Elastica with Miranda Sawyer

Boots on the ground from Notting Hill, Yasi unpacks the inimitable Elastica with music journalist Miranda Sawyer. Thanks to their angular, concise music, incredible style, and unapologetic live chops, they seized charts and stages on both sides of the Atlantic in their short but mighty tenure as a band. Miranda puts it best: “Elastica were everyone’s favorite.” CREDITS: Host: Yasi Salek @yasisalek Guest: Miranda Sawyer @msmirandasawyer Producer: Liz Sánchez Audio Editor: Adrian Bridges Additional Production Supervision: Justin Sayles Theme Song: Bethany Cosentino Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Look, it's not that confusing. I'm Rob Harvilla, host of the podcast 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, except we did 120 songs. And now we're back with the 2000s. I refuse to say aughts. 2000 to 2009. The Strokes, Rihanna, J Lo, Kanye, sure. And now the show is called 60 Songs That Explain the 90s: The 2000s. Wow. That's too long a title for me to say anything else right now. Just trust me. That's 60 Songs That Explain the 90s: The 2000s, preferably on Spotify.

• 0:36Speaker 01

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• 1:07Speaker 02

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• 1:38Speaker 03

  What's with this band, anyway? I don't get it. Can you please explain? Wait, like, Bandplain? Never heard this band in my life. Oh, you haven't? I'd love that. Really? Why? Yeah, I love this song. Oh, I don't know that one. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain. I really hate this band! Whatever, I'm their biggest fan. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain. Bandplain!

• 2:17Yasi Salek?

  Hello and welcome to the last episode of the quote unquote "British" season of Vansplain in Knit. I am your host, Yasi Salek. This is a show where I invite an expert guest on to help me explain a cult band or iconic artist. Today's episode is about Elastica. If you've never heard Elastica, you might not understand how a heart is a spade, but somehow the vital connection is made.

• 2:53Yasi Salek?

  My guest today, returning graciously for the third time, really the MVP of this season about Britain, Ms. Miranda Sawyer, welcome back to the program. I did force you and I'm so sorry.

• 3:08Speaker 05

  No, it's completely fine, Yasi. You didn't force me. I was definitely up for talking about Elastica, so there's absolutely no problem.

• 3:15Yasi Salek?

  That's what you love more than anything is just constantly talking about 30 years ago with an American person. You guys, something really exciting, though. We are reporting live from London. This is the most authentic episode of the whole season because I am boots on the ground in Notting Hill, which might not make sense for any other band, but it at least makes sense for Justine Fishman, and we'll get into it.

• 3:46Speaker 05

  Definitely does.

• 3:47Yasi Salek?

  Shout out Richard Curtis. And shout out the Laslet Hotel. You guys, I love it here. It's one of the best places in the world. I'd love to just live in this hotel. Miranda, before we get started, I don't have... Well, I do, it's on the bed, I can reach behind me. Your wonderful book, Uncommon People, Britpop and Beyond in 20 Songs. In the Elastica chapter, it starts out so fabulous because it starts out, honestly, Elastica were everyone's favorite. We loved them. So I was like, oh, you're the perfect... You're perfect to come on here. Why was Elastica everyone's favorite?

• 4:28Speaker 05

  Because they were women is part of it, like, that's definitely part of it. So like, if you were a a woman in the nineties, it's quite interesting going back to the nineties because you didn't quite realise it at the time, but obviously you're swimming in a particular kind of pool, you're making your way through a particular life and that life without you knowing it was pretty sexist and it was actually quite sexist, even within indie music, which is possibly somewhere that's, you know, naturally less sexist than the outside world. It was still, there's quite a lot of sexist tropes around and you had to kind of battle your way through. And Elastica were just really good because they made really great music. There were three women in there. They were really cool. They could, they could do it live.

• 5:12Speaker 05

  They were just really, it was just really exciting to see cool women. And Justine in particular, and Don, I mean, all of them. That wasn't something that you were offered that much. I mean, obviously somebody like Debbie Harry was cool, but like there weren't that many kind of British women who were cool like that, not since punk, you know?

• 5:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, totally. And also, like, I think, obviously, like, we don't want to, like, erase Lush or Sleeper, or, I mean, there's, there was plenty of probably like bands with women fronting them or in them. It's just Elastica really made it too. Like, they were considered in the top echelon with all the other, with the labs, whereas some of these other bands, while they're amazing, never really reached that height.

• 5:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's very true. And they were kind of, they, they kind of sparked into action incredibly quickly, which we'll go into, I'm sure, but like, because they happened really, really quick. It was like a kind of firework going off. And they were successful in America, all these kind of things that just didn't happen to all the, all the other bands. You know, you'd have a band like, say, Garbage, which is obviously arguably not Britpop, does have a British person in there.

• 6:20Yasi Salek?

  Sure, sure.

• 6:22Speaker 05

  You know, like, and Shirley Manson, incredibly cool person, making really great music. But they were kind of in America. Do you know what I mean?

• 6:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, Garbage was like Radiohead, where they were kind of like, I don't almost even consider them in this milieu, even though they're, of course, from Britain, but like, they immediately just made it in America. Let's just get started. Let's get going.

• 6:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:46Yasi Salek?

  We're going to start, obviously, with Justine Eleanor Freshman, born September sixteenth, nineteen sixty nine, a Virgo in Twickenham.

• 6:54Speaker 05

  Twickenham. You don't do the H.

• 6:58Yasi Salek?

  Oh, I know. I asked, I went on Soho Radio Station and I asked for an herbal tea and the guy was like, herbal tea. And I was like, okay, now you say the H. I don't understand. What is the, so it's Twickenham, but it's herbal tea. Like, I'm sorry, I can't get with the program here. I don't understand.

• 7:14Yasi Salek?

  You guys, I'm not pointing fingers, but I know some of you didn't listen to this Wade episode. And that's okay. I know some of you are just like, I love Elastica and I don't want to listen to this episode. So I'm just gonna say, for those of you that did listen to this Wade episode, which is phenomenal, sound issues aside, Miranda was the guest. We're gonna retread a little bit here because, as most of you might know, Justine Freshman was originally an original member of Suede. But that's not, we're not there yet. We're literally just talking about how she was the daughter of Willem Freshman, who was a Hungarian refugee and a Holocaust survivor, who was at Auschwitz and was orphaned at 14. And apparently, I read this in, I think it was John Harris's book,

• 7:57Yasi Salek?

  that he only ever talked about his experiences there once. And he actually apparently got angry at Justine for talking about that. Like, he was just like, very much like, I don't, like, we don't talk about that.

• 8:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I think it's interesting that, isn't it? Like, I mean, obviously, obviously, some people talked about it, some people didn't. But it's because Justine, I think, got kind of slated for being a certain class. And so she was trying to say, yeah, my, actually, my father was a Holocaust survivor and he was really upset at her for using it in that way.

• 8:28Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, totally. Which, I mean, I can totally see both sides, right? You're like, again, I love Justine Freshman so much, but also because I obviously see a lot of myself in, or, you know, like, that's why we love people or hate them. But I think it's worth mentioning that while there's probably a difference between being like, the daughter of seven generations of landed gentry, and being the daughter and raised by a immigrant Holocaust survivor who was an orphan, who married, I think her mother was also-

• 9:01Speaker 05

  She was Russian, wasn't she, I think?

• 9:03Yasi Salek?

  Russian, and who had, like, they had, her family had come to Scotland and they had, like, a store. You know, so it's like a real, her father was like a real bootstrap situation, like, went to school and made himself who he was. And he became, he was an engineer, structural engineer, and I think, I think also an architect. And he became the chairman of his own company, the Pell Freshman Company, and he became very wealthy.

• 9:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, they would.

• 9:29Yasi Salek?

  Good on him, babe. The American dream, but in the, uh, maybe not the English dream, but you know, definitely the American dream. Justine was the second child. She had an older brother named Richard, who's eight years older. She said in The Guardian, two thousand two, my background is quite, quite different to anyone else I know. And that my father is an incredibly positive, ambitious, world embracing person. And seeing that has been really important to me, which is why I try not to drag him into the pathetic little world of the music business.

• 9:59Yasi Salek?

  Good, good for her. So Twickenham is, is that like kind of new money area of West London?

• 10:06Speaker 05

  That's interesting. It kind of is and it isn't. So Twickenham is mostly known, um, for, it has a stadium and the stadium is to do with rugby. We don't like rugby. Okay.

• 10:16Yasi Salek?

  Why? Because of Australia?

• 10:18Speaker 05

  Oh, I just don't like it. Rugby is posh and it's like full of people you wouldn't like. A yasay I can say.

• 10:23Yasi Salek?

  Do you know that I played rugby in high school? How do you feel now? I was the captain.

• 10:28Speaker 05

  I can just tell by the way you dress that you did not play rugby.

• 10:32Yasi Salek?

  It was Singapore, so I don't think maybe it felt, fell under the same, uh, rules and regulations of England, uh, in terms of like who it was for, because it wasn't very posh, but I just liked it because you got to like rough up other people, you know?

• 10:44Speaker 05

  Okay, yeah, that's quite fun. But like, I mean, there's different versions of rugby and up north, there's a different version, which is not posh, but generally in the Twickenham area.

• 10:53Yasi Salek?

  Got it. Okay. Then it was like lacrosse. Right. Okay.

• 10:57Speaker 05

  And so that I always think of kind of rugby around that it's quite, it's suburban, it's, it's quite well off. You need money to live there now. I'm not saying that you necessarily did when they moved there, but you definitely do now. It's got nice schools, it's got nice countryside. Do you know what I mean? And yet you're kind of within, you're kind, you're kind of within London, I suppose, really.

• 11:15Yasi Salek?

  Right. Okay. So it's like, it's London, but it's like a more posh suburb.

• 11:20Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm, I hesitate to call it London, but it is London in the way that like Harrow is London. It's like on the edge of some like, you know, some, uh, some kind of train line and tube line is Twickenham.

• 11:34Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. They lived in a house constructed to her father's design. Cool.

• 11:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 11:40Yasi Salek?

  She went to the secondary school called Saint Paul's Hammersmith. And even though she was very posh, she said she experienced, actually, this is John Harris's words, not hers, a very English kind of antisemitism, vague frostiness and mumbled quips rather than any outright hostility.

• 12:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, interesting. Saint Paul's is definitely a very high achieving school for well brought up, intelligent women, do you know what I mean? I mean, it's like, it's.

• 12:12Yasi Salek?

  It's a girls' school.

• 12:13Speaker 05

  It's a girls' school, there's a boys' school as well, but yeah, I'm not surprised by that. Most people who would go there would have been kind of hothoused from the age of, I don't know, five to get in there, you know?

• 12:24Yasi Salek?

  Wow, yeah, and probably Christian.

• 12:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 12:27Yasi Salek?

  Justine said, out of a year of sixty, there were probably three or four Jewish girls, and there was, there were an awful lot of snobby families sending their kids there, so I was aware of not being quite the ticket. We were definitely new money. My dad had built himself a really wild looking, modern house in Twickenham, and all those people lived in Kensington in huge old family heirlooms. I remember having birthday parties and people coming to pick their children up and looking around, really not very keen.

• 12:51Speaker 05

  That's so funny, isn't it? That she was brought up in this, you know, I imagine a really, because everything about her is cool. You imagine that's really cool house in a lovely area, and then you go to Kensington, and Kensington, yeah, it's old money, you know, it, it's definitely old money, and the difference between those two things is quite interesting, really.

• 13:07Yasi Salek?

  Aren't human beings so amazing? Like, within any, within any group, they'll find a way to hate one part of it. Like, no matter how much you segment people, they will find a way to, like, put other people down. It's the, it's the real human condition. So she started playing guitar and writing songs at the age of eleven. I could not get any information about why that happened.

• 13:28Speaker 05

  You know, people mythologize their own lives, don't they? But there's, there was always the idea that she didn't know loads about music when she met Brett. She brought the art side and the others, do you know what I mean?

• 13:38Yasi Salek?

  Which is what we talked about in Swede, but now I have, I have some holes to poke in that with my elastic research. Because, okay, here's what she said. At thirteen, she got glandular fever.

• 13:51Speaker 05

  We were always getting glandular fever. It's a big one.

• 13:55Yasi Salek?

  It sounds like scurvy or something like, do we even have that anymore? Did we not cure it with vitamin C? I don't know what's going on.

• 14:02Speaker 05

  It is funny because I don't think either of my kids have ever had that thing of like, oh, he's got glandular fever. It was like a thing that somebody got and they would just seem to be off school. If you got glandular fever, you were off school for quite a while, like four weeks. It was quite serious.

• 14:14Yasi Salek?

  She missed six months, she said. She missed six months of school. But that's when she began listening to Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and James Taylor. Okay, fine. That fits into the story we got told by Brad Anderson. Cause I think he said that she only knew like some folk music and like, you know, Estrid Gilberto or whatever.

• 14:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:33Yasi Salek?

  But then she said in Smash Hits in nineteen ninety four. And I came out the other side completely unable to cope with social situations. Then I discovered The Smiths and that really didn't help a great deal. I started writing poetry. I used to bastardize lyrics and make them into poems. Joni Mitchell, Bowie, no, I couldn't bear to tell you. Okay, so she knew about The Smiths.

• 14:54Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 14:55Yasi Salek?

  Of her own volition.

• 14:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, everybody. I mean, you know, it's like a basic text. The Smiths, do you know what I mean? Like you just couldn't be, she's two years younger than me and you couldn't be our age. And like into music and not know The Smiths. It would just be impossible somehow.

• 15:10Yasi Salek?

  But I guess like the implication from the suede story was that she wasn't into music, right? So like now I'm kind of like, hmm. And then I'm like, oh, Justine, you wily character, you're so smart. Were you playing four dimensional chess with Brad Anderson the whole time? Were you like, no, me? I don't know. I don't know anything. Please teach me because men love that, you know?

• 15:31Speaker 05

  Especially about The Smiths, given that it's suede.

• 15:35Yasi Salek?

  What on earth? She was like, no, I've never heard of that man. What is his name? Morrissey? Please go on. She also said in Melody Maker in nineteen ninety four, when I was a teenager, I was very inspired by the whole rock and roll mythology. I had all my picture books of Blondie and Bowie, even Duran Duran. These people seem to live on another planet, live in orbit somehow. That whole myth drew me towards wanting to be in a band and to experience the good life. Again, like you said, the we self mythologize, like, who knows if that was actually the twelve year old Justine, or it was.

• 16:05Speaker 05

  It seems likely, though, doesn't it? I mean, I had a poster of Blondie on the wall, my wall. You know, it's like, you're drawn towards it. It's just whether you've got the confidence to think, oh, I could be those people, or whether you're like someone like me thinks I could be maybe right about those people.

• 16:19Yasi Salek?

  Sure, or me, those who can't do, teach and podcast about it forty years later. This was also interesting. I'm really glad I found this. So she also said, life was very, very average until she was sixteen, and that's when her dad made a lot of money. And she said, we were suddenly really rich.

• 16:38Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 16:39Yasi Salek?

  Again, I really relate. And I'm like, because it does make you, it's a little different. Anyways, I don't have her father's financial records in front of me, so I can't, we can neither confirm nor deny this, but you know, I don't think she would say that it wasn't true. This was in Q Magazine nineteen ninety five. Regardless, my takeaway is that she obviously is posh, but comes from a more complicated background than maybe just like a straight up generationally wealthy person in London.

• 17:13Speaker 05

  Definitely. I think it's straight up, it would be very unusual at that time for a straight up generationally wealthy person to want to move into pop music. I don't think that's true now.

• 17:21Yasi Salek?

  Right. They were busy playing rugby and going to the club or whatever.

• 17:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, often to be lawyers.

• 17:28Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so I guess in school, she really excelled in art and wanted to study painting, but her father, immigrant father hive assemble, I know this man, I grew up with this man, was like, no, no, you should study architecture. Justine said, I wanted to go to art college, and he convinced me it was too easy a way out. He thought I'd end up doing nothing. Who amongst us with an immigrant father has wanted to go to art college and been told, no, you will go to business school? Sorry, that was me. That was not Justine. So she goes to University College in London, which is where she meets one Brett Anderson, who was studying, what did we say he was studying? Planning?

• 18:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, town planning.

• 18:03Yasi Salek?

  City planning, town planning, yeah. But they were thrown in with the architect. Texts because there was not that many planners and he said there were so few planners that we were thrown in with the architects. One of them started to catch my eye. She was extremely beautiful in an almost Middle Eastern or Mediterranean way. With long unwashed dark hair cut in a severe fringe. She would always wear scruffy clothes like faded vintage Mickey Mouse T shirts or big clumpy bikers boots. But somehow they just managed to make her look more elegant and moneyed. Coolest person.

• 18:32Speaker 05

  She is cool.

• 18:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, you can just see it, right? You could just be like, oh, like whatever you do, it's just like works.

• 18:38Speaker 05

  Yeah. He also says that really brilliant thing that when she first spoke to him, her voice was so posh that he thought she had a speech impediment.

• 18:49Yasi Salek?

  I literally thought she had also he like Ray Rude was like and that she had brown discolored teeth. He noticed. I was like, okay. English, come on. You shouldn't be surprised. What were you? But yeah, speech impediment. I mean, I've listened to her interviews and stuff. It's not that, is it that crazy?

• 19:07Speaker 05

  It's quite confident and long like like I remember, I think it's actually in that Q interview that you just mentioned where they describe how she says cheers at the end of every at the end of like she'll play a song and then she goes cheers. But because she's posh, it goes chairs. So it's like she's saying chairs.

• 19:28Speaker 05

  And she just is. Yeah, she's got a kind of languid posture that to somebody who is not of any of that Amelia is incredibly cool and slightly intimidating. Do you know what I mean?

• 19:38Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So they have this like, you know, lovely little romance. She starts hanging out with him all the time and is BFF Matt Osman. And it was the three of them that sort of sit around, smoke cigs, talk about music. Brett said, and this is what I was sort of referring to earlier, you guys, Miranda knows because we already did this in this weight episode, but that she had no interest in being in a band whatsoever. It's very strange. When I first met her, the only records she had were Joni Mitchell and things like Astrid Gilberto and Van Morrison. And he was like, no, babe, we're listening to the Happy Mondays. And the fall, which is quite cool, actually, and it's it is totally possible that she had never heard the Happy Mondays or the Fall.

• 20:20Yasi Salek?

  And she taught him about, like we said, art, how to gain pleasure, in his words, from being near beautiful things. Modernism, appreciating spaces.

• 20:30Speaker 05

  Being near beautiful things like Justine.

• 20:33Yasi Salek?

  Like myself, yeah, being around beautiful things like myself. It's actually really, I I really love it because. And this is both to me a nineties thing and a British thing is that she's Justine is like obviously striking and gorgeous. But she's not conventionally beautiful, you know, like in the sense of like Kate Moss or something or like some sort of like a like a blonde haired, blue eyed like.

• 20:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 20:59Yasi Salek?

  There's something more like Angelica Huston-y, like handsome, striking about her.

• 21:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it depends what you like, what you think of as beautiful. I mean, she was. She was really, really beautiful anyway, but also she had, she's got character in her face, doesn't she?

• 21:17Yasi Salek?

  Character. And also she obviously had a presence and a charisma that you can't really quantify and or like even really see in a three two dimensional photo.

• 21:25Speaker 05

  But yeah, she was, yeah, she was completely gorgeous and not in a kind of like, yeah, exactly, not in a kind of, I'm gonna dress in a cute. Dress and straighten my hair and like she wasn't like that at all. She was always really scruffy, which is amazing.

• 21:39Yasi Salek?

  That's one of, I mean, again, relatable, relatable queen. So they just, they start a band, they do, the three of them. They eventually recruit Bernard Butler and then after playing with a drum machine for a while, they go for a real drummer. Importantly, briefly, it's Justin Welch.

• 21:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:57Yasi Salek?

  But he has other considerations. So then more permanently becomes Simon Gilbert. Justine said, and they had, the first Soya Show ever was in nineteen ninety and she said that she couldn't see or speak for the whole gig. She was so nervous, like her hands were sweating and she couldn't even open her mouth to the backing vocals. So it's not like she was a natural, you know, that like was like ready to go on stage.

• 22:22Speaker 05

  No. No, she definitely wasn't. I mean, if you see some of those photos of the early Suede as well, they just look hilarious. I mean, she's, I mean, she's got Adidas tracksuit bottoms on, which are always cool. But like, you know, I mean, literally Brett is practically, he's in a hu- a hooded, like kind of, it's not even like a sweatshirt top, it's like a hooded top made of kind of hemp.

• 22:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, they called them something about a children's TV show presenter, but I don't remember the name of it.

• 22:49Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, they said, they said they were like Blue Peter presenters, didn't they? Which is, that's.

• 22:53Yasi Salek?

  Hmm, correct, yeah. And I had to get the four one one on what exactly that meant. All right, an important data point in our Alaska story is that in October of nineteen ninety, Blur released their single She's So High, early baggy Blur.

• 23:21Yasi Salek?

  The next day, Suede opens for them at the Zap Club in Brighton, and this is where Justine first meets Damon Albarn.

• 23:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, and he is rude to her.

• 23:32Yasi Salek?

  And he is rude to her, again, four dimensional chess, though, because Damon had seen Suede before, I learned. And the reason he even had gone that night to see Suede before they played together was that his friend was like, do you want to go and see this band tonight? One of them's a public schoolgirl and she brings all her really nice friends along.

• 23:51Speaker 05

  Sounds about right.

• 23:53Yasi Salek?

  So he was like, oh, so again, maybe a little four dimensional chess here. The way he was rude to her is that Justine actually thought Blur was really good, and so she was like, oh, can I have a Blur poster? And he goes, fucking buy one then.

• 24:04Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 24:05Yasi Salek?

  What?

• 24:06Speaker 05

  It's also quite Damon, I mean, meaning that I think if he likes you, I don't think he's quite often quite rude to you at first. His old school British way of chatting up, do you know what I mean?

• 24:17Yasi Salek?

  Right, got it, got it.

• 24:19Speaker 05

  People, and then you, you know, by the end of the evening, you go to bed.

• 24:23Yasi Salek?

  Wonderful. I love it here. This is where I belong. Um, so, yes, fucking buy one then, but then he became obsessed with her and hunted her down after. She was like, okay. She said, I'd never been pursued like that. Brett and I were breaking up at the time anyway, and Damon didn't stop phoning me. So I met him and he was very forceful and in my face. And on the first night we hung out, he told me I was gonna have his babies. And it all got a bit complicated for a bit. This is interesting now, but given the arc of what happens with Justine's life, and particularly later with Justine and Damon, this is actually very interesting. Things with Brett were not great. She said, she said, I'd done six months in an architecture office and it was horrible. And Brett was at home doing the housework and hoovering and stuff.

• 25:08Yasi Salek?

  And he said, oh yeah, it's gonna be really great when we leave college. You'll be out working as an architect and I'll be in hoovering and making dinner for you. And I was like, mm, that's not gonna happen.

• 25:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's not sexy.

• 25:21Yasi Salek?

  It's not very sexy. So it kind of makes sense that Damon Albarn, one of the most ambitious people in the history of the universe, was appealing to her.

• 25:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, and also there's something, I mean, I think you grow out of this, but um, there's something appealing about somebody saying, we're gonna do, you're like this and I'm like this and we're gonna do this. Do you know what I mean? Obviously, I mean, within, with about, personally, within about 10 minutes, I'm a bit like, actually, I'd rather do my own thing. But like, you know, if you're a kind of time in your life where you're unsure, to meet someone who's so sure is fantastic. Who's so sure that you should be together and this is what's gonna happen and it's gonna be brilliant.

• 25:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And also he looks like, he looks like Damon Albarn.

• 26:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, he was really beautiful. People forget.

• 26:06Yasi Salek?

  I don't know. No one forgets, babe. Everyone remembers very well. His, his, his photos of his youth pop up on my social media algorithms every single day. I'm like, yeah, there he is. So this also begins the bitter blood feud between Damon Albarn and Brett Anderson, which makes for some of the most entertaining and enjoyable parts of the Britpop story. It's not till nineteen ninety one, but Justine goes out for a drink with Damon. And then, in a bizarre twist of events, she soon discovers that Damon Albarn barely knows anything about music. She said, he had about three tapes and one of them was Janis Joplin. He didn't have a clue. He didn't buy any records.

• 26:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's funny that though, isn't it? Because I think there's quite a few bands around that time. That basically presented themselves as saying, you know, what's really interesting about music? I don't know. I'm not interested in music, right? And it's because Damon said that to me. He's like, I don't have any records in my house. I only have books. And like, you know, do you remember he was like, um, he'd have that Penguin, um, Raymond Chandler kind of T-shirt on.

• 27:08Yasi Salek?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 27:08Speaker 05

  And he presented himself like that, but also like the Manic Street Preachers, who were kind of around at that time. They presented themselves as not being interested in indie music at all. They were only interested in Guns N' Roses and Public Enemy.

• 27:23Yasi Salek?

  That's so fucking cool, actually.

• 27:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's absolutely brilliant, but it's not true. I mean, they listen to the Smiths. Of course they listen to the Smiths. Everybody listens to the Smiths. So it's a bit like kind of re. It's like repurposing your past, because everybody who was interested in music probably, you know, listened to the Smiths or whoever. But then, when you're meeting journalists or presenting yourself in the world, you're saying, I'm not interested in any of that music. I'm new and original. And the reason why I am is because I read books or I only listen to Guns N' Roses or whatever, you know?

• 27:53Yasi Salek?

  I actually love it. I think we've gone too far in the direction of authenticity and we need to go back to lying. We need to go back to just full lying and self-mythologizing. It's more interesting.

• 28:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, and the nineties is full of that, let's face it. We love it.

• 28:07Yasi Salek?

  So good, because also they couldn't like fact check you. Now people will be like, well, I found this photo of you on the internet. Where you're holding a Smiths album, wearing a Morrissey T-shirt and you're like. God damn it. This was, I'm sorry, I just have to say it because I did find it funny. While she loved Damon and the music of Blur, she was not exactly keen on the rest of the band. She said, "I thought they were a bit," word we don't use anymore that starts with an R, "they were like children." Bernard Butler had been a bit odd, but Matt and Brett were really cool, very bright, very easygoing, and Blur weren't childish, drunk, not scary, just pathetic. "I loved Graham's guitar playing, but I thought he was a prat. But Damon was sufficiently interesting to keep me going.

• 28:52Yasi Salek?

  I thought the band were really good. I thought they were more musically gifted than Suede. The songs were stronger, and the guitar playing was better, and the harmonies were there."

• 29:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's interesting. See, I really, Blur, to me, they were, they were obviously intelligent, they were just drunk.

• 29:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 29:11Yasi Salek?

  Because they were too wasted. And they were real, from, again, I wasn't there, but from what I've read, it sounds like they were real, real drunk, like falling over, knocking things over, sloshing around drunk. So like, maybe she was like, "Oh, these people are remedial."

• 29:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, messy.

• 29:29Speaker 01

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• 30:30Yasi Salek?

  For their part, though, the rest of Blur also maybe side-eyed Justine as well. Alex James is quoted as saying, "We were very impressed by how rich she was." Damon's posh, his dad ran an art department, but they were cash-rich. I think she had an agenda, possibly. "I don't want to rattle any cages, don't you, babe? You're rattling so hard. You're holding on to the cage and everything." I think she thought Damon could help her career, shall we say. So that's what, that's the vibes that was going into John Harris's book in 2003. They also had an open relationship, which we mentioned in the Blur episode, but Justine said, "We had quite an unusual relationship. We saw ourselves as being quite modern and not affected by the same rules as everyone else. The open thing does nothing for me, but there was no choice.

• 31:15Yasi Salek?

  If you're with Damon, you're going to be in an open relationship."

• 31:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, they were young as well. And also, they were in bands. It's really difficult and they were, you know, touring and they ended up, like, you know, all in different places. I think it's possibly very hard to keep a monogamous relationship in that. But they were very devoted to each other, it's just that.

• 31:33Yasi Salek?

  Sure, it's just a modern love.

• 31:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:36Yasi Salek?

  Now, it's April of 1981. Blur hits the top 10 with their second single, "There's No Other Way." Honestly, a great song. Brett finally moves out of Justine's house because she's finally, she's obviously with Damon and they have the breakup. It's quite difficult and devastating, but I won't belabor this point. Here is Justine's first major act of shaping music as we know it.

• 32:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, leaving.

• 32:05Yasi Salek?

  Leaving, because her leaving really lit a fire under the ass of Brett Anderson and the rest of the band really coalesced and we would not have gotten the swayed that we got without Justine leaving Brett Anderson.

• 32:18Speaker 05

  Completely, because also, like, it's not just the fact that he had now had something to write about, you know, his heart was broken.

• 32:24Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 32:25Speaker 05

  Plus, he had to make rent.

• 32:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. He didn't, he couldn't live at Justine's flat anymore.

• 32:29Speaker 05

  Couldn't live at Justine's anymore. And also, her leaving kind of removed a slight aspect to Suede's songs, which we forget, which were, there were slightly... Not completely elastic, but maybe a bit more fall sounding elements and that was just taken away.

• 32:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, like the metal Mickey of it all was like, yeah, Justine didn't really like the like, very like florid, romantic, gothy threads of Suede. Like she wasn't really into, she wasn't into Bernard Butler doing like

• 32:58Speaker 05

  Twiddly.

• 32:59Yasi Salek?

  Seven hour solos or whatever. Yeah, just like wasn't, it wasn't her thing. And there was a tension there. And then when she left that, the band was able to sort of like reform in a more cohesive way. And I'm, it's not just me saying this. Brett Anderson has gone on record saying it like in his own book and interviews like multiple times. Like he knows it. We all know it. So tick one for my theory that there would be no, there would be no Britpop or many other things without one Justine Eleanor Freshman. Brett did say though, after they played their last show, cause she stayed in the band after they broke up.

• 33:34Speaker 05

  Hmm, bit weird.

• 33:35Yasi Salek?

  And it was, it was her leaving the band, not really her leaving him ultimately that formed all this Suede stuff. But he said, I remember being in the car with her after that gig, which was their last gig with her and her saying that that was it. She didn't want to be in the band anymore. I think she didn't really believe in Suede. I'm not really convinced that she knew how good we were. Justine disagrees, babe. Justine said, I definitely believed in it. I believed in Brett and I thought he was really gifted and I thought that they deserved to get somewhere. We'd get the enemy every week and in it would be another shit band being praised. I was just like, I'm getting out of this because I can't stand anymore. She basically was like, I don't think anything's gonna happen. Not because they're not good, but just because people couldn't recognize it, it sounds like.

• 34:15Speaker 05

  And also being in a band with your ex is just, that's really difficult.

• 34:19Yasi Salek?

  While he's like writing songs about how he hates you and singing them at you at rehearsal. Like, I mean, nobody's that strong, babe.

• 34:28Speaker 05

  And also you got, you slightly got the feeling that Bernard was on his side. Do you know what I mean?

• 34:31Yasi Salek?

  Oh my God, totally. And Bernard was on his side and everyone was just looking at her and she's like, I mean, she said it. She was like, we'd be in rehearsal and then he'd be like singing the song pantomime horse and like looking at me and I'd be like, okay, well, this is fun.

• 34:48Speaker 05

  I'll just be outside.

• 34:56Yasi Salek?

  But amazing last words on Leaving Suede, which were in NME two years later. She said, I was fed up standing at the back, looking like a useless twat when I knew I wasn't. I thought it would be better to be Pete Best rather than Linda McCartney.

• 35:09Speaker 05

  It's very good.

• 35:10Yasi Salek?

  She's so smart. So she reapplied herself to her studies, but then she still had to repeat her third year and she graduated with a two colon one. I'm sorry. I don't know what that is, except that does become a title of an Alaska. So what does that mean?

• 35:28Speaker 05

  It does. Yeah. No, I didn't think of that.

• 35:32Speaker 05

  A two one, if you get a degree, right, in, in the UK, well, no, just probably in, I don't think it's the same in Scotland, but the first is what you can get. That's the highest thing you can get. There's this thing called the second in there is what they call an upper second, which is a two, one, and then there's a lower second, which is a two, two, and then there's a third. So she got like the second highest.

• 35:54Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's good, but it's not like top of, top.

• 35:56Speaker 05

  Yeah. It's not the people who got first were people like Boris bloody Johnson. Do you know what I mean?

• 36:00Yasi Salek?

  Got it. We don't like him. We don't like him. His bad haircut.

• 36:03Speaker 05

  No, he's horrible.

• 36:06Yasi Salek?

  So she gets her two one and then she cuts all her hair off. Major, major point.

• 36:12Speaker 05

  Major. This is a very important point.

• 36:15Yasi Salek?

  Yes, it's very important. Has someone recently cut all her hair off? When cutting your waist length hair to be short is like such a massive shift in how you hold yourself and feel about yourself.

• 36:32Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. See, I think you should unpick more. How do you feel yourself about yourself? Now you've got a Justine haircut.

• 36:39Yasi Salek?

  I mean, at first I had 17 mentee bees, babe, full mental breakdowns. I was like, what have I done? I'm gonna die alone. But it is also a huge release of like the past self because your hair, I really believe, holds so much energy and it's like, how much memories is in that hair? Like, how many ex-boyfriends live in that hair? I need to buy, you know? I, I had to do it. I felt like pulled, you know, like even though I knew it was like, I'm gonna feel crazy. Like, there was no option. I was going insane. I was like making Pinterest boards all day of short haircuts. I was like, I need to cut my hair off. It's ugly. I hate it. And I feel better now. Justine says it later where she's

• 37:19Yasi Salek?

  like, the thinking man is attracted to a woman with short hair, you know? And I was like, so, thinking men, here I am, babe.

• 37:31Yasi Salek?

  March of this year in 92 is when Blur put out Pop Scene, which was like arguably one of the first quote unquote Britpop songs, right?

• 37:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 37:47Yasi Salek?

  What did they called it? New wave of new wave back then? I didn't realize that. Instead of before they started calling it Britpop?

• 37:53Speaker 05

  That kind of was then, kind of wasn't. But I suppose it was just a classic, you know, kind of inky way of like, oh, we've got some new bands, kind of thing. But the idea was, I suppose that it was slightly referencing, it was slightly punky, as opposed to grunge's punk, which is still based in rock. And this is based in new wave, meaning kind of punk really. But yeah, the new wave of the new wave was just such a, but it mostly included, I always associated with this band called, or Smash. I associated with that band. And they were a bit more punky, if you sort of mean, obviously punky.

• 38:28Yasi Salek?

  Got it. This was though Blur's like, actual concerted effort to, when they started to be like, we're gonna be British.

• 38:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, definitely. And that was after they did a, they did a, did kind of disastrous tour of the, of America when nobody wanted to listen to anything other than Nirvana. And they came back and Suede were big and everything was just terrible for them. So they were like, especially Damon, were like, fuck this. We're gonna come back. And they made Modern Life is Rubbish. And the record company didn't like it and said they needed a couple of singles. And I think Pop Scene was one of the ones that they had to then write, but maybe not Pop Scene, but it was a bit, it was like, um, what do you call it? Like a marker card. It was like, we're gonna do this. And even if it fails, we're gonna do this because we think it's right.

• 39:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it was like a manifesto. Like Justine said, literally, they planned it. Like she was like, a plan was hatched. Damon and I felt like we were really in the thick of it at this point. We were both fairly obsessional about the idea of zeitgeist. He'd been brought up by artistic parents who were interested in the way culture works, and we talked about it a lot. And somewhere along the line, it occurred to us that Nirvana were out there and people were very interested in American music. And there should be some sort of manifesto for the return of Britishness. We didn't think Nirvana said anything to us about our lives. I wasn't remotely interested. That's where the manifesto comes from.

• 39:49Speaker 05

  Yeah. And it's not just them. I mean, you know, because that's why it ends up with, you know, Select doing a kind of Britpop cover and everything, you know, it's just, it wasn't just them feeling that. That's the point of.

• 39:58Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 39:59Speaker 05

  Especially, it's quite hard, you know, Zeitgeist sounds a bit naff, I suppose, really. But, but like, if you think pre-internet. In fact, I actually remember talking to Justine about this. She was the first person who said these words to me, which these words were morphic resonance. Do you know that?

• 40:15Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 40:16Speaker 05

  It's so Justine. Of course, I didn't know what this was.

• 40:18Yasi Salek?

  She's so smart.

• 40:19Speaker 05

  She's so smart. But it's the idea that like, a kid in Peru will say, will tell the same joke as a kid in England, and you don't know, really know why, because it's pre-internet. So you don't know why that happens.

• 40:31Yasi Salek?

  Isn't that kind of what zeitgeist is?

• 40:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it's like, she called it morphic resonance because she's super clever. So like, it it's the idea that certain things just happen across across lots of different areas. But obviously, within Britain, the reason why a zeitgeist or a morphic resonance might happen is because actually you've all got the same or a certain group of people got the same cultural references. You grow up with the same things. You know what you think is important and those things do kind of come together to form a kind of manifesto and it might be Justine and Damon's manifesto, but probably I would share in that and other people would share in it without even knowing it because you like the same films. You like the films of Mike Lee. You're brought up on Carry On, which I know you're obsessed with.

• 41:13Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 41:14Speaker 05

  And the Smiths. And so there's certain things that are going to feed into you what you think is important. And if it's not being acknowledged in the culture, you're like, no, we like this. This is what we're about.

• 41:23Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, no, a hundred percent. And I think it's like, it's inevitable that like, if Justine feels that way about Nirvana, Damon feels that way about Nirvana, there's thousands of other people that are feeling that way.

• 41:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:36Yasi Salek?

  This is how a pendulum swings. And she even gives a lot of credit also to Brett, you know, in terms of inspiring the whole thing because she said Suede was very much to do with Britishness.

• 41:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:47Yasi Salek?

  She did make a distinction that Damon was more playful, that he put on a mask and played a part, whereas Suede was just like doing it.

• 41:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, he was about characters quite often, wasn't he?

• 41:57Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So they're having this manifesto. They're thinking about things within the culture in a really cerebral way. The haircutting also was in collaboration. Okay, this is what I love to talk to you about.

• 42:13Yasi Salek?

  In collaboration with Graham's girlfriend, Jane Oliver.

• 42:16Speaker 05

  Ah, Jane, very important. Yeah, unseen heroine of the Brit pop scene.

• 42:23Yasi Salek?

  Did you not say that she is the inspiration for Tank Girl?

• 42:26Speaker 05

  Well, kind of, yeah. She's in Razzmatazz as well. She's in Pulp's, the video for Razzmatazz, she's in that. And she is, she's going out with Graham at a certain point. I think, I think probably then, actually. She's going out with Graham. She looks a bit like Justine. She's an intelligent, beautiful woman with dark hair that she then cuts into a bob. And you would see the two of them kind of backstage. And I can't, I can't kind of say they slouch. In these amazing kind of, you know, secondhand men's suits, just looking the absolute bollocks. I mean, they just look, you know, smoking fags, looking brilliant.

• 43:02Speaker 05

  And Jane was, I mean, you know, when we talk about the full, the formation of Elastica, like Jane should have been in Elastica, but she, she's a bit lazy.

• 43:14Yasi Salek?

  Did she play an instrument?

• 43:16Speaker 05

  I don't know. She did. She wrote, she wrote, she definitely write, helps write a couple of the songs. And she's kind of part of the inspiration for it, I would say.

• 43:26Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 43:26Speaker 05

  She was just, she was just like, it's really hard to explain. Like she was an important person that was, I suppose, not particularly visible because she wasn't in a band. But, and she wasn't writing about bands, but she was definitely an important person in terms of who she was knocking around with. Like I, I just did a picture book. Dave from Blur is bringing out a book about, of his photos, it was really great of early Blur. And she's like, in those, of course she's in those because she's like seeing Graham, she looks amazing. She also looks quite bored because she's like backstage a lot of the time. So I kind of think she was, she and Justine got on really well and they looked really great and they would talk about things. And she was just kind of part of the scene, really.

• 44:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And, and the John Harris book, he talks about how they're both like kind of dressing the same and wearing these like Fred Perry shirts and Doc Martens. And like, they're these like, the, the cool girls of this little scene that's coalescing around Blur that is, they are also, obviously, we talked about it with the modern life is rubbish in the Blur episode. They're taking on this other look of like.

• 44:31Speaker 05

  So Blur had a kind of two very definite looks, which they launched, didn't they? They had done British look part one and British look part two. And the, the British look, the one that's always forgotten is the one where they're dressing up and drinking tea in china teacups and slick, slicking their hair down in a kind of, in a, a, a country. Tea shop environment kind of thing. And you don't remember, so what we remember is the one with the dog and the Fred Perrys and the, and the jeans that are rolled up and the DMs. Like the Dr. Martins. And that's what we remember. And that was a look that was really easy to adopt for cool girls as well as cool boys. Like everybody could adopt it.

• 45:07Yasi Salek?

  It was a very British like look from like back.

• 45:11Speaker 05

  The look actually really reminded me of kind of like Rude Boys and it's a bit like the specials. Do you know what I mean?

• 45:16Yasi Salek?

  Totally, totally. And also like the look of like what the early Stone Roses were hanging around with like these like biker gang kind of things that were like, like a mix of like, yeah, mod and and rude boy and like all sort of like, but very British.

• 45:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, very British. That's true about the mod thing as well and slightly skin eddy as well.

• 45:36Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 45:37Speaker 05

  There's, yeah, there's a few kind of references which you you would all recognize and it's something that you like. Do you know what I mean?

• 45:43Yasi Salek?

  Yes, it's very cool. So amongst this, Justine, obviously, because I would do the same, unlike Jane Oliver, who was happy to just be like cool and and bouncing around. Justine was like, well, I want, I need to have a band too. Like, that's enough of not having a band. She starts to plot having a band. She said it was a reaction to Suede's drama. I was sick of the whole love and poison of London thing. When I broke up with Brett, the whole atmospheric romantic London thing hurt me. It reminded me of being with him, so I didn't want to go anywhere near that. Plus, I had just discovered Wire and rediscovered The Stranglers and Adam and the Ants were very important. I found their Peel Sessions album, which was virtually a manifesto.

• 46:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 46:25Yasi Salek?

  Their lyrics were funny, which was very important. Great, really angular guitar. It's funny, like now, obviously, people point quickly to Wire and The Stranglers because of the, because of the similarities, yes, and the lawsuits. But no one ever talks about the influence of Adam and the Ants on Elastica, but Justine talks about it a lot.

• 46:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, and it was, yeah, I mean, they were important. Like, if you were, again, it's like being a certain age. When they went on top of the plots, Adam and the Ants, they were just amazing. We loved them. And like, if you then investigated them earlier on, when you realize that they were actually a bit harder and punkier and weren't just a kind of like a dressy up punk thing, not that I have any problem with Adam and the Ants pop oeuvre, I think it's absolutely genius. But that you discover that they were slightly darker and spikier and weirder, you know, then I'm not really surprised. We we thought he was cool. He was still a bit around then as well.

• 47:30Yasi Salek?

  I didn't realize how famous Adam and the Ants were in the UK.

• 47:34Speaker 05

  They were huge.

• 47:34Yasi Salek?

  Like crazy, crazy famous. Yeah. Phil Savage, now Jane Savage, said that Elastica actually formed in our office. Justine had been playing with Suede and she was in one day and said, "Ooh, I think I might form a band." And we were like, "That's not a bad idea, actually." She began the band rehearsing with Justin, Justin Stephen Welch, Fourth of December, 1972, a Sagittarius, who we mentioned earlier, who had briefly been the drummer of Suede and was currently living with Matt Osmond. She got Damon to be the interim bass player. And three weeks later, they found Annabelle Annie Holland, a person that is an absolute mystery wrapped in an enigma,

• 48:15Yasi Salek?

  wrapped in a riddle. The CIA cannot find anything out about her. Nobody knows anything about this person. She was allegedly born on the 26th of August, 1965. I don't even know if that's true. She's a Virgo like Justine and she's from Brighton. That's it. No more information.

• 48:31Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, she's still, she's, she's, she exists, yes, she's still alive.

• 48:36Yasi Salek?

  She's real. I believe that she's real because I saw Elastica play with her in it. I know she's real. She didn't do any interviews and no one knows anything about her, I guess, except for her immediate people that knew her personally.

• 48:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:48Yasi Salek?

  She was originally a guitarist, but she was down to switch to bass. So now they have a bass player. In August of that year, Blur plays Reading and I guess afterward, everyone stayed and partied at the Ramada Hotel. Can you confirm or deny?

• 49:01Speaker 05

  I can never remember the name of those hotels in Reading, but yeah.

• 49:05Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So everyone's partying afterwards and who else is there? One 23-year-old Donna Lorraine Matthews, born December 2nd, 1971, also a Sagittarius. Like it's, this band is two Virgos and two Sagittarius.

• 49:20Speaker 05

  Balanced.

• 49:21Yasi Salek?

  Balanced, exactly. And Virgos are very like, you know, about the business, standing on business. And Sagittarius is a real free spirit. So.

• 49:29Speaker 05

  Yeah. They're the good time people.

• 49:31Yasi Salek?

  They are the good time people. Donna Matthews is Welsh. She's from Gwent.

• 49:38Yasi Salek?

  Newport Gwent. She pretty much has the polar opposite upbringing of Justine Frishman. She left school at 14. Her father, Donald, had done six years in prison for cannabis trafficking. She then lived alone in a bedsit until the authorities found her on her 16th birthday. So just two years, living on her own, 14 to 16, and they put her in a special needs unit. In the 70s, her dad, Donald, had been in the music business a bit. He was the co-owner of a London rehearsal space called Point Studios, where Blondie rehearsed when they were in town. So a little music background. She taught herself guitar, and she used to busk in the town center. And she played with a few local groups there in Newport Gwent,

• 50:19Yasi Salek?

  but she thought they were like acoustic-y and boring and girly, and she didn't like it. And then she saw the Luna Chicks play at Reading. And she said, that's what I do. I play guitar like that. I don't play like Suzanne Vega. There must be more girls who play like that. So I moved to London.

• 50:38Speaker 05

  She's great. She was friends with the 60 foot dolls, I think.

• 50:42Yasi Salek?

  I don't know about that, but she was definitely friends with this guy, John Lee, who is also from Newport Gwent, who later became the drummer of the band Feeder.

• 50:50Speaker 05

  Okay, yeah.

• 50:51Yasi Salek?

  And he had a flat in Cricklewood. I don't know where that is.

• 50:56Speaker 05

  It's kind of like looking a bit further out and not posh.

• 51:00Yasi Salek?

  Well, that's where he was living. And she just turned up at his house with a rucksack and her electric guitar and was like, can I stay on your floor? And soon after that, so you thought, I was gonna say they met at the Ramada. They didn't. She just happened to be there. She answered an ad in the back of Melody Maker that said, guitarist wanted, influences, the fall, The Stranglers, wire. Elastica were never gonna win that lawsuit, I just want you guys to know, because there's just a thousand things in print that are like, yeah, you're not winning this lawsuit. Donna only knew The Stranglers, but she answered the ad anyways. And she shows up the next month at Premises rehearsal studio to meet Justine and Co. And here's what she said. It was quite shambolic. I remember thinking, fucking hell, you're not very good.

• 51:44Yasi Salek?

  But I liked the way Justine looked and I liked her attitude. She had a brown velvet flared suit on and foppish hair and Doc Martens. She looked really like she was in the suede. I was impressed with her straight away.

• 51:58Speaker 05

  She's an impressive person. Justine is impressive. I can't say that enough, actually. Like, when you meet her, I don't know what you you expect, but she's so good looking. She looks so cool. She's really clever. You're like, oh, oh, hello.

• 52:10Yasi Salek?

  And she's quite tall, right?

• 52:12Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah. She's like five nine, five, 10, I'd say.

• 52:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, very cool. So Donna was like, yeah, none of you lot can play that well, but Justine's cool, so I'll stay. Donna was good at guitar, I guess. Like I said, in terms of all the relationships of like money and class within Elastica, the chasm between Justine and Donna was like the widest. And Justine said, Donna was obsessed with ways around the dole, how to make your fiver stretch further. She used to walk around with this bag of change. I always remember her counting out all these two peas to pay for food or her tea and coffee. We used to split the money for rehearsal and she would count out her two pound fifty and two pounds and five pences peas, five peas?

• 52:54Speaker 05

  Five peas.

• 52:55Yasi Salek?

  Donna said, I didn't really understand what the difference was between us at the time. I didn't even think she would have had a wealthy family, but I didn't know anyone who was really rich then. Now I can see how differently you grow up, but I felt that we were similar in loads of ways. Justine wanted to be more working class and I wanted to have more money. We kind of met halfway.

• 53:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I think when you're younger, you don't, you just meet people, you don't quite take them on face value, but you take them more on face value than I think when you're older, where you're like, able to kind of look people up and down and place them instantly into what class they are. I think when you're younger, you're like, you like music? I like music. You know, you like getting drunk? I like getting drunk.

• 53:31Yasi Salek?

  Well, it's also kind of what you said, right? Like, posh people weren't trying to be in bands. So like, why would Donna expect this woman who posted a thing about a band to be really rich?

• 53:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, you just wouldn't.

• 53:44Yasi Salek?

  So during this time, the band is going by the name Vaseline. Michael Smith, Mike Smith, who was the A and R, who had signed Blur to their publishing deal at MCA, he was at EMI and he was like, oh, okay, well, I'll give you guys studio time to make a demo at the EMI studio. So that worked out for them, thanks to their relationship.

• 54:05Speaker 05

  I think Donna made a real difference. I think before that, there was a slight idea that

• 54:12Speaker 05

  I mean, I just remember being introduced to the idea of Elastica as Blur's girlfriend. Like, it was literally like, it was meant, it was gonna be like Justine and Jane and maybe other Justine, other Justine being Alex's girlfriend, although that was just, I mean, she was never in the band or anything. And then I think once Donna joined, and Donna can write, can write songs and she can play and she looks amazing. I think they were suddenly a bit like, oh no, maybe they could be a band. You know, it was almost like it was a concept before and they, they would look great and somebody somewhere along the line would give them songs, maybe. Do you know what I mean? But like, once Donna joined, it was like, oh no, maybe you could do it.

• 54:48Yasi Salek?

  That's kind of what Jane Savage said. She said, not the most prolific of bands, obviously, and it was possibly Justine's plaything to a certain extent. She didn't quite have the hunger. She couldn't have, could she? But Donna might have done.

• 55:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, because Donna would have done. Because if you're, if you're counting out stuff in two P, you, you, you just don't have it. She's got nothing behind her.

• 55:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So they record three tracks in three days in this EMI studio with the engineer, Mark Waterman. These tracks are Lineup, Vaseline and Spastika. So Donna has joined the band in September and within like two months, they've written these songs.

• 55:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, and they're good.

• 55:26Yasi Salek?

  That version of Lineup is the one that comes out as a single, so it's not even like it changes.

• 55:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's pretty good.

• 55:31Yasi Salek?

  They'd already, it's so crazy. I learned from an article that somewhere during these sessions, there's a version of Vaseline with Damon singing and Graham playing the drums.

• 55:42Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 55:43Yasi Salek?

  I really need them to re-release that or re-release it at all because they never did. So in the top of nineteen eighty-three, Donna moves into a flat in Camden Town with Jane Oliver. And Donna said, immediately there was like this scene. Justin lived a hundred yards down the road with Matt from Suede. Steve Mackey from Pulp and him became friends, so you had them involved. And obviously Justine was going out with Damon. Suede, Blur, Pulp and us, all these sort of little gangs started to happen.

• 56:07Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 56:07Yasi Salek?

  Good mixer.

• 56:12Yasi Salek?

  It's happening. The good mixer is popping off, you guys.

• 56:15Speaker 05

  The good mixer was actually genuinely picked. So when Food Records moved to Camden, they used to be in Golden Square in Soho, which is near where I worked, which is Smash Hits. They moved into Camden and they basically were right next to a Savage and Best on the same road. When they moved in, Andy Ross from Food basically assessed the local pubs as to which one would be the meeting room and chose a good mixer because there was nobody in it apart from some old bloke and there was a pool table. And then, of course, it just turned into the centre of Camden.

• 56:49Yasi Salek?

  You know, nothing gold can stay. So, May 7th, we're still in 1993, the band plays their first gig under the name Onk.

• 57:00Speaker 05

  Great name. I love that name.

• 57:01Yasi Salek?

  You like Onk? You think they would have made it if they were called Onk, though?

• 57:05Speaker 05

  No, I don't think they would have done, but I love that name.

• 57:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's a good name. It was at a place called The Old Trout in Windsor and they were supporting a band called Truman's Water.

• 57:14Speaker 05

  Oh, I knew that of them.

• 57:16Yasi Salek?

  I mean, they played a seven-song set, fifteen minutes, those short little Elastica songs. So they had a couple of other names, including that they were considering, including Dad, really good band name.

• 57:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:29Yasi Salek?

  Then, for a while, Spastic Society, which then eventually morphed into Elastica, which may or may not be tied into, and now I believe that it is, given what you've just told me about the morphic resonance of everything, that there is a thing called the Elastica Principle, which refers to the tendency of structures when forced out of their initial shape to move through a period of distortion before assuming a new form, which is definitely a term that a structural engineer or an architectural student would know.

• 57:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, very good. We like it.

• 58:00Yasi Salek?

  So, that's their name. They play their first gig under that name at the White Horse in Hampstead, supporting Orange Deluxe, another band that we don't know about. Then they supported a band called Kinky Machine.

• 58:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:12Yasi Salek?

  At the Buzz Club in Aldershot. This gig is reviewed. Did I say that wrong?

• 58:17Speaker 05

  No, it's just funny. It's how you say it. It's just saying, a band called Kinky Machine at the Buzz in Aldershot. It's like, these things just don't exist. They exist.

• 58:27Yasi Salek?

  They sound totally fake to me. Aldershot? What are you talking about? That's not real.

• 58:34Speaker 05

  They're real, honestly. Genuinely, they exist.

• 58:37Yasi Salek?

  Ah, so funny. Love and respect to Aldershot, I'm sure it's a wonderful place. They're the support act, but the review is of them, not of Kinky Machine. John Mulvey said, "They're fast, they're cheap, they have a song called Rock and Roll is Dead. They only hang around for 20 minutes and a smitten local po goes all the way. F Riot Girl, Elastica are here and it really is year zero again."

• 59:02Speaker 05

  I love that way of writing, it's so funny.

• 59:04Yasi Salek?

  It's really great. It's really, we don't have it anymore.

• 59:08Speaker 05

  We invented music again and now we've invented it again and here it comes again.

• 59:12Yasi Salek?

  It is like so much chutzpah in it, in this, this type of NME and Melody Maker writing from back then. It's pretty smart though, because he kind of goes into like that people are gonna absolutely call them like industry plants and nepotism because of Justine having been in, as he calls her, the Pete Best of Suede and going out with Damon Albarn because Blur is starting to like come up, which doesn't actually happen.

• 59:44Speaker 05

  No, no, and it's also, that's very interesting to me because,

• 59:48Speaker 05

  you know, the idea of a kind of industry plant, I never really know what that means, but like, it's just the idea that if a woman goes, is in a band and goes out with another, happens to be straight and goes out with a bloke in a band, and somehow that negates what she does. It's just so old fashioned.

• 1:00:06Yasi Salek?

  It also like negates the idea of, okay, yeah, did they get their studio time from EMI because of Damon? Sure. Did Damon literally learn about music from Justine? Also, yes, you know, like it's a relationship is, I mean, hopefully, in the best case scenario, it's like a real.

• 1:00:27Speaker 05

  Well, it kind of enhances both of you, doesn't it? So that whatever you're

• 1:00:30Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. It's a symbiotic, you know, you're both feeding into this organism and taking from it, you know? Anyways, that's what happens. They get a little write-up and NME and now Steve Lamack, that's your mate.

• 1:00:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, lovely Steve Lamack, he's great.

• 1:00:45Yasi Salek?

  He's a radio host on Radio One at this time.

• 1:00:49Speaker 05

  He might be actually, but what he was was an NME, NME writer.

• 1:00:54Yasi Salek?

  Got it.

• 1:00:54Speaker 05

  And he was absolutely the champion of bands that were at the, whatever they were, if they were at the stage of bumping around Britain in a small van.

• 1:01:06Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:07Speaker 05

  He championed them, he would be in the back of the van with them. That's absolutely what he did. And then he, yeah, he ended up on Radio One with Joe Wiley, but that's who I like. And eventually ended up on Six Music and all that kind of years later. But that's absolutely how I think of him. He is the champion of the small bands in the small venues, the rugby times, that is Steve's time.

• 1:01:29Yasi Salek?

  I love that. And well, good luck then that he at that time was also a co-partner of this record label called Deceptive Records.

• 1:01:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Yasi Salek?

  And he sees Alaska for the first time this month, June 19th at the Camden Falcon. And that's an important moment because they do end up being signed to that label. Donna said, I knew from the first month in the band that we were going to be successful because of who Justine knew and what she knew from Blur and Suede. I trusted her with the business side of it. For me, it was more about, hey, rock and roll, living the lifestyle than it was about creating art. Justine had more of the art school side of it, whereas for me, it was about sex, drugs and rock and roll. I was totally infatuated with bands. I'd read all those biographies, Wonderland Avenue, Heroes and Villains, Rolling Stones books.

• 1:02:14Speaker 05

  It's also interesting, like in terms of if you compare them with other bands and Justine was in, in, in charge of the business bit. It's they made really canny record deals.

• 1:02:23Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:02:25Speaker 05

  Unbelievable. Like, if you compare, for instance, you know, the classic one is Sleeper, where they sold a million records and made absolutely zero pence because they had such a bad deal. They signed to Deceptive, which is a cool indie label run by somebody who is, you know, two people who are incredibly ethical, who aren't going to treat you badly. You're not going to get loads of money, but you're gonna, and they signed a massive publishing deal, and they signed a massive deal in America. Like, those are clever things to do.

• 1:02:48Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I mean, you can't discount the fact that Justine is, A, just worldly. So like, she's not coming to the table, like, she knows what's up. Also, she probably has lawyers that she can go consult because her father is wealthy and there's lawyers around, you know?

• 1:03:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:03:05Yasi Salek?

  She also had experience. I mean, she was the de facto suede manager for a while. So it's like, she's already been in a band and she has a boyfriend who's just been through it. So she can be like, oh, what did you wish you had done different? You know, like, she's...

• 1:03:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, because they had, they ended up, you know, Blur early on ended up with a manager that didn't work out. They ended up in loads of debt. They had to, that's where they had to go to America to pay all off.

• 1:03:27Yasi Salek?

  I know, which is one of the craziest stories ever because that poor man, we never, he didn't exactly steal from them, but clearly was just the world's worst money manager. Like, nobody knows what happened to that money. So they make more demos, they record Stutter and Pussycat. The one thing I wanted to say about that is that Mark Waterman, the engineer about Stutter, said that it's weird, really, because some people were dead set against it. Donna was really sort of like, if you release that, I'm leaving the band.

• 1:03:55Speaker 05

  I love that, sure.

• 1:03:56Yasi Salek?

  She didn't like Stutter. It's a classic. It's a jam.

• 1:04:01Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 1:04:01Yasi Salek?

  They did their first Peel session August 12th. It's great. You guys should listen to it. They sound perfect.

• 1:04:06Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 1:04:07Yasi Salek?

  I don't know, it's actually crazy. Like, you put it on, it sounds like the album. You're like, what? Why do you sound so good? Why do you already sound so good? It's been five minutes.

• 1:04:14Speaker 05

  How are you good?

• 1:04:23Yasi Salek?

  They sign their publishing deal with EMI in Primrose Hill on August 14th at midnight, because it would have been Friday the 13th otherwise.

• 1:04:33Yasi Salek?

  That's right. We're not taking any chances. And they do their handshake deal with Deceptive Records a few days later at The Good Mixer. They get their first NME interview with John Harris that same month. Gushing, babe. Here's how it starts. Some questions first. Are you aged between 21 and 26? Do you remember skinny ties, stretch jeans, swap shop, swooning to the formative tastes of pop music that were hurled at your gaping mouth by Blondie or the Jam? Yes? Then you, all capital letters, will love Elastica. More questions. Do you fall outside that age bracket? Do the things mentioned above mean little or nothing to you? No matter, capital letters, you too will love Elastica.

• 1:05:14Speaker 05

  That's so great.

• 1:05:15Yasi Salek?

  Okay, here's the one I wanted to really get into with you for a second. He talks about how she doesn't use Americanisms and sings in a clipped English accent and drops in the odd, specific British reference. And he asks her about this. And here's, she says this. "Justine, take Polly Harvey. I thought her first album was great. I really liked all those almost old English overtones on it. And I just couldn't believe it when she put out the second album and started singing about gasoline. I would never sing a lyric that I wouldn't actually say. I think it's really vital to write fairly colloquial lyrics or you'll never get across the time and place you're living in." Number one, that never

• 1:05:55Yasi Salek?

  occurred to me. I've heard man size 60 million times, and it never occurred to me, oh yeah, you guys say petrol. Why would you say gasoline?

• 1:06:13Yasi Salek?

  Did you think about it when you first heard it? Were you like, why is she saying gasoline?

• 1:06:18Speaker 05

  No, she's Polly Harvey, so you know, whatever.

• 1:06:20Yasi Salek?

  Sure, exactly.

• 1:06:21Speaker 05

  But this, no, I didn't. And also, I suppose with man size and with some of the stuff that she was doing at that time, she's like taking on a persona, isn't she? That's the, that's the main difference.

• 1:06:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, a persona. It might be an American persona. Yeah, I thi- I think that's probably right. PJ Harvey doesn't strike me as someone who's like pandering to America. That's not her bit at all.

• 1:06:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, she's not. But she's also like, she's not doing what Justine is saying. So like, Justine is saying, I'm representing something that's happening and I'm talking the way that I talk. And that's what my art is. And Polly's har- Polly Harvey's art is something different, isn't it? Like, we can see even in her later career, she'll just go into something and come, like she brings out whatever that is and makes it into a record, doesn't she? So she, and then in those early years, she takes on a different persona in every record.

• 1:07:14Yasi Salek?

  Totally. And yeah, it's, it's PJ Harvey, she didn't care one fig about Brit pop or Britishness or being, expressing Britishness through her art. Like, I don't think that crossed her mind while she was sheep herding in Dorset or whatever. She was just like, this is what interests me. And here I go. No, oi mista, apples and bananas.

• 1:07:37Speaker 05

  Absolutely not.

• 1:07:38Yasi Salek?

  Tea and biscuits.

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

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• 1:08:44Yasi Salek?

  Okay. At this point, most of Elastica is doing a bunch of drugs. Just FYI. Three quarters of Elastica.

• 1:08:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, not Justine.

• 1:08:54Yasi Salek?

  Not Justine. Donna and Justin are dating. They're doing a bunch of drugs. Annie was always, apparently, from what I read, she was always doing drugs, but she just did it privately and that was none of anyone's business, much like everything else about her life. Donna said, "Justine was spending a lot of time with Damon. We didn't really hang out over at hers. Me and Justin were mad drugheads and she had this quiet family life. She'd occasionally invite us to dinner, which we'd never do for her. We didn't eat." We did not eat. So they do their first tour supporting a band called Kingmaker.

• 1:09:26Speaker 05

  Oh, they were great. I won't have you diss Kingmaker.

• 1:09:29Yasi Salek?

  No, no, they're good. I want to listen to them. But I didn't understand that people did diss Kingmaker. They were like considered corny, right?

• 1:09:37Speaker 05

  I suppose they just didn't hit, you know, this thing, this classic thing. They were part of the scene and then they didn't hit. So then people take the piss out of them. Do you know what I mean? But like, they were good and lol, lol, lol, lol. I can't remember his lol. Anyway, he was a really nice guy.

• 1:09:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, Justine defended them too. I had to go listen because they've come up a couple of times in other things and I was like, oh, this band is good. There's a piece also around this time from the NME, from that tour that has this incredible quote from Justine. I couldn't find the rest of the article, but this quote was, "I can't think of anything better than a 16-year-old boy wanking and looking at a poster of me." But don't quote me on that because I'll kick your head in.

• 1:10:11Speaker 05

  Okay. I want to unpick this, right?

• 1:10:15Yasi Salek?

  Yes, please.

• 1:10:16Speaker 05

  Okay. So it was really funny when I was writing, the thing that really struck me, which hadn't struck me at the time. Was the weirdness around sexuality and sex and women in indie bands, right? And it is absolutely, the reason why she's given that quote is because somebody asked her, what's it like to be wanked over? What's it like to be wanked over by young men, right? That is a standard interview question. How insulting is that? And it is absolutely standard, like Shirley, Shirley Manson was told it by an A and R guy. You know, you know, I think, you know, this is, this is how cool I think you are. I wank over you. I mean, it's just like, it's, it's just shit.

• 1:10:59Yasi Salek?

  Okay, that, that's weird.

• 1:11:00Speaker 05

  Oh, man, it drives me mad. It's everywhere. It's like, it's all, nobody's asking the men, is it great to have young women wank over? They would never even use that word about young women at that time. That like, it absolutely wouldn't even occur to them that young women might masturbate. Like, it wouldn't even be in it. Like, that's not even is an issue.

• 1:11:19Yasi Salek?

  They did write a lot about there being fourteen year old girls in the entire front row of Blur shows at a certain point.

• 1:11:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, but that was dismissed, wasn't it? It was dismissed as something terrible.

• 1:11:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:28Speaker 05

  Like, you've got fourteen year old girls at your, at your, um, at your show, and now it's rubbish. You're rubbish. Like, you, you can go through the entire Blur's oeuvre, and whenever they have young female fans, everybody dismisses them as being a bit shit. And it's only when they, they reject those fans that they're allowed to be called again. It's just.

• 1:11:47Yasi Salek?

  You're totally right.

• 1:11:48Speaker 05

  And it like, and the way they, the, the, the questions that the inky, male inky writers ask women, it is always like, talk to me about women in rock and how is it? How is it to be wanked over by young men? I mean, please.

• 1:12:04Yasi Salek?

  It's important to have all forms of this. And unfortunately, men don't ever have to do this or whatever, good on them. But like, it's definitely important to have bands that focus on what it's like to be a woman. Like Riot Girl, you know, like, is really like preoccupied with the experience of being female. Whereas Elastica was like, I don't care about that. I don't even want to talk about being a woman. I don't want to talk about feminism. I don't give a shit. We're just a band, which I think is also really important because it shows you that you don't have to make it your whole personality that you're a woman in rock. You can, there's nothing wrong with that, you know? And that's also important and pushes the conversation further. But I just really liked it about Elastica that they were like. I don't know, what are you talking?

• 1:12:48Speaker 05

  But they also took on quite a lot of the cool masculine tropes, didn't they? So they're dressed like cool boys, like absolutely like cool boys. And one of the things that Justine says is we don't make girly music.

• 1:13:00Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:13:01Speaker 05

  And that makes you cool. So to, one of the things that's quite weird about the whole scene in the end is that to be a young woman and in inverted commas girly. So to show the, the womanies, the young womany side of you is dismiss this being a bit shit. And if you show the other side of you, which might be the more confrontational, the more conventionally masculine side of you, the, the one that's, you know, able to take loads of drugs and stay up into the morning and be really funny and play a guitar. That's the bit that's good about you.

• 1:13:31Yasi Salek?

  Right. I mean, this is not to harp on about the most life changing band of my life, but this is where Hole was like so special, you know, because to see Courtney Love, who was really hyper feminine, almost cartoonishly so in many ways, right? With these like little baby girl dresses and the Mary Janes and the like.

• 1:13:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:55Yasi Salek?

  You know, but also a bit of a mess, but also very masculine in like.

• 1:13:59Speaker 05

  Yeah. She has masculine energy, doesn't she?

• 1:14:01Yasi Salek?

  The way she plays guitar and her leg up on the thing and playing, wanting to be as good as the guys. But, but still being very girly was really revelatory, I think, you know? Cause it wasn't Riot Girl, cause it also wasn't preoccupied with womanhood in that way. It was just, this is what it is. And I, I think that was really important for me personally.

• 1:14:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, I agree. And I think, and actually weirdly, you know, all of the bands that have women in, even if it, because at that time it just wasn't, you know, there were bands, but like you, the assumption, it was very rigid in those days.

• 1:14:40Yasi Salek?

  It's still that way. It's funny. It has, and it really hasn't changed. I mean, I think people think that it's, it's really changed, but like. Rock music is predominantly male.

• 1:14:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, it is. And if you want to be, if you want to be successful within the music business as a woman these days, really, you just have to be solo. Like, that's, you know, that's your best bet is to be a solo performer.

• 1:14:59Yasi Salek?

  And you see it like with people like Paramore, where like how much they pushed Hayley Williams. So much that she's just like, has to double down and Paramore as a band. Like, it's not just me. Like, they really wanted her to be a solo artist, but.

• 1:15:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:15:12Yasi Salek?

  They supported Pulp on tour briefly, and then they all got the flu and had to cancel.

• 1:15:19Speaker 05

  The flu.

• 1:15:22Yasi Salek?

  Justine was like, everyone was sick. It was so weird. I don't understand what happened to them. They just all got the flu.

• 1:15:29Yasi Salek?

  Well, I bring that up because people started to be like, why are you guys so like, like, holding back? Like, oh, you're playing these shows. Oh, but we can't do half of them. Because then the next month, they put out, November 1st, just a few days later, they put out their first single, Stutter, and it is a seven inch and limited to fifteen hundred pressings, which was not enough. And I think everyone knew that. I mean, there's mixed explanations. There's a lot of like, whoa, we just simply didn't think anyone would like, and no one liked us. And I'm like, you've had eight NME write-ups before you put out one note of music saying you're the second coming of pop music and you're here to save the day. And like, I think you knew you could have sold more than fifteen hundred seven inches.

• 1:16:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? I think.

• 1:16:15Yasi Salek?

  It's brilliant.

• 1:16:16Speaker 05

  It's a really brilliant marketing. I do, I do think there's part of them that thought they wouldn't be as big as they did become.

• 1:16:23Yasi Salek?

  Right. Well, I guess nobody could have predicted how big.

• 1:16:26Speaker 05

  No, you can't. So I think they thought they would be more like a kind of cool, but not massively selling band.

• 1:16:32Yasi Salek?

  I think it worked out. Like, probably they did. It's the same thing where you don't want to book a venue that's too big and have it not sell out, nobody come. So it's better to sell out, but it really like exceeded expectations. It's interesting because it could have charted, right? But it's not gonna, you can't chart if you only have fifteen hundred. So it does generate enormous media exposure and just on the strength of this one single, they are voted best new band in the year end readers poll and melody maker.

• 1:17:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? It's just so, everyone's so excited about the scene and the idea of them and everything.

• 1:17:08Yasi Salek?

  Well, Suede and Blur had done a lot of legwork.

• 1:17:11Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 1:17:12Yasi Salek?

  To prime the pump, you know, like, if you will, like, this is, this is already 1993. So there's been a lot of legwork done, like I said, by these.

• 1:17:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, Suede.

• 1:17:23Yasi Salek?

  Suede in particular, right? And then also Blur with their pop scene, modern life is rubbish. Like, they'd started to come up. So a thing is coalescing and Pulp is, Pulp is already popular.

• 1:17:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, popular-ish.

• 1:17:35Yasi Salek?

  His and hers is out, which is like, in, in some ways, their like first breakthrough, right? So it's like, after 17 years of toiling in the mines.

• 1:17:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. His and hers is a great album. And there's part of you that doesn't think they'll get any bigger, but you can't imagine it.

• 1:17:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, but then, then they really did. Miranda and I went and saw them play here in the O2 Arena. Sold out show, two sold out shows.

• 1:17:57Speaker 05

  That is a big two sold out show.

• 1:18:00Yasi Salek?

  Massive. They're very famous here in, in the UK. So Stutter is a goddamn gorgeous, beautiful song. It's fucking rules. I love it so much. Whenever I put it on, I'm like, God, I love you so much, Stutter. You're wonderful. Her voice is just like honey. Like, it's just like this, like, thick, deep.

• 1:18:19Speaker 05

  It's great. And it's funny.

• 1:18:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, sometimes when men drink too much, they are not available for what you need them for.

• 1:18:35Yasi Salek?

  The Genius commenters on genius.com, the lyric site, remain my favorite people on earth because someone has just put one comment, which is, researchers have found that too much alcohol affects both your brain and your penis. In one university of Washington studies sober men were able to achieve an erection more quickly than intoxicated men. It's like a full just quote from a doctor on everyday health about erectile dysfunction. I'm just like, thank you so much for the added context.

• 1:19:02Speaker 05

  We got it.

• 1:19:04Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I think it's not unclear. And, look, Dave and Albarn like to drink.

• 1:19:12Yasi Salek?

  So I'm not making any, I'm not casting aspersions. I'm simply saying, he was a drinker. So then it's 1994. Stutter. So gorgeous. The B-side also, we didn't talk about it. It's called Pussy Cat. It's really good. To me, it sounds like the last, the last remnants of Suede a little bit besides See That Animal. Cause it's like still Elastica, but it's like if Elastica was put through a suede filter.

• 1:19:47Yasi Salek?

  They get their first NME cover, January of 1994. They play the telly for the first time on The Word. The Word is really weird. Uh, we have a quick sidebar about The Word. I was like, what is, it's like the grind. Like what is happening here? There's just like people dancing and these like, you know?

• 1:20:06Speaker 05

  Yeah. It was interesting, The Word, because it was, you forget how important telly was and it had some great performers. It had Nirvana on it. And that was, that was amazing. And it was literally Kurt Cobain going Courtney Love is the best fuck in the whole world. It's so brilliant. They had Oasis on, they had these kind of amazing kind of mix up of presenters that didn't really like each other or work well together. But they were interesting characters and the bands were really, really important. But yeah, you're right. They hired kind of dancers to dance in it. Like years later, I would see people and I'd say, oh my God, that's my friend Mickey. He's dancing there. I didn't even realize.

• 1:20:47Yasi Salek?

  Was it cool?

• 1:20:49Speaker 05

  Was it cool?

• 1:20:50Yasi Salek?

  Or was it kind of mainstream? It was just kind of like a mainstream?

• 1:20:53Speaker 05

  No, it wasn't mainstream. It was nuts. So it was like, it would do stuff and it kept getting kind of like, eventually I think it was put on quite late at night because it kept, you know, breaking some kind of rules.

• 1:21:03Yasi Salek?

  Rules.

• 1:21:04Speaker 05

  Yeah. So it was. It's hard to explain like telly, telly wasn't really cool, if you sort of mean, but it, but it would showcase cool things.

• 1:21:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:16Speaker 05

  And sometimes you, some, some of the interviews were really amazing. Like I remember, I'm sure this happened, but it sounds like a fever dream. That Snoop Dogg was on and, and so was this guy, uh, he was called Rod Hole and he had this thing called Emu. Which was an Emu, but it was obviously like a puppet. And as I remember, Snoop Dogg took a delight to the puppet and ended up battering it, even if it wasn't real. It was like he thought it was real and he battered the Emu going, going, I got that Emu, I got that bird good. And it wasn't real. It was like in somebody's hand. It was quite an odd show.

• 1:21:57Yasi Salek?

  Insane. Okay. All right. Well, you guys should watch it. It's on YouTube. It's definitely worth it just for Justin's A plus incredible work on his backing vocals, which is just him going

• 1:22:10Yasi Salek?

  great part of lineup that I don't think you hear as well on the album, but you can really hear it on this live.

• 1:22:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, I live in it.

• 1:22:16Yasi Salek?

  Wonderful, really wonderful.

• 1:22:24Yasi Salek?

  They get best new band at the NME Brat Awards this year also. I'm so sorry, but this is once again where I have to bring up Tom York's hair. Because there's the great photo of Justine and Tom York and Brett Anderson, because Radiohead won best song for Creep. Swayed one best new band. And there's poor Tom York there with his just like bleached blonde motley crew. Big, I believe it was extensions hair. And then once again, I must bring up that they were mean to him. And then he wrote Karma Police. So once again, thank you, Justine. Okay. You guys, you like Karma Police by Radiohead? You owe that to Justine Freshman being mean to Tom York about his dumb hair.

• 1:23:08Speaker 05

  And there's also that really brilliant quote that somebody, when they saw the picture said, it's like a haystack between two Hitlers.

• 1:23:15Yasi Salek?

  Well, that's what he says in Karma Police, right? Your Hitler haircut is making me ill.

• 1:23:23Speaker 05

  Arrest this girl.

• 1:23:24Yasi Salek?

  Arrest this girl.

• 1:23:35Yasi Salek?

  Now Lineup comes out as a single, January 31st, 1994. This one charts peaking at number 20. That's a big deal. Again, I think this Lineup that was released was just the demo.

• 1:23:48Speaker 05

  That's what.

• 1:23:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I just want to point out, this is, this, none of this comes out in America for a little while till the next year, but Lineup does appear on the soundtrack for the 1995 Kevin Smith classic, Mall Rats. But that's not till next year. We're going to talk about whoever at Geffen absolutely needs 12 raises because they were working round the clock, getting Elastica songs on soundtracks. Elastica songs are on so many fucking good soundtracks.

• 1:24:17Speaker 05

  Are they?

• 1:24:19Yasi Salek?

  Oh, my God, so many. We'll get into it there. It's more, more later, like this 96, 97, but someone at Geffen, you, my hat is off to you. They tour in February, they play their first Top of the Pops, play Lineup, they look so fucking cool. Justine's wearing a short sleeve, white men's button down with a black tie.

• 1:24:36Speaker 05

  Do you miss? So cool.

• 1:24:38Yasi Salek?

  It's so cool. And then there's a Vox article by Lisa Verico. Do you remember this at all?

• 1:24:45Speaker 05

  I remember Lisa, I don't remember the article.

• 1:24:47Yasi Salek?

  It's always girl on girl crime is all I'm gonna say. Here's what the, the head or whatever says. "Elastica may look rough, but their impoverished image is all part of the game. Inspired by such bands as the Buzzcocks and Wire and pursuing a, quote, 'poorer is better' policy, the swayed divorcees are top of the new art rock class."

• 1:25:07Yasi Salek?

  The second line is, "Had 1993's end of year polls included the luckiest new band in Britain, it surely would have gone to Elastica." Okay, rude.

• 1:25:17Speaker 05

  Lisa ends up being quite close to Oasis.

• 1:25:20Yasi Salek?

  That's very funny. Well, Oasis was, at this point, they were friendly, I think.

• 1:25:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:25:26Yasi Salek?

  She says that there was a photo shoot that Justine instructed her band to crouch down in order to, quote, "look poorer."

• 1:25:34Speaker 05

  That's a bit weird.

• 1:25:35Yasi Salek?

  Can you just say that? Do you think that really happened?

• 1:25:38Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, you might have asked them to crouch down. I don't know. That makes you look poor. Does it make you look poor? I'm not quite sure how that works.

• 1:25:44Yasi Salek?

  I suppose if you are crouching in the streets.

• 1:25:47Speaker 05

  Maybe if you crouch down and you've got like a cap that's begging for money that you look poor.

• 1:25:51Yasi Salek?

  Right. If you're all over twist. Yeah.

• 1:25:55Speaker 05

  Doesn't quite work.

• 1:25:55Yasi Salek?

  I'm just saying, this was not a particularly nice article.

• 1:26:00Speaker 05

  But it's also, I mean, I suppose the big thing is it's just so unusual, isn't it? Because everybody loves Elastica.

• 1:26:05Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:05Speaker 05

  So everybody loves Elastica. So to have somebody just say, actually, I'm not that keen. They slightly get on my nerves. Essentially, I prefer Oasis, although that's not said in the thing. You know, fair enough. You know what I mean? I think it's fine that there's somebody's being a bit snotty about it. And the class thing is something that you could always say, you know, if you want to say it, you can say it, but not about Donna, but about.

• 1:26:26Yasi Salek?

  And no one had said it really until this, which I thought was, I thought was really interesting.

• 1:26:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:26:32Yasi Salek?

  Well, I prefer this interview and profile by one Sean Patton.

• 1:26:37Speaker 05

  Yay.

• 1:26:38Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, we love Sean Patton in Smash Hits. She said, "What makes Elastica perhaps 1994's brightest hope is that purely and simply they're so classy. That limited edition debut single, Stutter, currently shaming most of its neighbors on an indie compilation near you, seethed with a ferocious sexual energy that would raise hairs on the coldest neck, male or female."

• 1:27:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, nicely done. Nicely done, Sean.

• 1:27:04Yasi Salek?

  Justine says in this article, "That woman in rock angle worries me. I have a nasty feeling that in a year's time, the last thing anyone will want to listen to is a female-fronted group."

• 1:27:12Speaker 05

  So you see, that's so interesting. It's so sad, isn't it? The idea that like, just even being in a band is, as a woman, is a kind of.

• 1:27:20Yasi Salek?

  Right. It has expiration date or whatever.

• 1:27:21Speaker 05

  Yeah. It's like, oh, this is a good idea for like a year.

• 1:27:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:25Speaker 05

  Novelty.

• 1:27:26Yasi Salek?

  And then she, she says, "All the exciting bands around now have women singers. Echo Belly, Salad, Blessed Ethel." I don't know salad or Blessed Ethel, but I know Echo Palais.

• 1:27:36Speaker 05

  Blessed Ethel, I don't remember. Salad, I remember. They were good and their single was called Marianne or Marie Joanne. You can see her, actually, not just in the band. If you watch early. It's a nineteen ninety-five, Channel Four coverage of Glastonbury. I think it's the only second, the second year that they come in. And they're doing, and you see Joe Wiley, she's a presenter, and Katie Putrick. And Mark Lamar, who's a comedian, he presents a word. He's also a presenter and Marianne's a presenter as well. On the thing. And it's what's really funny is it's just all completely amateurish. It's just adorable. Like Joe Wiley is like quite shy.

• 1:28:14Yasi Salek?

  I love that. I need to look this up. Okay. Well, there's an NME article in March, right after this, where Elastica is interviewed and Justine does, oh, it's usually always Justine. I don't think the rest of them ever really talk, but she said, "Speed is cheap and cheerful. It's a laugh and it makes you psychotic," which sums up the music quite well. This is an article not about Elastica in particular, but about speed. It's called "Speed: The Sinus of the Times" by Stephen Wells, and he just interviews a bunch of bands about doing speed.

• 1:28:43Speaker 05

  Oh, that's so Wells. I'm sorry. That's just so.

• 1:28:46Yasi Salek?

  I know, because it made me remember that I was like, oh my God, Stephen Wells is also the one that caught the Happy Mondays out with the, the quote that got them in big trouble.

• 1:28:56Speaker 05

  Yeah. He's a great writer. Stephen Wells is, you know, he died far too young, but he, he's an absolutely brilliant writer. He was really hilarious. He was actually very pro women. He would always support women in bands. He, he was just a force of nature. Great. It was absolutely great. And so every time he did an interview, it was like kind of a confrontation, do you know what I mean?

• 1:29:19Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that's, that's what it seemed like. I was, it was just, it's cool. Like he didn't, you know, he wasn't going to be like, what's it like having boys wink to you or whatever. He was gonna ask some like hard hitting questions.

• 1:29:28Speaker 05

  And also, speed is very much, what makes me laugh is speed is kind of very much his kind of drug.

• 1:29:33Yasi Salek?

  That's why he was like, he was like, listen, what if I write an entire article? Hear me out. So we're like, okay, all right. In May, Elastica signs with Geffen, big deal. Geffen was really, no one did it like Geffen, I feel like, in my youth in America. Like, it was like the perfect, and I hesitate to say it about a major label, but like, it was like, the greatest major label, because they kind of acted like an indie in my personal like-

• 1:30:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, in my head, they felt like an indie.

• 1:30:04Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, because they signed Sonic Youth, they signed Nirvana, like, they had all these really cool bands. It's like they weren't like the pushy kind of, they were trying to get hits in the way, you know what I mean? Like, again, I don't know, I wasn't there. Everything they did was, the Geffen compilations were like formative biblical texts for me.

• 1:30:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's so cool.

• 1:30:23Yasi Salek?

  DGCE rarities, oh my god, part one and part two, just incredible. So, I have a very soft spot in my heart for Mr. David Geffen and what he wrote.

• 1:30:33Speaker 05

  It's proper good A and R-ing.

• 1:30:35Yasi Salek?

  Exactly, yeah, and there was, there was great A and Rs there, and just, it's, it was cool. So they signed with Geffen, which makes total sense and fits perfect. Stutter is released in America finally, in August, by Sub Pop as part of this like, Sub Pop seven inch compilation thing, and then a week later as a CD single by Geffen. And then I think they made a new video, because I remember, there's two videos for Stutter. The first one is very like, plain, that's just them against a white wall. And then there's like a new, more glossy one that gets played on MTV, I remember. Yeah. Geffen was like, that one's fine for you guys, but in America here, we're going to-

• 1:31:13Speaker 05

  Shine you up a bit.

• 1:31:15Yasi Salek?

  And then Connection comes out in October.

• 1:31:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:31:19Yasi Salek?

  Was, does this shake the nation? I need to know, because Connection is such a crazy good song. I guess maybe Elastica was already beloved and winning all those, you know, prizes and being on, in the enemy, but was this like a bigger deal, this Connection moment?

• 1:31:33Speaker 05

  I don't know, it's funny, isn't it? I can't remember that it was. I mean, it's just really great. It's just excellent, isn't it? Such a, so strong, they're so brilliant. I don't know that it was really into to, you know, to to the average person. But what was interesting, I think, is like, you know, when you do your research, which is completely understandable, you're looking at is the music papers. But I remember with somebody like Justine, she, like, I interviewed her for The Observer, like, January ninety four. She was in Vogue, February ninety four.

• 1:32:03Yasi Salek?

  Yes, I wrote that Barney Hoskins did it. There was no, like, text in it that was worth mentioning, but that's kind of a big deal.

• 1:32:10Speaker 05

  Yes, a big deal. You just don't get into Vogue in that way. And you get into Vogue because you're cool and you look great. So there's like, there's a kind of element of Elastica that's to do with Justine, although Donna actually looks brilliant as well, obviously. In fact, Annie looks brilliant. They all look brilliant. Justin looks brilliant.

• 1:32:24Yasi Salek?

  They all look really good. Ju- Justin Walsh is so hot.

• 1:32:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, he's amazing. They just all look great. They all look fantastic. But Justine, I think, is a person that that is latched on to. And so I think that there was, there was, um, almost like a broadsheet awareness of Elastica. Do you know what I mean? They ticked quite a lot of, kind of, of Guardian reader kind of sensibilities. You know, here are intelligent women making music that we like, looking fantastic and being clever. You know, so you get tick, tick, tick, tick. And those things are i- in a way that you're not going to get other, other bands in broadsheets quite as quickly, really. So I think that they were maybe acknowledged by kind of the liberal establishment earlier than most places, most bands, really.

• 1:33:07Speaker 05

  But I don't necessarily remember, although, like, it's an absolutely brilliant single. I don't remember that it, maybe it changed things for them. I don't remember. Because I just remember them just being everywhere.

• 1:33:16Yasi Salek?

  I think I'm just applying my Americanness to it because I know it did in America. That was like the big single in America that, that's like where I really first heard them was Connection blew up. And that's not till the next year because everything comes out a bit later. It come, it came out in America in ninety five. But that was a, I mean, it was on the radio all the time. It was wa- it was how I knew Elastica and why I went and bought the album.

• 1:33:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, great.

• 1:33:40Yasi Salek?

  First, I'm going to mention that that beginning thing, the intro thing, is actually done on a keyboard. The sound is called distorted guitar. And two years ago, on Zane Lowe, Damon Albarn mentioned that he played it on a Yamaha handheld sequencer.

• 1:34:05Yasi Salek?

  Now we need to talk about the three girl Roomba of it all. Just for one moment, just for one moment. Because.

• 1:34:13Speaker 05

  That is a direct nick.

• 1:34:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And that's fine. This song is better.

• 1:34:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:34:22Yasi Salek?

  We love Wire, but you know, that's if that's what Wire contributed to this, the musical culture, aside from, you know, their own great songs is connection. Fantastic. But again, there's many articles like in 94 and that same Smash Hits interview, Justine said, how Alaska came about is sometimes when I hear records, I want to do something that shows how much I love them. We're born out of more out of a tribute to music rather than a reaction against it. I'll wake up one morning and it'll be, I want to sound like Wire. Or then it's The Stranglers of the Buzzcocks again. This, this was not going to go to court, babe, because the lawyer would just bring these quotes and be like,

• 1:34:59Speaker 05

  There's no argument.

• 1:35:01Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, but they settled out of court and that they rewrote the credits and it was fine.

• 1:35:14Speaker 05

  It's The Stranglers, isn't it, that say, actually, we didn't want to sue them?

• 1:35:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, we'll get into that. They're like, that was embarrassing. We didn't care. We love that song. It was, it was the publish. It was like their lawyers of their publishing. They have a big profile the next month in Melody Maker by Everett True. And there's a whole part where he's like, he says, there are certain music critics, myself not included, who are wary of elastic. It's about her being rich, basically. And I'm like, well, if you're not wary of it, why are you even fucking bring it up, bitch? Like, oh, many people are saying, not me, I don't think this, but many people are.

• 1:35:50Speaker 05

  There's a classic journalist technique. Sometimes like, not necessarily with indie, indie bands, but sometimes you have to ask, you're told by your editor to ask questions. And you're like, disappeared in a tabloid. So I just thought I better ask you for you. Just have to clear it up.

• 1:36:06Yasi Salek?

  Just have to quickly. And it's kind of sweet because Donna's like really defending Justine the whole time. She goes, there are lots of reasons why people are in bands. It doesn't have to do because they're wrought with angst. If you like music and you want to play it, then surely that's enough reason. Evan Dando's well off and he plays music. Which is honestly true, but in America, they didn't care that much about that.

• 1:36:28Speaker 05

  Yeah. It's also weird, isn't it? Because you could be, because you can, you know, she indicates herself. I mean, she doesn't write incredibly deep songs. She indicates things, doesn't she? But she's not writing, not not kind of pouring her heart out in the way that maybe you say Brett would doesn't like that. But one is perfectly able to be born into a beautiful background and still have some kind of hole inside you that needs to be satisfied through art or through music. I mean, come on, that's just standard. But I think that we're also class written in this country that when we're younger, we can't understand that, that you can be born to a life of immense privilege, much more than Justine's, and feel terrible about yourself and need to do something about it. We just won't allow that.

• 1:37:11Yasi Salek?

  Donna says, it's just racist against people who are well off. And Justine goes, classist. And she goes, yeah, classist.

• 1:37:21Speaker 05

  That's amazing. What an amazing thing.

• 1:37:25Yasi Salek?

  It's really good. She talks a bit about in the same piece about like, how women are sexualized. She says that Debbie Harry was the first girl I fell in love with when I was 12. I had her posters everywhere. She was utterly beautiful. She had a real softness to her, even though she was hard. She managed to use her sexuality and not be criticized for it, but maybe that was the era. If someone dressed like that now, they wouldn't get away with it.

• 1:37:46Speaker 05

  Really? Yes, interesting.

• 1:37:48Yasi Salek?

  I know. She says the late seventies was an era of very provocatively dressed women, and people seemed to be less frightened of their own sexuality than they are now. And Donna says if we all went on stage, all made up, wearing short skirts, we'd be criticized. We'd be seen as bimbos.

• 1:38:02Speaker 05

  True.

• 1:38:02Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I think that's interesting. Now, things are moving along. They're playing shows. They play a show in Glasgow where Donna and Justin have a full on lovers brawl at the hotel. And this is Donna's quote, "We were just punching the shit out of each other. This was the speed." And the next day, they had to play Top of the Pops together. Justine said, "I was really quite innocent about drugs. I'd never seen anyone doing heroin. I'd never met a heroin addict. I don't think I'd ever even had a line of coke. But I went to rehearsal with, and Donna said, 'Do you want some speed?'" Annie, Donna and Justin were all doing speed. And I was like, "Why would you want to do speed? What's the point?" But they persuaded me to have a line. So this was the previous year. Speed seemed really fun. It made you gab all night and smoke loads of cigarettes.

• 1:38:48Speaker 05

  Speed was really generally in that time. I mean, you know, everybody has, there's different drug times on there. But yeah, pre ecstasy, what people had was spliff, not even weed, really. And they had speed. That was the cheap bit. And then, you know, somebody might have some mushrooms or somebody might have some acid, but that's like what anybody had. And like coke and heroin were like a big deal because they were very, very expensive. But speed, everyone had speed. You'd take speed and then you'd paint your room because it would be quick, you know?

• 1:39:16Yasi Salek?

  I mean, I think the speed comes in so many forms, right? Like, the speed is like diet pills, you know, like it's very easy, like, it's not a hard street drug always, you know, it really is just like little pills that you can get in different forms. Whereas like heroin, you're gonna go and get from like a drug dealer.

• 1:39:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:39:34Yasi Salek?

  I mean, you get speed from a drug dealership, but I'm just saying, it's like, it's, it's not as like intense of a thing to procure either.

• 1:39:41Speaker 05

  No, not at all. And it was, and it was definitely felt cheap and quite teenage speed to me. Always like, it was just like something, you know, she's talking about a line there. In the, those days, you quite often just take it and rub it on your teeth, on your gums, sorry, you know?

• 1:39:56Yasi Salek?

  So that was, that was like, yeah, normal, you know, childish drugs, except that Justin and Donna had moved on into heroin. And like I said, Annie was already in her own way and world doing it, apparently. Donna said, my dad was a heroin addict, so I grew up with it. I took drugs all the time from when I was about 12. And when I joined the band and I found out that Annie did heroin, I was like, wow, hey. It was, don't tell the others. I wasn't a heroin addict, but Annie was. Annie was a heroin addict from day one. She had to take it every day. She used to take methadone as well. With me, I just took it like I took speed and eat. I didn't have a heroin habit for a while. I'd go down to Brighton and stay with her and do heroin. And now because Elastica are starting to make money, right?

• 1:40:39Yasi Salek?

  Donna and Justin could finally move out of the places they were living. And they move with Steve Mackey from Pulp to King's Cross. King's Cross was not a nice place back then, right?

• 1:40:51Speaker 05

  No, it's quite, it's, yeah, that made me, yeah, when you said that, I thought, oh, right. Okay. So they genuinely just moved near the deal.

• 1:40:58Yasi Salek?

  That's what Donna said. She said, we wanted a place where you could get drugs 24 hours a day. And we were thinking of a place to move. So we thought, well, we always end up in King's Cross in the middle of the night trying to score. Why don't we just move there? There was a 24 hour alcohol place at the end of the street, that and heroin and crack and anything you want. And we were just like, let's move here. Perfect.

• 1:41:16Speaker 05

  Oh, God.

• 1:41:18Yasi Salek?

  In December, there's an interview in Vox. It's just a list of things that Justine doesn't like. I'm not going to read them all, but number six is Cranberries fans.

• 1:41:28Yasi Salek?

  She says bland, ineffectual, middle of the road, nice music. I don't like Dolores's voice either, and their lyrics make my toes curl. Rhyming finger with linger should only be allowed in a Cadbury's fudge ad. And certainly not all day, every day, every time you turn the fucking radio on. Plus, I was annoyed that Damon was, wasn't on the cover of Vox and he was promised it.

• 1:41:50Speaker 05

  There you go. I like the fact, though, in those days, you know, it doesn't happen so much now, where literally the interviews that, that people did with musicians, it's just constant provocation.

• 1:42:01Yasi Salek?

  So great.

• 1:42:02Speaker 05

  Do you know what I mean? It's like, can you list everything you hate? And what do you think about this band that you hate? It's like the point, almost, part of what you did as a musician, should just wind people up so that they would say something outrageous.

• 1:42:13Yasi Salek?

  Well, and I think they liked it too, right? It was like a game. Like if you said the House Martens are shit. I'm just thinking of Jesus and Mary and Tim. Probably not a lot of people saying the House Martens are shit all the time in this era.

• 1:42:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:42:23Yasi Salek?

  I'm simply quoting Jim Reid. I'm, that's not my perspective. You're gonna get press. People are gonna talk about it, you know? That, I don't think that's why Jim Reid was doing anything. Jim Reid, just legendary hater and actually genuinely hated all these things and needed to talk about it. But we've become a little toxic positivity. I think we need to bring back some hating.

• 1:42:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, just toxicity.

• 1:42:43Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, just a little straight toxicity. They fly over to America in February of 1995 and like in the month before their album's about to come out and they play their first gig in Northern America at the Whisky in Los Angeles. Rodney Bingenheimer, he is the early champion of them, the Rodney on the Rock DJ for K-Rock, who is important to my life, played them a bunch on K-Rock. There's just another glowing review by Robert Hillburn, which ends, "Don't worry about the hype, Elastica is for real." They also play the Mercury Lounge in New York, that trip, and Debbie Harry and Iggy Pop attend. No big deal.

• 1:43:18Speaker 05

  That's just so great.

• 1:43:19Yasi Salek?

  It's okay, it's not, nobody, I mean, wouldn't you be nervous?

• 1:43:23Speaker 05

  Take a lot of speed before you go on.

• 1:43:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, probably like, oh, whatever. And then they put out their album. Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Okay? Oh, my god. Elastica self-titled, March 13th, 1995, Deceptive, Did You See? Here's one little thing that I thought was really hilarious. Apparently, it was reported in the LA Times in 1995, that they were gonna call, this is the only place I found this, so I don't know if it was 100% true, but, I mean, it was LA Times, it wasn't just like a gossip rag, that they had to change the title of the album because it was gonna be Keys, Money and Fags.

• 1:43:58Speaker 05

  That sounds quite likely.

• 1:43:59Yasi Salek?

  Which is, I guess, a line from Lineup, and because in America, we don't use fags as a cigarette, so they were like, no, that's not, we're just-

• 1:44:09Speaker 05

  And also, we did used to say it a lot. Like, you'd leave the house, you'd be about to leave the house, and you'd just go, "Have you got them? Keys, Money and Fags?" And then you go-

• 1:44:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah, it's a little checklist.

• 1:44:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, people would just say it all the time.

• 1:44:21Yasi Salek?

  Can we just take a moment to talk about how this album is just perfect, and from start to finish, top to bottom, no skips, just a beautiful, goddamn gorgeous, beautiful album?

• 1:44:31Speaker 05

  It is. And released at the same week as The Benz.

• 1:44:35Yasi Salek?

  Uh, well, The Benz didn't hit number one on the UK album chart because Elastica did, and was, became the fastest selling debut since, definitely, maybe, by Oasis the year before.

• 1:44:45Speaker 05

  Hmm. And it's great.

• 1:44:48Yasi Salek?

  It's so great. We didn't talk about how Lineup sounds like Wires, I Am The Fly. I'm really sorry. Justine said, "That really pissed me off because it's actually one of my least favorite Wire songs." Maybe I'm too close to it to hear it. I certainly wouldn't consider it a rip-off.

• 1:45:17Yasi Salek?

  Annie though, Annie is such a good song.

• 1:45:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, they're all, there's like, everyone is good. But yeah, Annie is great. And it's about Annie. That's so great.

• 1:45:27Yasi Salek?

  It's about Annie as a muse because she's just silent and cool and weird. She's like, and then there's a listing of names in that song.

• 1:45:44Yasi Salek?

  Car Song, a song about having sex in cars. Gorgeous.

• 1:45:47Speaker 05

  That's the best that's sung on. I love that song.

• 1:45:49Yasi Salek?

  So good. It's so good.

• 1:45:59Yasi Salek?

  Hold Me Now, also really gorgeous, sexy, vibey. S O F T, fucking banger.

• 1:46:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, really good. That's one of my favorites.

• 1:46:08Yasi Salek?

  Stands for Same Old Fucking Thing.

• 1:46:20Yasi Salek?

  Waking Up is the song that we, the Stranglers.

• 1:46:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:46:24Yasi Salek?

  Did not sue them for, but their lawyers did, um, for their resemblance to the riff from No More Heroes. And then the credits were altered to include the Stranglers.

• 1:46:46Yasi Salek?

  Justine said in an interview in 95, Rattus, how do you even say that? Strangler album, Norvegius? Nor, Nor, Norvegi, Norvegi, Norvekas?

• 1:46:58Yasi Salek?

  You say it, Miranda.

• 1:46:59Speaker 05

  I was gonna try. Hang on a minute.

• 1:47:06Speaker 05

  Raras no veggies, no joveticus.

• 1:47:09Yasi Salek?

  That I, nobody knows babe, nobody will ever know, it's a mystery. She said, "That was one of the records my brother left behind when he moved out of home. He used to play Stranglers records when I was 12 or 13. I didn't really understand a lot of the language and the images went over my head, but the sheer popness of it got me."

• 1:47:26Speaker 05

  It's like, "I like this, so I ripped it off."

• 1:47:29Yasi Salek?

  She said the Stranglers actually rehearsed the same studio as us and we went out for a drink with Jean Jacques Brunel a couple of weeks ago. Annie's a massive fan and he told her she was a really good bassist. They asked her, but basically was she consciously aware that she was appropriating the melodies in another interview and she was like, "No, of course not. Like, I just, you know, we know the Stranglers quite well. I think they were a bit embarrassed and their publishers decided to take action. I think we could have won if we went to court, but the problem was we could have been injuncted and that would have put the album back six months, which is the last thing we wanted. So we settled out of court. We had to give them a ridiculously large amount of the publishing, which of course, the Stranglers themselves don't get. The only consolation is that I now have a co-writing credit with Cornwell and Brunel." Which is cool. JJ Brunel, Jean Jacques Brunel said, "Yes, it sounds like us, but so what?

• 1:48:14Yasi Salek?

  Of course there's plagiarism, but unless you live in a vacuum, there's always going to be. It's the first thing our publishers have done for us in 20 years. But if it had been up to me, I wouldn't have bothered."

• 1:48:25Speaker 05

  Lawyers, oh my god.

• 1:48:27Yasi Salek?

  I know. They were like, "Fuck them, honestly." Never Here is kind of an outlier on this album, right? It's like a, the one sort of like sincerely emotional song. Not that, not that the rest aren't, but this is like a little more vulnerable and I think it is known to be about her relationship with Brett, right?

• 1:48:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because it's almost, it could be either. Do you know what I mean? Like, it could be Damon. Do you know what I mean? It really could be, because it's about...

• 1:48:55Yasi Salek?

  It's true.

• 1:48:55Speaker 05

  Like, I assumed it was about Damon, actually.

• 1:48:57Yasi Salek?

  Well, the part where she says, "You were far too busy writing rhymes that didn't scan and you, you lent me your records and I lent you an ear," to me and doing my forensic detective work is more Brett, because Damon had no records and she famously didn't like Suede's music, so...

• 1:49:19Speaker 05

  And, you know, and his lyrics scan.

• 1:49:21Yasi Salek?

  I know. I don't agree with you on that one, Justine, but, okay.

• 1:49:34Yasi Salek?

  And then we have Stutter closing it out, which I already said is goddamn gorgeous. And on the US version, which is not, wasn't on the UK version, See That Animal, which came from a Suede song, right?

• 1:49:45Speaker 05

  Right, okay.

• 1:50:00Yasi Salek?

  This album gets great reviews, babe. NME, nine out of 10. Q, four stars. Rolling Stone, four stars. Smash Hits, four stars. Spin, nine out of 10. Village Voice, A minus. Entertainment Weekly, B plus. Okay, rude.

• 1:50:13Speaker 05

  A minus. It's so funny marking it like that. A minus.

• 1:50:16Yasi Salek?

  I know. You know, famously, Robert Criscow liked the second album better.

• 1:50:22Speaker 05

  That's weird.

• 1:50:23Yasi Salek?

  The only person on earth.

• 1:50:26Speaker 05

  Yes, I would disagree with that.

• 1:50:28Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:28Speaker 05

  This is a great album and it's so, it's short. It does all the things that you want Elastica to do, which is basically make great records and not repeat themselves and just get out. It's great. They're all like two and a half minutes long, three and a half minutes long.

• 1:50:42Yasi Salek?

  Okay, like I said, she doesn't like a, she doesn't want a seven minute long guitar solo.

• 1:50:46Speaker 05

  No, she wouldn't. She did that, she said that really brilliant thing where she doesn't want to do like the way that songs are normally written, where she's like song, chorus, song, chorus, bridge, chorus, chorus, chorus.

• 1:50:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:56Speaker 05

  And she's like, I'm not interested in repeating it. Like, like you do song, chorus, and then you do something, you, you, you, sorry, verse chorus or the song chorus.

• 1:51:04Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:04Speaker 05

  But like you do the verse and you do the chorus and you do that. And then you don't repeat yourself. I'm not interested in repeating myself. And then, you know, you've got it, off you go.

• 1:51:12Yasi Salek?

  It's great. I mean, she was, she was like a surgeon, right? And this is talked about, Brett talks about it later when they reconcile and he's watching her make the album, like, and they say it in various ways, the other band members, like, and sometimes when they're being mean about it, they say she's like a Nazi, but not the haircut and the, but that she's very like rigid about like what exactly, she knows exactly what she wants. There's a precision to it. These writers have worn out the word angular to the furthest of its capabilities, talking about this music. She, this is what she wants it to sound like and it, it works, it's perfect.

• 1:51:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, and the lyrics are really good as well. Like, it's just, I, I really love that album and the sing, and there's different ways of writing lyrics, obviously, but there's, there's the humor in it and I like the kind of, you know, they quite often go, one, two, three, four.

• 1:52:02Yasi Salek?

  I know, like classic punks, classic, classic punk style.

• 1:52:05Speaker 05

  And they have sounds of like, and the puking sound, bleh, and the fact that they've got a cup of tea in there and.

• 1:52:10Yasi Salek?

  I love it in a motor. He, she made sure to be like, just because we said car doesn't mean we don't call it motor over here. Um, also, let's go siesta and your Ford Fiesta is really fucking good. It's really top class, as they say, top notch.

• 1:52:32Yasi Salek?

  In every little Honda, there may lurk a Peter Fonda, bye.

• 1:52:35Speaker 05

  Ooh.

• 1:52:37Yasi Salek?

  So good. I mean, look at Peter Fonda.

• 1:52:48Speaker 05

  And it's quite camp, that song as well. She's just, that, that bit where she goes, ooh. It's Peter Fonda, it's so funny.

• 1:52:56Yasi Salek?

  It's, yeah, she, and she said earlier on that they wanted, they wanted to be funny.

• 1:53:01Speaker 05

  It's like a proper reaction against Brett, isn't it? She doesn't want to be serious.

• 1:53:05Yasi Salek?

  She really didn't want to be like that level of overwrought. And I don't think it's ways of overwrought, but wrought at all, if that's a way to say it. Yeah, it's, it's just, it's just fabulous. It's just wonderful and, um, I listened to that album, top to bottom, back to front, so many times as, as a teen. I, I was 12 when this came out, so it was a big deal for me.

• 1:53:32Speaker 01

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• 1:54:03Yasi Salek?

  Justine and Damon do not move to King's Cross, you guys. They buy a house on Kensington Park Road. That's a nice part of town. The tabloids wrote about it. They called it their 350,000 pound love nest, which just made me want to commit sui hari kari because I was like 350,000 pounds. That's how much it costs to buy a massive gorgeous house in a nice part of town.

• 1:54:24Speaker 05

  It was a fucking massive house, yeah.

• 1:54:26Yasi Salek?

  We've fallen so hard. That, like that, that won't get you anything now, nothing.

• 1:54:30Speaker 05

  Nothing.

• 1:54:31Yasi Salek?

  Not even a whisper, not even a room.

• 1:54:33Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:54:34Yasi Salek?

  Anyways, Justine's possessions are completely moved over in her absence because she was just gone on tour for all of 1995. She said Damon was there for six months on his own and he didn't buy a chair to sit on. There was a telly on a box, loads of newspapers, an ashtray and a bed, and that was it.

• 1:54:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think that's a big problem.

• 1:54:55Yasi Salek?

  You think, you think he should have maybe bought a chair?

• 1:54:57Speaker 05

  I do think it might have worked. Like, I think that, you know, having moved from, you know, she had a kind of like, I mean, I'm aware that it was her house, wasn't it? It was her flat when she lived with Brett, but it was like a nice place that had cats and it was nice. I mean, obviously Damon was incredibly busy and just go, everyone was just going out all the time. And I'm certainly not saying I lived anywhere, I mean, I didn't live, I didn't own anywhere. And where I live, I mean, I don't think was worth 350,000 pounds, but like, we were just out all the time. Where we lived was a pit. Like, that's just the nature of life in those, in those, in that time. There's nothing to keep you indoors, there's no internet.

• 1:55:33Yasi Salek?

  Right. Just a telly on the box.

• 1:55:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, you just go. So I get that he's like that, but also if you've been on tour and you come back and he's done nothing, you're gonna feel a bit like, oh man, not even a bed?

• 1:55:45Yasi Salek?

  Well, they had a bed, just a bed and an ashtray, no couch though. If I didn't have a couch, I would throw a fit. That's my favorite thing in the whole world. I need to count. And a felly. Melody Maker asked her, as a kid, were you a tomboy? And she said, more so now than then, actually. When you're in your twenties, you feel more confident about what you are. You don't feel like you necessarily have to dress up for boys. When I was a teenager, I had really long hair and felt like I had to wear makeup. But now I feel a lot more comfortable with short hair. It's something I discovered with leaving home and going to college. In a way, it's nineties urban camouflage.

• 1:56:18Speaker 05

  I completely agree.

• 1:56:19Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, right?

• 1:56:20Speaker 05

  I completely agree. If you don't want attention as a young woman, you dress down.

• 1:56:25Yasi Salek?

  She said that if you're wearing long hair and makeup, you're going to feel a lot more vulnerable than if you got short hair and big boots. I remember at school, we had self-defense lessons. And the teacher said that anybody with long hair should really wear a hat and cover up. Because if somebody wants to grab you, you're incredibly vulnerable. There's nothing somebody can do if they get hold of your hair.

• 1:56:43Speaker 05

  Yes, which is a pretty grim thing to say. But I do think that there is an.

• 1:56:46Yasi Salek?

  I know. I thought about that.

• 1:56:48Speaker 05

  You know, is that what we were saying before? If you present in a, if you take on masculine looks, you're asking to be taken seriously.

• 1:56:57Yasi Salek?

  That's exactly what she said. She said, so there's a sense that you sort of really avoid the things that signify vulnerability or availability. And she answered, it's just expecting to be treated as one of the lads. You don't want to deliberately remove yourself from being able to be a good bloke.

• 1:57:10Speaker 05

  Hmm. But she's like, she's, it's so interesting because she's not using the language that people use now. But what she's saying is in order to get, I mean, you, what are people saying now? It's like, you know, a seat at the table or whatever. You know, you have to, it's like, you have to almost like become as masculine as the people that you're trying to, you know, be with. Which is just obviously tragic, but it's just, you know, that's how it was.

• 1:57:34Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:35Speaker 05

  And there's still a big part of me, like, I can't help it. Like, I'm from the same era as her. I'm not from the same class, but I grew up with all the same things that she grew up with. And I still, there's still a big part of me that thinks it is cooler to dress a bit more like a bloke. That, like, I can't help it.

• 1:57:49Yasi Salek?

  Same. There's like, whenever I put on an outfit, I have to like, make it a little masculine. Like, it's not possible. Like, a dress has to have like, a boots, or like, something scuzzy.

• 1:58:01Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:58:02Yasi Salek?

  Like, the idea of wearing like, a dress and heels is like, so foreign to me. Nothing wrong with it. I mean, it's great. I love when I see hyper feminine women or whatever, but I personally feel like, really uncomfortable.

• 1:58:12Speaker 05

  And I think that's because there's this, there's an association, a very, very long-term association, and God knows how you unpick it. Is that if a woman is good-looking, she is not clever. So if you want to be accepted as somebody who is clever, and has something to offer of their, of your brain, as well as your body, then you have to kind of say, actually, you, you can take me seriously because I'm dressed like you. It's just tragic.

• 1:58:35Yasi Salek?

  She also reveals in this article that Damon didn't like when she cut her hair.

• 1:58:41Yasi Salek?

  He says, this is the one where she says, Damon was so gutted when I cut all my hair off, although he can get into it now because he knows it makes me happy. Which I thought was interesting. Yeah. The girls who look a bit boyish, it's the intelligent boy's choice. That's the thing I was quoting earlier. And then they talk about like, the fame in Damon. Because this is March 95, so Blur's very famous, right?

• 1:59:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, they are. Yeah, they're, they're huge.

• 1:59:05Yasi Salek?

  And Elastica is, in its own way, big. And now they have this whole tabloid thing, right, about them as a couple.

• 1:59:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, very different.

• 1:59:13Yasi Salek?

  And they ask her, like, you're cast in the tabloids as Mary Ann Faithfull to his Jagger. And she says, "Some wild inaccuracies have been printed about the way we live, but you hope that anyone with half a brain will realize they're not true. If somebody's a little fantasy world, and if you make a fuss about it, you kind of justify it. So it's better just to ignore it. Sometimes it can be quite invasive, but it just goes with the territory. I had a strange day on Saturday, shopping for the tour and buying things like Imac and knickers and stuff." I don't know what Imac is.

• 1:59:41Speaker 05

  Oh, it's hair removal cream.

• 1:59:43Yasi Salek?

  Not the kind of things you want people to see you buy, because we've been on top of the pops. It was very noticeable that people were giving me funny looks. Damon gets incredibly paranoid. He hates it.

• 1:59:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't think it was easy. I think it was really hard. They had people like, they had mild stalkers. They had people put stuff through their letterbox. I think someone tried to set fire to their letterbox. You know, I mean, it's not great.

• 2:00:04Yasi Salek?

  Oh my god. Somehow in all of this, I also read that Adam, from Adam and the Ants, had a stalker that lived in his air conditioning unit. Like in his, like in his, like in the like wall, isn't that so insane? And he would like hear like scurrying and then he would find like crisp wrappers and soda cans outside where the vent opened up and he was like trying to report it and they were just like, sorry, like, and he was like, there's, I think there's somebody living in my aircon.

• 2:00:32Speaker 05

  Oh, my God, that's mental.

• 2:00:34Yasi Salek?

  So crazy. So at least they didn't have that. But yeah, I guess I wasn't there, but like the point being that they were like massive tablet fixtures at this point. So they're very famous.

• 2:00:45Speaker 05

  Yeah. And it's also weird because they, they were kind of were and they weren't because obviously we haven't, haven't quite had the Blur versus Oasis bit, but we, what we've got is famous people, but not quite, you know, not hugely famous, but famous enough people that are living within the remit of the tabloids. So they don't have bodyguards. They haven't got people on the door saying you have to move on or anything like that. They're in, they're out and about, they're buying their Immac and boots, you know? So they're out and about and the tabloids want to, you know, this is the height of the, of the kind of paparazzi. And so the, it's not that far for them to go to Kensington. There's, if, nothing's happening. They can go around and see if like Damon and Justine are like buying

• 2:01:30Speaker 05

  anything. Do you know what I mean? Take a picture of them. It's like, it's as boring and tedious as that. Do you know what I mean? There's some people that want to be in the, in the tabloids all the time and they didn't, they didn't deal with the tabloids. So it's not like they gave them loads of interviews. They didn't. So then you have to, the only thing they can get is the paparazzi shots really, but they were pretty available because I think there's a point where you're rich and famous, but you're not in that huge upper echelon where you're really away from the normal people, you know, you're not living in Gwyneth Paltrow land, you're living in like normal, normal land and you go and do your normal shopping because you want to still be an, an ordinary person. And that means that you're completely vulnerable to the paparazzis.

• 2:02:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that sucks. It does sound really bad. And I think this is like just around or about when Battle of Rip Pop happens because it is mid 1995, right? Isn't it?

• 2:02:19Speaker 05

  Yeah. And, and that happens in August.

• 2:02:22Yasi Salek?

  In August. Yeah. So it's about, it's about to happen.

• 2:02:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:02:25Yasi Salek?

  There's also that really terrible Blur indoors tablet thing about how they don't have sex.

• 2:02:31Speaker 05

  That's so weird. I don't remember. I mean, Blur indoors is quite funny.

• 2:02:36Yasi Salek?

  Justine said, it's just totally ugly. The thing that pisses me off is that Elastica don't warrant that attention. I get it because of Blur. Blur indoors. That's so shit.

• 2:02:44Speaker 05

  Yeah. But that's it because she's really trying to be in a cool underground band. And just from the nature of her relationship, that's not allowed.

• 2:02:53Yasi Salek?

  Right. And it's funny though, because she does, she's very self-aware because in the same article, they're like, but you're in a band. You want to be famous. You can't gripe. And she says, no, you can't. I went into this with my eyes open. I thought if they can handle it, so can I. There's also that idea that if you have a boyfriend who wants to be famous or is famous, then you want to be equal to him. You want to be as good as they are. The classic. We don't have to get into the whole Liam Gallagher saying, I wouldn't kick that bird Justine out of bed.

• 2:03:21Speaker 05

  But I will say that Justine said- She was not happy about that, was she?

• 2:03:24Yasi Salek?

  She said, what a sad cunt. I mean, I think he was being ironic if he wasn't so fucking thick.

• 2:03:30Yasi Salek?

  That's pretty good. In June of 1995, they also played the K-Rock Weenie Rose, which is a radio show festival in Los Angeles, well, in Irvine, California. And I am there with my father, just so you guys know. And it was a big deal.

• 2:03:45Speaker 05

  Oh, that's great.

• 2:03:47Yasi Salek?

  Hole played, Elastica played, the Ramones played, Rages Against the Machine played. It was a great day. Me and my father.

• 2:03:56Speaker 05

  That sounds brilliant.

• 2:03:58Yasi Salek?

  That's right. Because I was 12 or 13 and I was not allowed to go to concert by myself, so my dad took me. Then they joined Lollapalooza Tour that summer to replace Sinead O'Connor, who dropped out because she was pregnant. This was, I also went to those Lollapalooza, one of the best Lollapalooza lineups of all time. Hole, Sonic Youth, Pavement, Jesus Lizard, Elastica, just fucking fabulous. Beck. However, August 6th, Annie Holland is like, no more, thank you. I don't want to do this anymore. I'm tired. Bye.

• 2:04:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's really interesting. Before that, what I would say is, so before we get to August.

• 2:04:35Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:36Speaker 05

  There is Glastonbury nineteen ninety five.

• 2:04:38Yasi Salek?

  Okay, yes, I didn't mention. That's also June.

• 2:04:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's June. I can definitely make a case for Glastonbury nineteen ninety five to almost be like the pinnacle or the launchpad or the point of Britpop because because Pulp step in.

• 2:04:52Yasi Salek?

  Right, to cover Stone Roses drop out, yeah.

• 2:04:55Speaker 05

  They drop out, Pulp step in. Nobody thinks they're gonna be any good. And they're amazing and everybody loves them. They do everything wrong. They play like new songs and everything and people are still like, we love you. And they, and common people blows. There is no roof, but it blows the sky up. You know, it's absolutely amazing. And Oasis play and Robbie Williams goes on stage with them.

• 2:05:13Yasi Salek?

  Sure, in his tracksuit, yeah. Fat Robbie Williams in his tracksuit, yeah, it's great.

• 2:05:17Speaker 05

  And then on the, on the NME stage, the Prodigy play, they're amazing. Supergas play and Elastica headline the Sunday. And I can really remember that gig. And they were absolutely brilliant. And the way that the NME stage is positioned is it faces out west. So the sun. So if you were on the stage, I think you see the sunset, right? So you're facing out that way. And I remember watching it. They played an absolutely brilliant set. They were so good. The sun was going down. And then this guy, he's called Ant Gen, he's like a mate of Pulp's. He comes on and he has no clothes on, he streaks at the back, like he looks like, he looks like George Best. They call him a George Best looker.

• 2:05:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, he's the one that left Pulp to join a cult that was like a Christian ecstasy cult, yeah.

• 2:06:06Speaker 05

  But it was really, it was a hot Glastonbury, which then was another guaranteed. And it felt a little bit like, there's certain points when you're young where you feel like, oh, we're winning. Like, like this, like, whatever it is, what I believe in is somehow it's working. And that Glastonbury was one of them, definitely.

• 2:06:25Yasi Salek?

  It's funny, we talk a lot about the demise of Britpop and the death of it, but we haven't really talked about the peak of it. And I think that's really interesting that it probably was exactly what you're saying. It was around this time, like everyone's firing on all cylinders. Like the battle of Britpop is, you know, huge because these bands are so huge. And Pulp is finally reaching their full potential and the Common People is so big and Elastica is so big. And it's just, it's really 1995 is just the best.

• 2:06:56Speaker 05

  Yeah. But I mean, even things like Supergress, so Supergress play Glastonbury. And, you know, they release all right, either just before or just afterward. And that was like huge, that song was massive. That's like the tabloid introduction to what Britpop is. Do you know what I mean? They're like, oh, Britpop is great. They're like, they look like the Beatles and they're really cool and cute. And that's what they think kind of Britpop is, do you know what I mean? And everybody loved that track.

• 2:07:27Speaker 05

  So it was just felt very optimistic.

• 2:07:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, okay, that's very interesting. So things, yeah, things are gorgeous, things are going great. But then, but then they're not because Annie Holland leaves Elastica.

• 2:07:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, she goes to, they pay a couple of gigs, don't they? They play like T in the Park and somewhere else, maybe a Kayleigh in Ireland. And then she's just like, I've had enough of that and she's out.

• 2:07:49Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, she's replaced, well, she doesn't fully quit here, but she's replaced on the Lollapalooza tour, I believe, because she quits right in the middle. So they have to have Abby Travis play, who was the bassist for Beck. And actually in the Lollapalooza book, Melissa Oftermar says she was also considered to do it, but Courtney wouldn't let her. Because she was like, it's, it's because she had just joined Hole. And she's, Courtney, I think, rightfully so, was like, it'll be confusing. Like, no one will understand that you're our bassist, you know? So Abby Travis did it. And then sometime around here, or early 1996, if you ask Justine, Justine gets into heroin. Sometime between nineteen, between the end of summer nineteen eighty-five and top of nineteen six, she said heroin seemed to get fashionable. People would be doing ease and at the end of

• 2:08:34Yasi Salek?

  the evening, it would come out on a bit of tin foil. No one was jacking it up. Everyone was smoking it. Jacking it up, I presume means.

• 2:08:41Speaker 05

  It means a j, didn't you?

• 2:08:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. It was being passed around like, ooh, try this. It's mellow and nice. So under those circumstances, it was in my immediate vicinity. And Donna said, I can't remember her asking me for heroin. And I said, no, for ages. She was like, I just want to try it. This was after I said to her, I think I'm a heroin addict. So she knew I had a problem with heroin before she started taking it. And as soon as she started taking it, she became an addict straight away. This was in the last party in John Harris's book.

• 2:09:09Speaker 05

  It's interesting, isn't it? Because she's, um, you know, there's a big aspect of Justine as a control freak. And I sometimes think that people who are control freaks, when they take the drug that is switched on inside them, whatever that drug is, they just fall really hard. And heroin is quite often the one, obviously. Crack is another one, but like.

• 2:09:28Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And it's like, part of the reason they go there is to be free of that control, right? You know?

• 2:09:36Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:09:37Yasi Salek?

  It's also very interesting, because, I mean, I did this with Blur too, so I'm not, it's not a matter of gender, but I think it's, you can't talk about the story of Elastica and the story of Justine without talking about what's going on with Damon. Because it's so influential on her and same vice versa. It's pretty noted that Damon's also doing heroin, right? I don't, I mean, allegedly, again, this is what's being bandied around, but like, kind of before that, right? He famously has that thing where he goes and ID and like, rages out on Brett Anderson for doing heroin and Justine's like, you're, but you're doing heroin. What are you talking about? So, you know, that was also going on in the home or whatever.

• 2:10:21Speaker 05

  It was a messy, it's just a messy scene. It was a big scene. It was a big scene. Everybody was out. Everybody was doing all sorts of things. And I think that in those situations, maybe because we all had that feeling that was incredibly optimistic, you felt a bit invincible.

• 2:10:36Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, nothing can hurt us. We're invincible. Totally. And I mean, also, I can I can imagine there's a lot of stress, you know, like we just talked about the tabloid stuff. Elastic has been on tour for seventy five years. At this point, they've not been home like everyone's tired. I'm not justifying the use of heroin, but I'm just like, if it's just around, eventually, you're probably gonna get curious.

• 2:10:56Speaker 05

  Yeah. And also, like, if you think about, say, that time, her boyfriend is Damon Albarn, and he has just been through the Britpop wars in August, which Blur win, but they are hated for winning. And so like, so, so they win and almost immediately lose.

• 2:11:14Yasi Salek?

  Everyone's yelling at Damon out of car windows. They're shouting, where's Liam? Playing fucking Wonderwall at him.

• 2:11:20Speaker 05

  They literally sing wherever he goes, he gets it. And also in that year, like, because they were, Elastic were touring and Blur were touring and did it. I think, I remember Justine saying that they saw each other for three weeks, the whole of that.

• 2:11:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and the whole year. So that's all you're not seeing your partner. It's, it's a mess. So the next year, that was the good year. Now we're entering the bad year. Nineteen ninety six. They go back to the UK to start working on songs. After touring Australia in February, they recruit Dave Bush to join them. I mean, Mancunian, like you, who had briefly been a member of The Fall. He was really good at electronic stuff.

• 2:11:58Speaker 05

  So he was that keyboardist, wasn't he?

• 2:12:00Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So that, yeah, because they wanted to do more. It's ninety six. So everyone's kind of moving in that direction. They're not everyone, but a lot of people. And finally, they're like, okay, Annie's not coming back. So they replace her with her permanent replacement, Sheila Chipperfield.

• 2:12:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:12:15Yasi Salek?

  Parents were apparently circus performers.

• 2:12:17Speaker 05

  Chipperfield is massive. Chipperfield is the, like, there was Zippo Circus and there was Chipperfields. Like, it's really well known, like.

• 2:12:27Yasi Salek?

  It's just like a footnote in the book. It just says that her parents were circus performers.

• 2:12:30Speaker 05

  No, no, no, like, like when we, we would find out, we're like, oh, my God, she's a Chipperfield. Like, like, like, not like she was past, she was like, oh, my God, it's like, she's genuinely, that circus would like formed everybody's life. Do you know what I mean?

• 2:12:42Yasi Salek?

  Circus folk. Okay, there's one small problem, though. Dave Bush and Sheila Chipperfield are not junkies.

• 2:12:49Speaker 05

  No.

• 2:12:50Yasi Salek?

  But everyone else is a junkie. Things are not moving along. Justine said, I was still very much going to work every day, but not getting very much done, thinking everything was shit. You lose your joy of life and you lose your ability to hear things properly. I think if you're clean, you can get a spirit from music. You know it's good just because of the way it makes you feel. If you're doing drugs, it's much harder to get that feel from music. Maybe at the beginning, when you do it, everything feels great, but you can't really tell if something's right or not. It just muddles you. Also, on top of this, Dave Bush is adding tons of electronica, like we're saying, and click track, and they want to sound more like New Order. And Justin's having a bit of trouble with keeping time to this like sort of rigid click track. Justine

• 2:13:31Yasi Salek?

  was like, drummers on heroin are not fun. It just got tedious. It wasn't pretty. So the vibes are pretty bad. Donna said, we used to turn up at the rehearsal rooms and just take drugs. We'd always be late. We'd sometimes do music, but most of the time we'd just take drugs. We all used to just sit and do heroin together. For Dave and Sheila, it must have been mad. Just three people sat there in the corner with foil just doing gear. Then we'd play some songs. The look on Sheila's face sometimes was just like, these people are fucking mad. And Justine said, poor girl, man, clean living young chick, really up for it. I felt really sorry for her. We weren't very furtive about it. We weren't furtive at all, in fact, but none of us would let her go anywhere near it.

• 2:14:11Speaker 05

  Yes, grim, innit?

• 2:14:12Yasi Salek?

  It's a real tell about heroin, right? That like, when people do it, they won't let you. And it's not because it's like cocaine where they just want to keep it for themselves. They're just like, please, you don't want this. You don't want to be a part of this. It's dark.

• 2:14:25Speaker 05

  I mean, it's a cliche, but whatever it is, but every indie scene, at some point, heroin comes in and messes it up. It's like unbelievable. It just comes in and it takes a certain proportion of the people in that scene. Takes them away. It's not just indie scene, is it? It's like soul scene is whatever, you know, it just takes a certain proportion of those people and it just doesn't let them go.

• 2:14:46Yasi Salek?

  Nobody learns. They don't learn from the last 10 times that it happened or whatever. But I guess because there's all these like romanticizations, artists who did take it and still make great work or whatever, and the people maybe think they, because of that, they made great work. I don't know, you know?

• 2:15:01Speaker 05

  There was always that idea that people could maintain on heroin. So like, the idea was like, you know, hey, Keith Richards is basically, you know, he could maintain and actually Charlie Watts and all that kind of stuff. And even Sean Ryder. So the idea was that like, you know, you can maintain and still be okay.

• 2:15:18Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, but it's like, open your eyes, babe. Are you Sean Ryder? No, nobody is. Sean Ryder is an alien from another dimension. Same with Keith Richards. These are absolute aberrations of human beings. That's not the norm. You're not like that. Ninety-nine percent of people are not like that.

• 2:15:33Speaker 05

  I mean, I can remember, like, it's quite interesting when, you know, you did that quote about Justine saying, "Oh, I can remember what it just seemed to be around," and so can I, and I wasn't interested. And it just made everything quite boring.

• 2:15:44Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:15:45Speaker 05

  There's just a point where it got boring.

• 2:15:47Yasi Salek?

  She kind of said it too, in that same thing where it was like 10 things you hate, and one was the Cranberries fans. Another one that I didn't read was like, this is pre her getting into it, I guess, but it was like people who use drug use as like a means for creativity or whatever. And it's funny because she really didn't know it, but I mean, who knows, maybe she was unhappy. You know, like, whatever. There's many reasons that you finally are just like, okay, fine.

• 2:16:09Speaker 05

  You probably just also want everything to shut up.

• 2:16:12Yasi Salek?

  Right, yeah. Turn the, not to

• 2:16:15Speaker 05

  Just turn everything down.

• 2:16:15Yasi Salek?

  Chip or field it, but like, turn the circus off, you know? So, they're not, they're not making much progress. They do write a couple of new songs and they record them for Steve Lamack's Radio One show. Three of them actually end up on the next album, I Want You Only Human, and which ends up being called Just Human, and A Love Like Ours, and a fourth one called The Other Side, which, those were released eventually, the Radio One ones. And then in November of 96, they start recording their new album. Just a spoiler alert, this doesn't come out till 2000, so just if you think about how good things were going.

• 2:16:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:16:50Yasi Salek?

  Justine and Donna are not really on the same page musically, though. Donna, I guess, was really, had gotten really into, like, Missy Elliott and rap music and stuff like that. Donna said, "We came out with loads of intricate music, but because we were out of our heads, we couldn't seem to put it in a cohesive form. There were loads of unfinished songs, thousands of pounds worth of tape full of them. You probably could have made 10 albums on the material we had, but everyone's heads were in different places." Justine said, "Donna's a very interesting character, very bright and totally chameleon-like, and I didn't have a clue. I totally underestimated her. Her chameleon thing worked for a bit in terms of her understanding the idea of Elastica and adding to it, but eventually she went completely off the rails, changing personalities and changing looks, until it got quite frightening.

• 2:17:32Yasi Salek?

  I remember her walking into rehearsal, maybe six months after Sheila had joined, and saying, 'Oh, I heard the Elastica album last night. I was around at someone's house and they put it on, and I was just so embarrassed.'"

• 2:17:43Speaker 05

  So weird, isn't it?

• 2:17:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and Donna's really honest too. She was like, I started getting really egotistical, thinking I deserve to be writing half the songs. And that's when it started going wrong. I'd started to become very competitive, which pissed Justine off because it was her band. She had the direction that made Elastica what it was, and I never appreciated that at the time.

• 2:18:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, it becomes a bit of a power struggle, doesn't it?

• 2:18:02Yasi Salek?

  I think so. And also, it doesn't help that everyone's on drugs, because like,

• 2:18:05Speaker 05

  No.

• 2:18:05Yasi Salek?

  you know, you're not exactly being rational or logical. Justine just stops coming to rehearsal because she's so frustrated with what's going on. And the band kind of carries on and Donna ends up singing and this goes on for a while. And then Justine finally comes back and is like, what are you guys doing? Like, and then she bans Donna from the studio. And then in 1997, this is a year of nothing happening, babe. Except for the Geffen person was working around the clock to get Elastica songs on soundtracks. Unheard Music is on the Suburbia soundtrack. In the City is on the Nowhere soundtrack. Gregor Rocky, great, great movie. And Justine mostly stays home this year and Damon's gone, like you were saying. He's gone because they have put out their like breakthrough American album, self titled Woo-Hoo.

• 2:18:55Yasi Salek?

  And so while Damon's gone and she's just at home, kind of doing nothing. She reconnects with Brett Anderson because she had a nightmare about him where he died and she wasn't invited to the funeral. And so she's like, oh, I need to contact him. They hadn't spoken in like three years. And they reconnect and she starts hanging out with him and his girlfriend a lot. And we talked about this in the Suede episode. There's some implication in the book, Love and Poison, that maybe, and not by the writer, but, but by various associates that are quoted, that maybe Justine is the one that got Brett and Sam into heroin, but there's no way to know that. Regardless, Brett does get into heroin at this time and then also into crack as well. And that's a whole nother story. It's neither here nor there. It's in the Suede episode. But Suede was playing Reading with top billing at this point because they, again, like you said,

• 2:19:40Yasi Salek?

  Off Cycle all the time, are putting, they put Coming Up out this year and it's doing super well. And Justine joins them for a song called Implement Ya. Were you there at this writing?

• 2:19:53Speaker 05

  God, I can't remember it. If I was.

• 2:19:57Yasi Salek?

  It's on YouTube. People can watch it, but it was very sweet because Justine was like Brett basically organized it so I'd have something to do. So I didn't feel bored and bitter and twisted about the fact that I wasn't on stage. I was only on stage for two minutes.

• 2:20:17Yasi Salek?

  And then Damon comes home and Justine said, I think Damon was a bit pissed off that suddenly Brett was back, but I think he knew that at some point he would be. He just hated Brett. They loved hating each other. He was just like, why is that cunt back on the scene? I even brought Brett round to say hello to Damon to try to heal old wounds. He was living around the corner. We were all doing drugs together and I was like, she's talking about Brett and his girlfriend, not Brett and Damon. And she said, I was like, well, look, why don't you just make friends? And Brett was like, okay, I'll finally bury the hatchet. They thought that that day they'd give it a go. And it was one of the weirdest, nastiest scenes ever. It was like a cat and a dog meeting each other. Just one of them went to shake the other's hand and he didn't look around. I can't remember which way around it was, but it was really weird. I got Brett out of there within two minutes. I realized

• 2:21:02Yasi Salek?

  it just wasn't happening. When they actually had to be in the same space, they still wanted to kill each other.

• 2:21:07Speaker 05

  Funny. And also you know who the cat is and who the dog is, don't you? Like it's so obvious that Brett is the cat and Damon's the dog.

• 2:21:14Yasi Salek?

  She said something really good. She was like, it was so beyond anything to do with me. And it got to a point where Brett was driven by hating Damon and Damon's driven by hating everyone. So they really just needed to hate each other.

• 2:21:28Yasi Salek?

  I thought it was great, but yes, Brett is a cat and Damon is a dog. That's pretty clear to anyone with two eyes. Guess what? The Geffen person back at work, 1998. They get a human put on the Dead Man on Campus soundtrack. So this is two full years where Elastica doesn't do much, right? Like.

• 2:21:44Speaker 05

  They did nothing. And it's that thing, isn't it? They've got the money and now they're into the drugs.

• 2:21:49Yasi Salek?

  And now they're into the drugs and they can't get along enough to make music together in the studio. And so that's all that's happening. So Justine is like, I'm going to get the original lineup back together. That's the only thing that's going to make Elastica work again. And so she reaches out to Annie and Annie agrees to come back for rehearsal. But Justine said that Donna didn't want Annie to come back.

• 2:22:10Speaker 05

  Because Donna was big mates with Sheila, right?

• 2:22:12Yasi Salek?

  Yes, and I think, okay, here's what she said. She said, "The four of us with Dave Bush and the old songs suddenly sounded great again. Then we started jamming on new stuff and Donna just went off looking for, quote, "the note" while we jammed this one song over and over. She was like, "I just know there's this one note and if I play it, the whole song will sound great." She went through all the notes. There's not that many, but she just kept looking for it. So good. "There's not that many." She went, "There's not that many, babe. Neither you have it or you don't." So I think what her implication was that with Annie back, it was really clear that the old Elastica like really worked and then the new direction they were trying to go in, particularly because Donna was bored and wanted to do something different, wasn't working. And so Donna was like, "Go away, Annie. You ruined everything."

• 2:22:55Yasi Salek?

  And Justine said she'd gone by this point, totally mental. There was terrible shit going on all the time, total chaos in her house. She had braces fitted because she wanted to get her teeth sorted out, despite the fact that she was killing herself. She was about six stone. Six, what's six stone like?

• 2:23:09Speaker 05

  I can't do the conversion, but it's really then like it's, yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, it's no good.

• 2:23:16Yasi Salek?

  And Donna said, "I was blowing four grand a week at one point on drug bills and hospital bills." And she kept, I guess, getting flights to go away and detox. She'd be like, "Right, I'm gonna go to New York for the weekend. Get me a flight. I'd miss the flight. Get me another flight. I went to the Chelsea Hotel to try detox on my own for the weekend and I went insane and took loads of drugs and just came home."

• 2:23:35Speaker 05

  Oh, it's so sad.

• 2:23:36Yasi Salek?

  It was really sad. It was really sad. It was really dark. It gets really so much darker. So Justine says, "The last conversation Donna and I had in the studio was when she said she wanted to turn a song called Operate into a Missy Elliott song. And I said to her, "Donna, I don't think you want to be a guitarist anymore." And she said, "No, I just don't want to be the guitarist in Elastica." And she went on to say, "I don't like your voice. Your lyrics make me cringe and the way you play guitar makes me cringe." And Donna was like, "I did say that. I was barking mad." Not to say that Justine wasn't, but in my addiction, I was a lot further advanced than she was. I'd gone through ODing and Justine was nowhere near that. I'd lost it. And then Donna tries to seriously kick by taking this insane thing called Naltraxone. Did you know about this?

• 2:24:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:24:20Yasi Salek?

  It's where they sew implants of a drug into your abdomen because it blocks the effects of opiates. And she did three implants. None of them worked. But she was like, and they cost 600 pounds each. And she said, yeah, it blocks morphine, but you go and cane crack. It lasts for six weeks and you're a fucking lunatic. I nearly died so many times during that six weeks. I was hitting up crack every day. Taking anything I could get my hands on. And then at some point, she ripped, pulled the stitches out, stuck her finger in her and gouged it out.

• 2:24:53Speaker 05

  Hmm. That's crack for you.

• 2:24:55Yasi Salek?

  It's crazy. So Donna leaves the band and she was out of money, but listen, good on her. It's like, sometimes you need a great rock bottom or consequences or whatever. And even though she's out of money and she's out of the band, she takes a loan out. And for 8,000 pounds and goes to a real rehab, not just a detox in Bristol. And actually, that's when she got clean.

• 2:25:17Speaker 05

  Good for her. Because she would have died.

• 2:25:20Yasi Salek?

  For sure. So actually, maybe leaving Elastico is the best thing that ever happened to her, but.

• 2:25:23Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 2:25:25Yasi Salek?

  That same weekend that Donna leaves the band, Justine and Damon break up.

• 2:25:30Speaker 05

  Hmm. Yeah, the implication was also that, that Justine kicked Donna out and she kicked Damon out. Do you know what I mean? Like it's obviously because there's an assumption that she's like in control and she is just in, but it's like, it's like the disintegration of two. Actually, you can look at it in a way, it's two really important relationships in her life and they just go.

• 2:25:49Yasi Salek?

  She might have been the one to like, call it.

• 2:25:52Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 2:25:52Yasi Salek?

  Because it was so obviously over, you know, like, that doesn't mean that she just, you know what I mean? Like, it's like, it was over. Both of those were not functioning anymore. She said, Damon was saying to me back in 997. You've given me a good run for my money. You've proved that you're just as good as I am. You've had a hit in America. Now settle down and let's have kids. He wanted me to stop being in a group, stop touring and have children. I wasn't very happy. In fact, I'd say I was suffering from depression quite seriously. And he kept saying, the reason you're unhappy is because you really want children, but you don't know it. It did throw me. I thought about it quite seriously. On the other hand, he was being more and more open about being unfaithful. He was spending a lot of time in Iceland. I went over there and I got told there'd been a local comedy program

• 2:26:35Yasi Salek?

  that had done a sketch with a load of women with babies and they were all called Damon. That's how out of hand it got. That's crazy. That is crazy. A sketch comedy show about all the kids, women having babies called Damon in Iceland? What are you even saying?

• 2:26:48Speaker 05

  I went to Iceland and Damon was there.

• 2:26:52Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah, he bought a house there. I forgot. It's like he actually had a home there.

• 2:26:55Speaker 05

  He had a whole house there. Really, I mean, I think it really helped him when he was losing his mind. But it's very small Iceland. That's the main thing I can say about it. Everybody is incredibly beautiful. Like incredibly beautiful.

• 2:27:06Yasi Salek?

  Eight women with children named Damon.

• 2:27:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, and it's very, very, very small.

• 2:27:12Yasi Salek?

  So funny. Justine said, I kept saying I wanted him out and he was telling me to go and lie down because I wasn't feeling well. And I wasn't feeling well. He put too much time into walk away from it. He wanted children out of it. He wanted something I hadn't given him. And he was going to stick around until he got what he wanted. He was of the opinion that he wasn't going to go anywhere because he hadn't chosen to. It took a long time to break up. It got to its elastic limit. It snapped. I just couldn't take it anymore. It got so beyond the point of being a sensible way to live. There was no discussion anymore. It was whatever happens. It can't be worse than this.

• 2:27:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:27:45Yasi Salek?

  And then I think John Harris' book says that this is around where she got clean as well, but no one knows why or how and she doesn't talk about it. So. Paul Jones of the band Linoleum joins the band. This is like six months later after all this goes down. And also keyboardist called Mew.

• 2:28:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, Mew, she's nice.

• 2:28:04Yasi Salek?

  Then they play the next year, they play Reading while they're trying to make the album. And then in November of nineteen ninety nine, they're dropped by Geffen because Geffen's been swallowed up by Universal Records and nothing gold can stay, et cetera, et cetera. And then finally, April of two thousand, they put out The Menace.

• 2:28:21Speaker 05

  And it's interesting, isn't it? Because they do The Menace really quickly, don't they? So they spent these five years spending three hundred and fifty grand on absolutely nothing. On having nervous breakdowns. And they did that so quick.

• 2:28:33Yasi Salek?

  I know. And then six weeks, they just do this.

• 2:28:35Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 2:28:36Yasi Salek?

  I have a different view now on The Menace. I think at the time I found it disappointing, which I think that was kind of common, right? If you loved Elastica, as they say, Mark One or whatever, like this was not really what you wanted. But now, now that I listened to it again, because I don't think I'd put it on again in twenty fucking

• 2:28:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, I agree.

• 2:28:57Yasi Salek?

  Five years, you know? And then you could, then with like perspective of like what comes after it and like, you're like, wow, they were actually so ahead.

• 2:29:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't mind it. It's like, I didn't mind it as much as I thought I would do. Weirdly, I think quite a lot of the music is really good. And I don't think that the, I don't always think that the lyrics and the vocal performance is as good.

• 2:29:20Yasi Salek?

  I agree. Yeah. I mean, I guess it goes with what they're kind of doing, but I just like, think I'm like, oh, this is like, it might have been a slightly early, but like, it's kind of electro clash, right? Like, it's like,

• 2:29:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:29:34Yasi Salek?

  It's litigray. It's, you know, like, it would have fit really well in like New York in the early 2000s. Like, it just didn't land for the, the Elastica audience. But I think what they did was pretty cool. And like, there are bits on it, like, Nothing Stays the Same is really good.

• 2:29:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:29:56Yasi Salek?

  I like that spoken word little bit. Uh, Human is actually amazing. It's like a really vibey, cool song. It's literally Samples Wire. So now we're just skipping the, we're just going back to the.

• 2:30:24Speaker 05

  It's funny, Human, because it's like, the album's called The Menace, isn't it? And that's where the menace is. Like, it's fucking really menacing, man.

• 2:30:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's really menacing. It is. It's like less frenetic than the rest of it. And then they do this like brilliant cover of Da Da Da by the trio, which is so cool.

• 2:30:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:30:41Yasi Salek?

  Funny little crowd.

• 2:30:51Speaker 05

  It's like most albums, isn't it? It's like, so it's got quite a few tracks and actually if you took four of them out, it would be a really strong album.

• 2:30:57Yasi Salek?

  It's not enduring. Elastica's self-titled is enduring. You can put that album on at any juncture in time and people will be like, yes, this fucking slaps. It's legible, you know? This is more impressive to me in the sense of what they did by evolving musically than it is in anything I would want to listen to again, if that makes sense, you know, like respectfully. But then what I wanted to spend the last bits of this talking to you about was what I kind of didn't put two and two together on on my mind was that very famously after Justine and Damon broke up, she moved in with MIA, who was at that point very young, right? Like maybe like 19 years old or something.

• 2:31:42Speaker 05

  Yeah. And also with a fashion designer, what's she called now? I think a bit of it. Luella Bartley, I think.

• 2:31:48Yasi Salek?

  Oh, Luella Bartley, of course, sure. So like, it's not like Justine's old at this point, where she's like 26 or 27 or something. I mean, I don't know how old she is in the year 2000, but.

• 2:31:57Speaker 05

  She's probably early 30s. She's early 30s.

• 2:31:59Yasi Salek?

  Early 30s, okay. But yeah, she lived with, she lived with MIA and I think it sounds like they were just kind of, they had this like new creative, not partnership, but like, I mean, people forget, Justine Freshman has a writing credit on Galang.

• 2:32:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:32:16Yasi Salek?

  The single off Ariola, which is the big breakthrough single of MIA.

• 2:32:26Speaker 05

  And also MIA takes the, doesn't she take the photo for The Menace? She definitely did it. And she directed the video for Mad Dog. God damn.

• 2:32:34Yasi Salek?

  It's very cool. And like, Arilla wouldn't exist without Elastica. And I think that is her last, Justine Freshman's fucking final act of musdom, which we didn't even talk about 13, which is. Phenomenal, that's, you know.

• 2:32:49Speaker 05

  My favorite Blur album. I love it when Blur are depressed.

• 2:32:52Yasi Salek?

  Mine too, and that's all who's, who's behind that. One, Justine Alonra Freshman, but her final act of creative muse-dom. What, just such an interesting, for me, the most interesting figure because she's a muse and a creator. She did both, you know, but she, it's just her being is just, can do nothing but make art in her wake, whether it's her making it or causing other people to make it. And I'm not trying to take away from Maya, who's obviously also a genius, you know, but she owes a debt to Justine, I think, and, and same with, I'm sure Maya was influencing The Menace, you know, by whatever she was working on at the time. And I just think that is a very cool thing that people don't really think about when they think about Elastica,

• 2:33:35Yasi Salek?

  because people really place Elastica in nineteen ninety-five and not really in the year two thousand.

• 2:33:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, and not later on. Yeah, it is interesting. And also, Justine, the one thing you can always say about her, she had really good taste, like really good taste. And that sounds, like I always used to kind of, in my head, I used to think, they've just, they've just got good taste, do you know what I mean? But like now, now I'm older, I'm like, no, that's the point. Like, you know, if you, it's like, when you're making art, quite often, no matter what it is, you can't do the thing you want to do, but you know kind of the thing that you want to do. You, you, you're aiming for something, whatever that, that is, and that is your taste. You're aiming for this thing. And I just think that she's always had really good instincts about what is good quality and what's, what works, what doesn't work.

• 2:34:24Speaker 05

  And that's like from aesthetics to music, from all of it, really.

• 2:34:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, she had a really, really strong point of view.

• 2:34:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:34:34Yasi Salek?

  Which a lot, I mean, a lot of art is point of view, right?

• 2:34:37Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, definitely. It's like an angle. And she, you, you know, all these people, like it's whenever we talk about like bands, obviously, because if you love music, this, this, you can't even help it, you slightly mythologize everybody. But you know, these are real people and she was a really interesting and is, I'm sure, I'm not in contact with her anymore, but like she's a really interesting, engaging, fun to be around person. You know, she's not like, you, you, you would think that she'd be just cool and snotty, and she really wasn't like that. She was pretty friendly and good company, you know? And there was always a big part of me that wished that Elastica would reform, but the original Elastica, and that cannot happen, that it cannot happen. Those people are not in the circumstances. It can't happen.

• 2:35:22Yasi Salek?

  We've talked about this. You guys can look it up, but Donna now found religion.

• 2:35:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:35:30Yasi Salek?

  And she's doing something very cool, actually, where she's, it's very hard for me to explain it, but she's like studying and doing like thesis work in like music as like an instrument for spirituality. Is that kind of what it is?

• 2:35:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's like ecstatic, isn't it? It's like improvisation and ecstatic feelings in music. And she's doing a PhD in that in Glasgow, which is pretty good, really.

• 2:35:52Yasi Salek?

  It's really cool. She has a YouTube page. You can look at it and she's puts her music and her stuff on there. And it's, it's actually awesome. And I think I, as someone who's very interested in the spirituality conjunction with art, as you guys know, I think God is behind all art. I find that very cool. But yeah, that person is not going to fucking reform Elastica. She has like waist length hippie hair and she's like, you know, communing with Jesus or whatever. Like it's not really. Annie, God knows.

• 2:36:21Speaker 05

  Well, so Annie, I did ask, actually.

• 2:36:23Yasi Salek?

  Oh, you did? Okay, great.

• 2:36:24Speaker 05

  Yeah. So Annie is in Brighton. She had a long-term partner who sadly was ill for a while and then died. So she kind of got through that, but she's still around. Like people see her. She's at certain gigs, she'll turn up and stuff like that. She just, you know, that bit of her life is over. She's quite happy. She just isn't interested in being in a band anymore. And, you know, people have obviously offered money and enticements for Elastica to reform. But Justin always said, and I think in the end, this is like a good cop out. She says, she always says, I won't be in Elastica unless Annie's in it. And she knows Annie will never do it.

• 2:36:59Yasi Salek?

  She knows that Annie will never do it.

• 2:37:00Speaker 05

  Annie will never do it. So like, it's like a kind of like, it's like a get out of free card. And Justin is like playing with the Jesus and Mary. He plays with loads of bands. And he is with Mew, like they're married, I think.

• 2:37:11Yasi Salek?

  Oh, cute.

• 2:37:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's so lovely.

• 2:37:14Yasi Salek?

  Okay, lovely. No, it's great. And honestly, look, controversial opinion, and I don't think anyone who is an organizer of Coachella is listening to this podcast at this point in the pod, but like, not everyone has to reunite.

• 2:37:26Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 2:37:27Yasi Salek?

  You know, give it a fucking rest. Like sometimes, and I'm not going to name names, sometimes I go to a reunion tour and I'm like, this is elder abuse. Like this should be reported.

• 2:37:37Speaker 05

  And not just for them, but for the audience as well.

• 2:37:40Yasi Salek?

  For everybody. I'm like, you're trotting these like decrepit, like tired people who don't want to be playing songs that they wrote when they were 19.

• 2:37:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:37:50Yasi Salek?

  You know, just to like turn a buck. And I'm not saying that everyone is like that, but like some of them really do be feeling like that. And you're just like, oh, I don't like this. So again, I don't think none of that needs to happen. Justine is, you know, I think she's painting. So she finally got to do what she always wanted to do, which is, you know, that goes to show that you are who you are, right? When you're, when you're, one of my enduring theories that you hit a certain teenage age and that's who you are and you don't really ever change. I really believe that. And, you know, some to different extents, but like, she wanted to paint and now she's painting. That never went away, you know? And I think that's really cool.

• 2:38:27Speaker 05

  I really want to say all four of them. And, you know, I didn't know the second iteration of Elastica quite so well or anything.

• 2:38:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:34Speaker 05

  But they were really, they're really nice. Like, you know, I mean, I'm aware that at certain points, they were absolute raging drug addicts, but like, they were great. They were really entertaining company. They were really fun. And I really liked them. You know, they were really nice people and they are really nice people.

• 2:38:49Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, nobody, nobody has said anything in the things that I read, anything bad about them. And that's not true of other, other artists in the milieu.

• 2:39:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:39:00Yasi Salek?

  So, yeah, they put out one last song we didn't mention, but it's actually really good called That Bitch Don't Work.

• 2:39:05Speaker 05

  Oh, that really makes me laugh. That's fun.

• 2:39:07Yasi Salek?

  I know. I think it's quite good.

• 2:39:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:39:15Yasi Salek?

  It was put out by Witchdaw Recordings. Shout out Welsh Mark. We love Welsh Mark here on this program. In November of 2001. It's really sad because there was an interview, and this is another reason that music died, the day the music died. This interview was with CD Now.

• 2:39:31Yasi Salek?

  In 2000, but Justine said that she had gotten really into ESG. And so the next album, if she was going to make one, would be dancier. This is what we could have had, you guys. I just want you guys to know. We could have had an ESG-esque elastic album. And that's it. Now everyone is thriving and the story of Elastica is over. Except for where it lives forever in our hearts.

• 2:39:54Speaker 05

  It definitely does live. It lives in a lot of young women's hearts as well. Whenever I do a talk about my book, there's always a young woman there. I'm very happy to see this. She's about 17. She's quite often with her mum. And when it comes to questions, they put their hands up and they want to ask about Elastica.

• 2:40:11Yasi Salek?

  It's so fab.

• 2:40:12Speaker 05

  So good.

• 2:40:12Yasi Salek?

  It's so fab. Thank you, Elastica. I owe you everything. Well, not everything, but a lot of things. We love you. We love Justine Fishman. We love Sunkissed t-shirt, Justine Fishman. We have all these images burned into our brain and...

• 2:40:26Speaker 05

  And now you have the haircut, so I do.

• 2:40:28Yasi Salek?

  And now she's like restraining order.

• 2:40:35Yasi Salek?

  All right, Miranda, thank you once again so much for... You've been an absolute joy and a pleasure and you're the best.

• 2:40:41Speaker 05

  It's always fun, Yasi. I like to chat with you.

• 2:40:45Yasi Salek?

  I like to chat with you too. We'll see you when we return. Goodbye.

• 2:41:00Yasi Salek?

  If you liked what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Bandsplain. Our guest today was the incredible Miranda Sawyer. This episode was produced by Liz Sanchez and edited by Adrian Bridges with help from Justin Sales. Executive producers for Bandsplain are Gina Delvac and me, Yasi Salek. Our gorgeous and catchy theme song was composed and performed by Bethany Cosentino and Jennifer Clavon, graciously recorded by Carlos de la Garza in Los Angeles, California. Special thanks to our producer emeritus, producer Dylan, aka Dylan Tupper Rupert, and also Sean Fantasy, Michael Hardman, Casey Simonson, Robert Adler, Leah Edwards, David McDeanna, Dana Myerson, Jessica Hopper, and Department Q.

• 2:41:42Yasi Salek?

  Come back next season for a new episode of Bandsplain on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 2:41:54Yasi Salek?

  Isn't like, isn't it like a hundred centuries they're not done building? What do you have to build now it's built?

• 2:42:05Speaker 01

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