs to girls that they can't be in a band as equals of boys. Although the whole scene Sarah emerged from is generally perceived as being self-consciously non-macho, and the antithesis of all the old rock'n'roll cliches, the accepted line-up for a band in the late eighties was still four blokes, or maybe three blokes and a girl on vocals with a tambourine. I think that's changed. Plenty of all-boy "gangs" still exist, and probably always will, but there are now vast numbers of bands where the gender mix seems genuinely random, as it would be in any group of friends.
I don't think that's particularly a change in the music industry, though - I think it's a reflection of the fact that kids get into "cool" music far younger these days, before sexism's had a chance to stick its boot in, and I think one big reason for that is the internet. I'm sure when I was a teenager, if you wanted to find out about non-chart music, you had to listen to John Peel or buy the NME... and both of those things were seen as the preserve of the earnest Sixth Form Boy. Now, everybody swaps e-mails and mp3s and checks out MySpace the moment they hit their teens, and the whole thing is a lot less elitist and more egalitarian.
My 17-year-old cousin Sally downloads music and goes to gigs and I don't think for one minute it occurs to her that she shouldn't because she's a girl. I'm also sure it also wouldn't occur to her not to pick up a guitar and form a band. How she might thereafter get treated by "the biz" and "the media" and "the soundman" might then be a throwback to the bad old days, but I genuinely think it's an important change. Bear in mind I'm making this theory up as I go along and I am not, nor have ever been, a 17-year-old girl.
The music press were initially very supportive of your releases (three singles of the week in either the NME or Melody Maker is that right?). Did their attitude change? Why do you think that was?
CW - I don't think they ever were really supportive, it was just one or two people, who were usually quite junior freelancers initially. It was mostly Bob Stanley at the outset, I think he gave us all those Singles of the Week. I suppose you do something extreme like award 3 Singles of the Week in one issue to one label when something's new and exciting, not when it's 8 years old. Everett True gave us a full page in Melody Maker quite early too. We continued to have supporters on the press, all the way through, but always more many detractors. Or just people who wanted to slag the records off because they had an impression about us. It wasn't really very fair on the bands in some ways, but I think the upsides of being on the label outweighed it generally. At least the records got noticed and reviewed.
MW - There was more than one writer who, having given one of our records a good review, refused to write about another, because he feared being tagged as "a Sarah person" - again, something which clearly never worried him when writing about Creation or Sub Pop. The problem with all reviews (as I'm sure you know!) is that one review, no matter how good, doesn't really affect sales - you need a constant drip of good reviews, or even just any sort of review, in order to get through to people, and we just never got that - we just had isolated moments. A couple of reviews probably sum the situation up: Heavenly's first single was dismissed by NME as "like all other Sarah releases, this features a twee female vocal" - it was actually the first single we'd ever released with a lead female vocal! And the Field Mice's last single, Missing the Moon, picked up Single of the Week in NME because the reviewer, coming from a "dance" background, had never heard of us or the band, so just judged it on what he heard - and what he heard was a "perfect mix of acid house and pop" (or words to that effect), when the regular reviewers would just have heard jangly guitars (despite the fact it didn't have any) and probably a twee female vocal.
