She may have earned her stripes with wistful goth romantics All About Eve, but Mice's Julianne Regan now feels it's time to set the record straight once and for all. To wit: she used to fancy Simon Le Bon, she played Mother Teresa to Bernard Butler's Joseph Stalin, and, while at school in Sligo (yes, Sligo), she got into a "Celtic mythology vibe". But we hear she's better now. Father confessor : Stuart Clark.

"Culture shock ? That's a mild way of putting the adolescent horror I felt when I discovered that my new classmates preferred Chris de Burgh to the sex Pistols." As someone who regards Chris de Burgh as a genetic disorder rather than a pop star, I can only imagine the bowel-loosening terror that must have gripped Julianne Regan when she was plucked from the bosom of the punk rock explosion and deposited in a strange town where 'A Spaceman Came Travelling was considered to be higher art than 'Anarchy in the UK. Faced with the same senario, I'd now be known as the 'Sligo PLayground Chainsawer' but the future of All About Eve singer somehow managed to curb her murderous intent and grew to tolerate - if not love - the Victorian monolith that was the Irish educational system circa 1977 to 1979.

"Yeah it was all very Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie," she laughs in a manner guaranteed to turn even the coldest of male hearts to sludge. "I remember asking a girl in my class if she was going out with anybody and her looking at me as if I'd called her a prostitute ! Don't get me wrong, I was a respectable young lady who'd been to a posh Coventry grammer and - if they had their own car and came from good homes - indulge in some high-class snoggery. At the Ursuline Convent, the rule was that you didn't talk to the opposite sex, let alone swap saliva with them. 'Touch tongues and that was it, you were pregnant.

What did the Ursuline nuns make of an anarchic English Lolita suddenly landing in their rumpy pumpy-free midst ? "I'd have had a lot harder time all round if I'd been thought of as a Brit, but my Dad was originally from SLigo, most of our holidays were spent in a nearby seaside village called Standhill and it was almost a case of welcoming back the prodigal daughter."

"The thing is, at 14, all you want to do is fit in, so I kept my filthy English morals to myself and did my best to be like everyone else. You know Id giggle about David Soul or whoever the heart throb of the day was supposed to be, and then go home and play Never Mind The Bollocks at full volume out of the window. The only way you could buy it in Sligo was in a brown paper bag because they thought the cover was too rude. That'll give you an idea of just how conservative it was."

Strangely enough, Wayne Country & Electric Chairs 'If you don't Want To Fuck Me Baby (Baby Fuck Off)' never did make its way into the local Golden Disks. At this juncture you'd be forgiven for thinking that Regan went on to front a larger-swilling Oil combo rather than the Goth romantics responsible for such windswept delights as 'Martha's Harbour'.

"Well, I was a big Kate Bush fan as well" she pleads by way of mitigation. "I must admit that while was being shunted from school to school I tried the Mercy and some other place before my Mum decided to send me back to England - I did get into that whole Celtic mythology vibe. It's hard not to when you're living at the foot of this mountain, Knocknarea, where the first Queen of Ireland, Queen Maeve, is supposedly buried and W.B. Yeat's grave is a few miles up the road. That, together with the Atlantic Ocean crashing in and the general air of isolation, did have an effect on me but after a while you forget about the scenery and start wanting some action - where there was precious little of in Sligo. U2 did play at the Baymont Hotel in Stranhill once, but I had an exam or something the next day, so I wasn't allowed to go."

With the help of an understanding counsellor, Julianne overcame the harrowing effects of Bono-deprivation, and once safely back in Coventry managed to forget about Stadium rock all together.

"Embarrassingly enough," she confesses, "the New Romantic movement was in full flow and I had a brief flirtation with knickerbockers and Duran Duran. Actually, I used to think Simon Le Bon was quite hunky, which was an indication of my mental state at the time. The music was obviously shite, but I've always been a bit of a dresser0upper and the likes of Visage had that same aur of fake glammour about them as Roxy Music and Queen - both of whom I absolutely adored when they started."

I think we'd better stop Julianne there before she says something she really regrets. Passing up on that most Coventry-ish of phenomenons 2-Tone, because it was "too-drab", our heroine discovered the joys of Kohl eyeliner and formed the prototype All About Eve. A couple of club tours, svereal line-up changes and serious patronage from The Mission later, the band landed the major label deal that somehow contrived to be both their making and downfall.

"We were very earnest and absolutely loved what we were doing, and I think it was that sense of passion which people identified with," the singer reflects. "I sometimes wish - especially from a business point of view - that we hadn't quite so wide eyed and innocent but, then again, the reason the music worked was because in a song, there was always a feeling, a naive sense of optimism, that things wew going to get better."

As ludicrous pompous, overwhelmingly pretentious and downright silly as it might seem inretrospect, there's no disputing that s hell of a lot of people connected with Goth and derived strength from its we're so fucked up but at least we have each other mentality.

"Yeah, it was like a giant family with everyone looking out for everbody else. I don't see that anymore. Where I live in North London, you've got these 14-year olds walking round with their big jackets and gold rings on, pretending they're in the Bronx. They wouldn't last five minutes there, of course, but life's become so aggressive that they're play-acting now, chances are not too far down the line they're going to be doing it for real. You look at South Central L.A. or whereever, on the TV and say, 'It can't happen here'm, but it already is." "Up until then we'd never realised the cess-pit we were operating in, " All About Eve were understandably well chuffed when 'Martha's Harbour' wnet top 10, but along with the silver disc came the realisation that success has its downside too.


"Up until then we'd never realised the cess-pit we were operating in, " she rues. "While we were getting to number 47 and number 33 the record company were happy to leave us to our own devices, but as soon as we had a hit they wanted to turn us into Fleetwood Mac. If they'd been up front about it, fair enough, we could have told them to Fuck Off, but most of it was done behind our back at marketing level and by the time we sussed what was going on, our credibility was in tatters.

"There was that and the fact we started taking on board too many outside influences. Guitarists love listening to other guitarists and ours, Tim Bricheno, fell in love with Free. It happened to me as well - people would say, 'wow, you sound like Fairport Convention', and when I realised we did a bit, it destroyed some of the innocence." With Regan refusing to undergo major re constructive surgery to become Paul Rodgers, Tim Bricheno decided to take his Paul Kossoff fantasies to the Sisters Of Mercy who'd stopped making cuts of themselves and were becoming stadium massive.

"This is going to sound incredibly arrogant", she warns, " but there was definitely a point when we could have flicked the switch and become as big as say, The Cranberries but we didn't want that. Well, most of us didn't. Tim - and I'm not slagging him off - had got into this rock 'n roll vibe and was only going to be happy in a group where he could jump around and stick his feet into the monitors.

"Actually, most of the former All About Eve members have gone through the Goth clearing house. Tim went off to the Sisters, Andy plays occasionally with the Mission and Mark, our drummer, has joined Pete Murphy's touring band."
While her erstwhile colleagues have stuck with what they know, Julianne has spent the past two years taking a good, hard look at where she wants to go and deciding it's definitely not backwards.

I always feel we were Goth by association because the Mission produced one of our singles and we toured with them. Our indie releases were very dark and industrial but the time we got round to recording our first album, the sound had really broadened out. "I still love what I call proper adult Goth, though," she stresses. "Stuff like The Specimen and the way the Cure and The Mission turned out in the end as too cartoonish for me, but I remember seeing Bauhaus and being blown away because they were so intense.

Regan admits there are drunken moments when she wishes All About Eve hadn't broken up so soon, but with Tim Bricheno defecting to the opposition and Polygram still smarting at their refusal to become the Fleetwood Mac 'B' team. It was the only realistic option.

"If it's not acrimonious. If it's nothing to do with personalities, you can always say in a couple of years time, 'lets make another record.' Whether it be me and Marty or Andy or Mark or all four of us, that possibility still exists."
One person Julianne definitely won't be working with again in the future is Bernard Butler, a brief collaboration between the two ending last year in tears, recriminations and an impressive acreage of gossip column bitching.

"I met him socially through a friend at a time we when he was still with Suede but had some stuff lying around that he didn't think was right for the band," she reveals."He bunged me a tape, I added some vocals and he got really excited and said, "lets do something together". Him leaving Suede at the time was purely coincidental - it was only ever meant to be a side project and I'm no Yoko Ono figure. I'm a bit of a control freak myself but compared to his Stalin, I'm Mother Teresa ! "It was fine when we were doing things in dribs and drabs, but as soon as we got into the studio and started spending whole days together, it was obvious we were horribly mis-matched. I'm a bit of a control freak myself but compared to his Stalin, I'm Mother Teresa !
"Bernard's big problem, " Regan proffers, "is that he's only 23 and hasn't been able to deal with the immense fame that's been thrust upon him. That's not saying he's immature. I defy anybody that young to be called a genius and not in some way let it go to their heads. If he could sing, it'd be the end to his problems because what he's looking for isn't a partner, but a voice. I consider myself to be far more than that, which is why we ended up wanting to murder each other."

If you're trying to imagine what they might have sounded like, Regan came up with the original words and melody lines for Butler and McAlmonts recent top 10 hit, 'Yes', "I remember hearing it on the radio," she chuckles good-naturedly, "and thinking please have used some of my lyrics because I need the money!' People reckon we made a fortune out of All About Eve but all of us are living in heavily mortgaged one-bedroom flats and I'm having to sell my BMW next week to keep my head above water. It's 'D' reg., one careful lady driver, and if anyone wants to make me an offer they can get in contact with the record company."

Julianne might have been able to hang onto that Beamer if she's embarked on her current flight of musical fancy a little earlier. The proud owner of a debut single, 'Mat's Prozac', that pushes all the right post-grunge buttons, Mice also boast the not inconsiderable talents of former Levitation guitarist Christian Hayes and Tim McTighe who was recently to be found handing bass duties with Powder.

"Yeah , he got sacked because he couldn't dance properly,"she chuckles before adding, "I'm prepared for people to say, Oh God, not that silly old folk rock has-been coming back with some indie superstars', That's what it looks like, I know but there's a real substance to the band that has nothing to do trading on past glories. It's not Goth, it's not grunge and it's certainly not Britpop. I dunno, you'll have to put you're own label on it."

In that case, welcome to the 'New Wave of Bands Who haven't Got Their Heads Stuck Up Their Arses Trying To Sound Like The Small Faces'.

Hot Press December 14th 1995