The Charlottes

• on Molesworth
• on Subway
• interview 1 2 3
• on Cherry Red
• Mercer photos

On September 3rd 1989 radio DJ John Peel interviewed Graham Gargiulo and Simon Scott on his BBC East Anglian-networked Sunday night Rock Show. Only the previous month, in an interview celebrating his 50th birthday (for the magazine The Catalogue, left), John had explained why he didn't conduct interviews any more. Indeed, he hadn't done one since Captain Beefheart. It needed something special to cause him to change his mind. At first, though, he must have thought he had made the wrong decision:

John Peel: Those are The Charlottes and that was the title track from their LP "Lovehappy", and we have Graham who does the guitaring with the band, and Simon who is the drummer, in the studio with me, and they are as nervous as I am about this interview, so we're going to have a look at...oh, fascinating!...that's terribly...oh, I've suddenly gone very, very echoey. Why's that happening do you suppose? Shall we just try opening one microphone and see what happens? (sounds better) Perhaps I'm not quite so echoey when that happens. What d'you say? (laughs) We've run into a technical problem. Ian (the producer) is looking very puzzled. It does sound as if I'm phoning the programme in from home. I think we'll fade that out again (sounds good) and play another record while we're trying to sort out (laughing) why exactly that is going on. This is Daniel Owino Misiani and the Shirati band - and the title I'll work out while it's playing.

(John plays the record and reads out an amusing anecdote from the album sleeve, ending:)

"A warning to young people who play the guitar", it continues, "it does not pay when you have to fight with other people's husbands, but Misiani is proud of travelling all over East Africa. That is the only positive thing." Some sound advice there for members of The Charlottes. We're going to have another go at speaking to them. Now what it is, is to only open one microphone. About the only thing that's left for us to do is to spontaneously combust. We'll try not to do that. Right, there's one microphone. That's Graham's microphone open now. Sounds reasonable. Most people will know the band's from Huntingdon - you are from Huntingdon, aren't you?

Graham Gargiulo: (faintly, as if from far away) Yes.

J: And I'm going to have to turn you up now. This is most peculiar, or is it the wrong mike? There we go. That's it. Oh boy, oh boy. But we'll get the hang of this eventually, don't you worry. I hope no one is recording this because (sarcastically) it'll be one of the classic interviews of all time. The band. Tell us the history of The Charlottes up until now.

G: We've been going for about a year and a bit. Before that we were in a band called the Giant Polar Bears. That sort of split up and we got Petra singing. We recorded the single about four weeks after forming which is why it sounds a bit different to what we do nowadays.

J: You're not proud of the single, you were implying earlier on. "Are You Happy Now?", isn't it?

G: Well not necessarily "not proud of" it. It did what it was supposed to do. When we did it we didn't expect it to sell that well.

J: How well did it sell, do you know?

G: It sold well, yes. It sold abroad. We got letters from Australia and Poland and Germany, and even Japan.

J: Molesworth Records.

G: Yeah, Andy Clifton's baby.

J: Are there many other releases on Molesworth Records?

G: Yes, there's another band from Huntingdon, called The Flowershop, has had a release on it, and The Pleasureheads

J: Oh, right!

G: from Peterborough, they've had a single on it as well.

J: Okay, so the Subway Organization. They're based in Bristol, so how did they get to hear of you? Did you get in touch with them, or did they get in touch with you?

G: When we recorded the single we had two more copies on tape, so we thought we'd send it to two different record companies to see what they thought of it. One of them thought it was a load of rubbish, and Martin Whitehead of Subway quite liked it. He rang us up and said, "Have you got any more material?", which we didn't have, so we released it on our own. He got in touch again and said he wanted to do a mini-album.

J: Whenever I've read reviews either of your gigs or of this LP, people have made comparisons, with - I think just because they make comparisons of any band that's got a woman singer -

G: Yes, there's lots of lazy journalists who see a band with a girl singer and consequently, the first thing that comes into their mind they compare you to. The Flatmates and The Primitives, we've been compared to, who I don't think we sound anything like.

J: I don't think you sound anything like them at all. That's true. Well, are there any other bands in Huntingdon that you'd like to draw our attention to? Have you heard any other good bands in the area? Because one of the things I wanted to do when I took over this programme was to try to encourage good local bands, because it seemed to me to have reached a point at which bands were routinely and regularly being featured on the programme because they'd been playing in the same pub in Cambridge for, say, something like eight years, whereas that seemed to me to be an indication that actually they weren't much good.

G: Yes, it's sort of a funny local scene really. Because of the type of music that we're playing, we haven't had as much support as a lot of the institutional Cambridge bands who've been around for years. But there are some good bands. Of course there's The Pleasureheads from Peterborough, and The Flowershop, who've changed their name to Turtle Noise, I think.

J: (audibly salivating at the prospect of discovering a new hardcore band) To what? Total Noise?

G: Turtle Noise. They're pretty good. And of course there's Nutmeg. There's quite a few bands around, but we don't really have that much in common with them.

J: You'd seem to me - from reading the music weeklies and so forth - to be in the critical stage of a fledgling career. You've got a lot of really quite good reviews. I mean, the reviews I've read have been really good.

G: Yeah, it came totally out of the blue for us. One of the local columnists in Cambridge wrote this bitter little article about us saying how we'd been hyped. I was speaking to Subway about it on the phone and they were laughing their heads off because they haven't spent any money at all promoting it. It was just a couple of journalists picking up on it.

J: This seems to happen fairly frequently to bands. Once they start to move out of their immediate area and to attract attention outside, people in that area are somehow resentful of it.

G: Yes, we've had a lot of that actually. It's not as if we're bigheaded or anything. It's like the first rung on a different ladder. You realise when you get out of the local scene that it's a hell of a lot harder on the national scene.

J: What sort of gigs are you doing at the moment?

G: Not much coming right up, but we've got The Camden Falcon on the 16th with Blow Up - that should be quite a good one - and Hull the night before with Thrilled Skinny, Luton faves. We're putting together gigs in Manchester and Leeds.

J: "Putting together"? How does that happen? Does the record company help you?

G: Not really, no. It's a question of me overcoming my laziness and expanding my phone bill and actually ringing them up. But we've got a chap in London who's arranging a few gigs for us there. He really liked us when we played here with the James Dean Driving Experience. So it's quite a hard thing to get gigs if you're an unknown band, but fortunately we've had a few good reviews so it should be a little easier now.

J: That makes a considerable difference really, doesn't it?

G: Yes it does. People aren't interested in you unless you've had some kind of review, but you don't tend to get a review unless you play London, so that's a bit of a vicious circle.

J: So where would you like to be a year from now?

G: I suppose I'd like to be at the stage of say a band like My Bloody Valentine, still on an independent label but reasonably successful.

J: Yes, because... Did you go to the Reading Festival?

G: No, I didn't, but Simon did.

J: Did you go? Right, we'll try opening the other mike.

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