Record Mirror : Stu Bailie
June 1987

Julianne Regan, singer with All About Eve, is coming terms with the fairly exhilarating prospect of stardom. And she's had to do it more quickly than most. In the past two months she's appeared on 'Top Of The Pops' with the Mission (she played keyboards and sang vocals on 'Severina'), supported Wayne and co on their recent tour, and then realised with a shock that her own band could haul in over 2,000 fans to a headline gig."It's a bit too good really," she muses, "it's happened so quickly the backlash is due to arrive next week!"
And to think that last Christmas Julianne, Tim (guitar), and Andy (bass) were looked upon as a two-bit Goth act who kept getting compared to folks like the Cocteau Twins and Siouxsie. They'd released two singles in as many years and had made a fairly dramatic swing from a rocking sound to a lighter, all-acoustic thing. Eventually though, they got to mixing the styles together, were 'discovered' by the Mission, and suddenly people started to take them seriously.

What really clinched it was the recent release of 'Our Summer', an enormously charming pop song with a chiming 12 string and ethereal, folksy vocals that amounts to a double helping of the joys of spring. The music is quite uplifting, but aren't the lyrics just a little winsome?
Julianne: "Not really, it's very much kind of, 'things are crap, but they will get better'. It is a ridiculously naive and optimistic lyric, but it often happens that way. I was even walking down the street today and my heart was lifted, I don't know why. "

But as Julianne has already supposed, there could be a nasty backlash before long. And when the cynics do come out gunning, they certainly won't be short of ammunition. All About Eve's live set includes such feisty little songs as 'Flowers In Our Hair', 'Lady Moonlight' and 'In The Clouds', that do have an endearing quality, but can be quite appalling at times. And they will insist on wittering on about Isis and Guinevere, and putting awful hokey poetry on their record sleeves about "winter tears" and "promised blossom".

"I'm afraid I'm responsible for that," Julianne confesses, "the others can't be blamed. I've got a medieval obsession at the moment, and I have to read everything and see every film about that period. Our manager's really getting into it now too, he's just lent me a Welsh trilogy about the Druids . "

And what's all this about gypsies in your songs

"It's a bit of a ridiculous romantic idea, because I had this notion that gypsies all had these swirly skirts and. tambourines and caravans, and the men are all fabulously swarthy stuff. But I saw a gypsy encampment in Camden recently, and it blew all my dreams away. It was just open sewers, fires and wasted dogs. But I heard a record of Romany music, God knows what it was called, '20 Romany Hits' or something, but it was just lovely. It's about the attitude; the real Romanies didn't give a damn, they just sat around playing with their Tarot cards and dancing and drinking. Quite a nice life."
So are you a bit of a romantic then,
Julianne? "Oh... yes."
Andy: "She never used to be until about a month ago!"

Julianne (defensively): "I've always been a closet romantic, but I've just come out. What was I before? I've had moments of wildness, but I was more like Miss Jean Brodie before. I've definitely mellowed since then; we've got this phrase 'to blob out', which is like an alternative state of grace. The art of mellow."
Such openness! This helps to explain why All About Eve have been embraced by the thousands of bright young crimped-out things, but those old enough to recall the original hippy trip must be recoiling with horror. Not again, surely! Already the press are jesting and panicking about the forthcoming 'summer of love", but is it all just a hype? And what does the band feel about the way they're being portrayed?

Julianne again. "We've had a lot of that, and I'm very grateful you haven't started on us about being hippies. Everyone seems to look for a reference point and that's been picked up on, but it's not hippy - it's fantasy and escapism. Perhaps the length of your hair or the brightness of your shirt can seal your fate a little bit," she looks over to Tim, who should have a volume control fitted to his purple satin number, "but hippy is passive and inactive, and we're ambitious young things. We're not just Lolling around. Hippies of today have definitely got to have a tiny bit of yuppieness in there," she chuckles. "They haven't got a pocket big enough for their Filofaxes in their kaftans, though." She thinks about the prospect with amusementThen again though, is fantasy a good thing in 1987? Is it fair to get all dreamy and detached when there are, for example, nearly four million unemployed in this country? Some people would argue that such issues ought to be confronted.

Andy: "I don't think it's a matter of not confronting them, it's just making people feel better in that situation." Andy: "I don't think it's a matter of not confronting them, it's just making people feel better in that situation."
Tim: "We've all been on the dole for a long time, so we've lived through that, being one of the great unwashed. But now that we're not anymore, we don't feel like writing songs about it." Julianne: "It is escapism, for sure. I mean, I've confronted it and haggled in my own mind about it. It may sound a bit limp-wristed, but there's not a lot I could personally do about it unless I was going to go into politics or work in the DHSS. But escapism serves a purpose -- you can stick on a song and feel great."

"It would be out of character if we started championing causes and trying to save the world, we'll leave that to Paul Weller. But I don't think he could write a song about gypsies as well as us."
Quite .. "Designer kaftans!"