With a new guitarist, new single and album in the offing, Julianne Regan tells STEVE SUTHERLAND how a change of heart saved ALL ABOUT EVE from oblivion.

What the fuck was that? What did she just say? Stop the tape. Rewind. Must have been imagining it. Play it again. Here it comes, just after that slinky guitar prowls through the belladonna. "Reason starts to fade and fall away . . . Wanna take a gun to you " Cool as you like. Almost matter of fact. Check the label. This can't be All About Eve.
The tape's still rolling. Everything peels away, vaporises. There's just some harmonics and a rim shot and, Jesus! , what's this? A rap. A rap for Christ sakes! Listen. There's some female Hendrix phasing through the ozone: "So the next time you're out stumbling across my little piece of sky . . ." Cool on acid, aiming to kill. What the fuck happened to All About Eve. Calm down. Take a deep breath. Surely the bottersnikes will come out to play soon. What ? What's this? Sounds like Soul II Soul mugging Fairport Convention. There's some Hitchcock in there, thinking it might be sampled from "Psycho" . There's mandolin, jazz guitar and Julianne, she's . . . she's . . . pulling a rifle on some ravens. What the fuck HAS happened to All About Eve

I'm in Julianne Regan's flat, drinking Earl Grey, trying to find out what the f'uck has happened to All About Eve and hoping the sky won't fall on my head. Her ceiling's propped up by scaffolding. There are pigeons in the loft and they're bringing down the plaster. She says she'll have to call Rentokil but, y'know, there are chicks up there at the moment and, even though their droppings are giving her asthma, she can't bring herself to . . . well, you know.

Bearing this in mind, the Eves' new single, ''Farewell Mr Sorrow", is a mite disappointing. it's too old Eves for me, slightly twee in its Englishness, a tad safe with it's twiddly goth guitar parts. It sounds like something they could have written in their sleep. Julianne surprises me by agreeing "It's a bridging song really, between the past and now. It's functional. I think its a decent pop song but I'm under no illusions that it's anything more or less than that. We function in an unfortunately sterile climate at the moment. In an ideal world, I'd have 'Ravens' out as the first single but is that commercial suicide or what.
"At least it's an up song," says Eves' drummer Mark Price. "We haven't had an up song since . . . oh . . . 'Every Angel' was it ?"

"Yes," laughs Julianne. "We've been miserable for so many years that we thought it would be interesting to bring out a jolly song for a change."
I wonder if original guitarist and pin-up hunk Tim Bricheno leaving the band had anything to do with this change of heart

"Certainly," says Julianne. "We don't want to say too much about him because we don't want to sound bitter or annoyed or anything but the one thing we ought to put straight is that he didn't just leave, he was asked to leave. We knew that it would be scary without him but it was a decision that had to be made. "If you had maybe four hours we could tell you why but . . . well, it wasn't the old musical and personal differences. A lot of people have focused in on the fact that we had a relationship. You know, 'Oh, they just couldn't handle it after they split up' , and all that. But it was much more practical than that. We really just wanted to enjoy being a band again, we just wanted to work and do it, but Tim wasn't of the same opinion - he didn't have the same creative or work ethic that we discovered at the time. That was it, just different ambitions in the band. I don't mean ambitions in horrid mercenary or financial or success-hungry sense, I mean just getting on with it, loving being in a band again which we hadn't had for years."
How come ?
"I dunno. Why people have bad marriages I suppose. It starts when people fall in love and when it goes stale - I'm taking musically here. You take each other for granted and complacency creeps in. It's like, Well, I'm in this group, and we get along and we can sell 200,000 records and that's very nice but . well, it isn't really."

Julianne met guitarist Marty-Wilson Piper a month before Tim left, when she went to see his band, Aussie rock heroes The Church, play Kilburn National. When new recruits were being mooted - Johnny Marr and Karl Wallinger are two who were considered - she called him and, on impulse, he agreed to give it a try. He'd heard All About Eve, he had actually picked up one of their albums in a bargain bin, and after old Eves pal Wayne Hussey had demoed a few morale- boosting tracks with the remaining trio, Marty flew in from Australia and the new All About Eve started from scratch.
"We've never been so prolific," Julianne enthuses. "It was great having someone really open and easy to work with . Y'know, if there was a chord sequence that wasn't working out it wouldn't be the end of the world, it would be, 'Never mind, there are hundreds of other songs waiting to be written' . The infusion of new blood brought all our old enthusiasm back again. Marty's such an outgoing and optimistic person, after the drudgery of the previous years, it was such a relief."

The deal is that Marty will play with the Eves while The Church are on sabbatical - the kind of timeshare deal that Robert Smith once had with the Banshees. When he couldn't make it, Pink Floyd's Dave Gilmour came to the rescue.

"The Church is such a healthy set-up," says Julianne. "We've learned a lot from Marty's attitude. We were a very closed shop before, very precious. Working with somebody else would have been tantamount to committing adultery but now we all feel a lot freer. It's not just that we feel confident enough between us that, if one of us wanted to go off and work with someone else, the others wouldn't mind, it's also opened our eyes musically. In the old days we were too precious about styles of music."
This radical rethink is responsible for , "Touched By Jesus", a remarkably sparse, dynamic inventive, musically aggressive and lyrically . well, whoever thought they'd hear Julianne considering taking a gun to someone

She laughs, delighted. "It's all to do with this new sense of freedom where if it feels good, do it, if it sounds good, say it, just so long as you mean it. It's the kind of thing I would have thought but never said. Y'know, still waters run deep - you can be sweetness and light and still part of you can really be dark. I'm not saying I conned anyone before. I like to think I was an okay person but I am also brave enough to admit that I have got dark sides and I have got anger and I have got a temper and I do feel betrayed and cheated by people and I will shout about it . . ." She laughs. "Sorry, I don't want to turn into an hysterical bint.
"We've never been a band to have like (adopts American accent), 'Hey, an attitude' kind of thing but I think we're bolshier than we've ever been. I suppose we're just more confident. We've been too self-effacing in the past, so 'Touched By Jesus' is the most pompous . . . what's the word I'm looking for? The most full-of-ourselves song we've ever written. I hope this isn't too distasteful but we're just saying, 'look, we feel like gods at the moment so, please, acknowledge that and don't try to obstruct us' ."
The streetwise rap towards the end which calls the hairs on the back of my neck to attention comes courtesy of Linda Hayes, who apparently looks like Nico chain-smoking in her red cowboy boots and tee-shirt that says POWER. Julianne tells me Linda did the voice-over for the Iron Bru ad. What the fuck has happened to All About Eve ?

"We just got fed up with wanting to please all of the people all of the time, especially when we ended up not pleasing many of them at all," she says. After 'Scarlet', which failed to deliver on the commercial promise of the Eves' beautifully naive debut album but developed Julianne's lyrical prowess as she learned to distance herself from her scenarios and narrated through other characters, the new album, which may or may not be called "Hush" , is lyrically far more strident a proclamation that she is ready, willing and able, to stand on her own two feet.

"Very much so." she agrees. "It's about coming through the mill again but not in a Gloria Gaynor 'I Will Survive' kind of way. It's not any feminist, strong woman statement. It's just that I'm stronger and happier and more confident and so are Mark and Andy. It's just a very genuine feeling of all working for the same goal and trying to make each other happy at the same time. All we want is a happy life. I don't mean a bland life so we've got nothing to write about any more, but I now realise that you don't have to have drama happening every day to feel like it's worth getting out of bed."

The Eves have chosen an apposite moment to be reborn. While many of the attitudes they unfashionably championed in their early days.- peace, love, harmony and all that - have now become common currency, their style of music has been superseded by the honey feedback of Ride and their pals and the baggy experimentalism of the Primal Scream contingent. Julianne knows this - she's come down from the clouds and has divined a route somewhere between keeping true to her instincts and leaving herself open to the action around her. She says the group aren't bandwagon-jumping or anything, but they're less blinkered now, partly thanks to their own desires, partly thanks to Marty, and partly due to the influence of producer Warne Livesy (The The, Julian Cope, Midnight Oil and Julianne whispers it behind her hand - Deacon Blue) who urged them to use keyboards. It's a measure of just how entrenched the Eves were in their own little world that they found the idea of using a piano or a Hammond revolutionary. So now they're emerging, blinking. into reality, their public image is due for an overhaul. How will they combat the fact that people will expect them to be back dancing barefoot through the fairy rings? Julianne shrugs. She knows that the groovers will probably still discard them as Goths while there's a danger that the Goths, who previously embraced them as a haven of quality safe from the infidel vagaries of fashion, might well feel betrayed.

"This is the great question, it really is, because, on many levels, the way we've behaved and the set-up the band have been detrimental to growth. At every photo session we turned up dressed as hapless hippies again and again which, y'know, didn't exactly help. We just kinda got stuck into this thing where we thought that's what we were. Then we take some time out of the public eye or whatever and, a year later I find I'm not wearing skirts down to my ankles anymore and haven't got loads of beads and I think, 'Oh, I've just grown out of it'.

"Some people will doubtless see us this time round and think, 'Oh! What's happened? Where's the tambourine? Where's the ribbons?' Well, sorry . . . I just grew out of it and I don't care what they think. You know when things are going so well, you're waiting for a bus to knock you over It's that vibe at the moment. We've got the luxury of having kind of a clean sheet. I know there's a lot of ghosts to put to rest but, because of having the new line-up and what that's brought - the new attitude and the new enthusiasm - to us it doesn't feel like the third album, it feels like the first one again.
"We haven't come back with a great new image or anything like that. I really hate it when I read interviews with people and all they do is slag off their past. There are many things that I hold dear from ours but I think there was a tendency for All About Eve to make too many little ventures into the world of pantomime. We had a strong image but it was negative because it detracted from the music and misled people. Y'know, how some of our videos you'd expect us to be playing madrigals or something but, in the video for 'Farewell Mr Sorrow hopefully we just look like a band enjoying themselves. It doesn't have me leading a unicorn through a forest glade in a floaty gown, or anything like that.
"It's not that we've been faking it. We've never been insincere, we've just been very misguided. People around us must have been tearing their hair out - y'know, 'Oh no, she's got another "Poldark" outfit on for this video. We're never gonna sell this'. Well, those days are over. This is a new band with a new outlook."
Bye bye bottersnikes. RIP.