Julianne: "Look, we want to hang on to Julianne, but we'll have to let the boys go..." That was more or less the message from Phonogram HQ, when 'TBJ' failed to do whatever their accounts department had expected it to do.
Despite glossy videos, inches of make-up, (and that was just Andy!), Phonogram had failed to market us to whoever it was they were trying to market us to. They were desperate to make us bigger, not necessarily better. Russ Conway, (and he'll never know just how close he came to having a cyanide-flavoured lime shoved down the neck of his stupidly '80's bottle of stupid designer beer), had been banging on about having to 'appeal to the Beverley Craven market'. I don't wish to offend any 'Bev' fans, but I was mortified. It further proved that this guy had no idea about us at all. I HATED that 'Promise Me' song. I hated the music and I hated the soggy, 'semi-emancipated, but still all-woman' lyric. I wasn't some woman at a piano, simpering on about some bloke lighting a cigarette while she gets slowly pissed ! For God's sake ! BEVERLEY CRAVEN ! Poor woman even had to suffer the indignity of having her tour sponsored by some euphemistic 'feminine hygiene' products. You had to collect leaflets from boxes of tampons to get a ticket to see her in concert ! (Perhaps Phonogram wanted to ditch the boys so that they could get me a sponsorship deal with Philips to promote a nice new pink 'Ladyshave', or maybe with Boots The Chemist to launch some new super high strength 'Evening Primrose Capsule'!)

Whatever, I wasn't about to tread the 'coffee-table woman' path, and, I certainly wasn't going to desert my friends and colleagues in AAE for the opportunity ! So, I declined Phonogram's offer, and they dropped us faster than the hottest of bricks.

Within a month or so, we'd been signed by MCA, (which I think stands for 'Many Crap Artists'). We liked the MD, Tony Powell, who'd been at Phonogram years ago, and, he liked us. At one point, it also seemed that EMI liked us very much. We'd been shown round their offices, pressed a lot of flesh, even been allotted our marketing team...I'd thought our feet couldn't get any further under their table. But, very suddenly, they withdrew their offer. I wish I knew why. Perhaps they'd managed to get a look at the AAE file in the vaults of Phonogram's accounts department. I was really disappointed. I wanted to be on the same label as Queen and Kate Bush, not Kim Wilde and Junior! Beggars, choosers, blah blah blah.....

But pity poor old MCA. They thought they'd signed the band that was going to give them 'Martha's Harbour (This Time It's Personal)' ......Frying pan, fire, blah blah blah.....We were getting tired of the smell of our own flesh roasting. Shortly after signing we changed management, and said goodbye to Tony Perrin, the manager we'd shared with The Mission and who had once advised me to "throw bigger shapes on stage, you know, like Bono, or Jim Kerr !" Hmm. Imagine if I'd taken his advice ! We could've been the Cranberries!

Our new manager was Dai Davies who also managed Ted Hayton the engineer/producer, and, the unbelievably brilliant, but now gone ? / dormant ? / imploded Levitation, who we'd toured with. I liked Dai immensely. A man of great experience, with humour and scruples. He seemed like the perfect man for the job of setting AAE back on its rails.

The Mission had been renting a farmhouse on the Hereford / Wales border, and we took over the lease when they'd finished with it. The big stone barn built on to the side of it was one of the main attractions, the other was it's very isolated position, meaning that we could turn our volumes up as loud as we liked. We divided our time between living there and living in London, the periods of time we could spend there depending on when we could grab Marty away from Church / solo album commitments. There, we wrote what was to become 'Ultraviolet'.

The switch of record labels turned out to be a mixed blessing. We were free of the dreadful A & R man and the financial politics that were kicking in at Phonogram, but, we sensed something strange about our new relationship with MCA. I felt like we'd kind of been ushered in through the back door, somehow sneaked in. Our new A & R man, Jeff, was a nice enough bloke, the A & R co-ordinator Guy Cameron was a treasure, and Tony Powell himself was cool, but, everyone else seemed faceless and disinterested. We just didn't feel that welcome.

When we'd written a number of songs, we began recording at a studio near the Kent coast, with Ted Hayton at the controls. For the first time in our careers, we were in control of what we were doing. The situation allowed us to be very 'hands-on' and to be able to actually produce ourselves. For once, we didn't have to fight to get our own way, to get our songs to sound just as we wanted them to. The first song we recorded was 'Phased'. Jeff came down to the studio and we played it to him at Concordian volume. He mentioned something about it being a 'strange' song, but said that he was quite happy to go away and leave us to it. Grrrrrrreat ! He had given us a lovely long rope with which to hang ourselves !

As you probably know, I'm a big fan of 'Ultraviolet', although, yes OK, the vocals were too low in the mix. I love it because it's ours, and, if it's flawed, we made the flaws ourselves, even the flaws belong to us and are not flaws that somebody else has foisted upon us. Nobody was telling us what to do. Nobody was saying that they 'didn't hear a hit single'. Nobody was looking over our shoulders. Because we'd been so under the microscope since the appearance of those few golden eggs we'd laid, we now felt free to follow our own desires. But, more than this, we were like teenagers who, having been 'grounded' for 3 weeks, wanted to go out, smoke a thousand cigarettes, drink a million Alcopops and sleep with the whole world in the back-seat of the family Volvo. For us, the musical equivalent of this was making 'Ultraviolet'.

It's not hard to sense the recurrent theme of 'reclaiming what's yours' in the lyrics of this album. For this reason, I still love 'Mine', because it's insistent about the need for control and space, without being aggressive and 'punk-rock-two-fingered'. I love the way the song goes on to completely disintegrate, which is the antitheses of control, but makes absolute sense, because it's only when you have control that you can let go! I think that in the answer to Question 1 , I've gone on about the other songs I love and the reasons why I love them, so I'll not repeat myself here.

I admit, that I do now wish that I hadn't buried the vocal so much in the mix, but, at the time, I just wanted to merge with the music as far as possible. Perhaps this was a subconscious over-reaction to having been singled out as Phonogram to the point of their wanting to keep me but not the band.

This album contains some of my most treasured sonic moments from AAE. I really wish that people could appreciate the moments of flawed beauty. I think that in an ideal world, I would get my hands on the master-tapes and re-sing a lot of the album and re-mix it. But, the world is far from ideal, and for practical, financial, and possibly legal reasons, I can't.

See, I told you there were oceans of spilt milk...."