Newspaper Articles

While looking through piles of photos and bags of stuff for photographs of James, I've come across other things I didn't even know I had. Here are two of three articles from Newcastle papers- one from the Sunday Sun and one from The Journal. The Sun article is from a screen test that I did to be a presenter for The Tube, the Tyne Tees TV pop music show of the 1980s. Almost everyone else on 'my' day got the job, and although I felt a bit superficially miffed by that fact, you can see from what I'm wearing that I'd already got Helen and the Horns going at this point. Perhaps it would have helped the band reach dizzying heights, but I think I needed to concentrate on what we were doing. 

I remember seeing the show later and thinking 'There is no way that I could speak into a microphone while walking backwards'. I also felt that there was sometimes something forced about the 'controversial' interview techniques and I was glad not to have been part of that. Rather craftily, at the regional focus groups they'd slurped up the ideas of the participants- mine was to interview Tony Fletcher from Jamming magazine, and another young woman at the one I went to proposed doing a feature on the air guitar competitions that were being held at Camden Palace. Nice bit of free research for the production team, and not my first experience of energy vampires!

I did, however, get on really well with Muriel that day, despite what the reporter says. I think she didn't suffer fools gladly and I am not a fool. We kept in touch and she came to see the Helen and the Horns play at The Calton Studios in Edinburgh, which was a fantastic gig for us. We'd made friends with the band So You Think You're A Cowboy the night before at a gig at The Oasis in Dunfermline and they all showed up to see us, as did Muriel. After the show she bought round after round, and much fun was had by all. She also had a show on a Sunday afternoon on Radio 1 in London and we did an afternoon session for her. She popped down from the heights of wherever she was doing her bit from, to the basement where were set up, and was absolutely delightful.

The other article is from The Journal, and must have been printed after we'd signed to RCA Records (Elvis's label, aha!). I have one that was printed just before our gig at Tiffany's in Newcastle too, quite a while before this.

I have more cuttings but I won't over-post them; it's just that I've been putting stuff on my Facebook page and it's such a dodgy platform, isn't it? So I'll transfer over some of the other things too when I get a moment.