Swing Out Sister: Blue Mood, Breakout and Beyond

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Blue Mood, Breakout and Beyond documents Swing Out Sister’s ‘Early Years’ containing the albums from 1985 – 1992. Compiled in conjunction with Corinne Drewery and Andy Connell; the comprehensive collection celebrates the 35th anniversary of their debut It’s Better To Travel, alongside the subsequent albums, Kaleidoscope World and Get In Touch With Yourself as well as their Live At The Jazz Café album and 3 discs of B-Sides, remixes and rare tracks. Iain Key reviews the set for Louder Than War as well as chatting to the duo.

Of the three studio albums in the box, all produced by Paul O’Duffy, It’s Better To Travel perhaps sounds the most dated, although that isn’t a criticism. It’s a record that has the power, after 35 years, to transport you back to places and people who have long since sat at the back of the mind. It encapsulates the sound of the 1980’s daytime radio for me. It still sounds sophisticated with Corinne’s jazz-tinged vocals underpinned by Andy and Martin’s flawless instrumentation. Listening now the variety in the album still surprises me, from the pop of Breakout to the slow-burning soulful jazz of After Hours and club hits Blue Mood and Surrender before the closing, icy, instrumental Theme (From – ‘It’s Better To Travel’).

I overlooked the second album Kaleidoscope World when it was released in 1989. For me that year was all about The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and Wedding Present. Discovering it now, 30 years later, is like unearthing a gem. While the debut album was sophisticated this takes things to another level, it’s filmic with a 60s tinge. You can tell that they had a bigger budget (which is something we will discuss in the interview below) and there are some famous musical names involved too, such as arranger Richard Niles and the legendary Jimmy Webb. Rather than being the sound of 1989, it’s timeless and the orchestration on tracks is to die for. An album you can easily lose yourself in over and over.

If the 1989 album was influenced by the 1960’s then 1992’s Get In Touch With Yourself owes a debt to the 1970’s with Curtis Mayfield and Isaac Hayes grooves. After the departure of Martin Jackson during the sessions for the previous album, producer Paul O’Duffy became a more integral part, involved in the creation of 5 of the tracks. The obvious draw for this album is the single Am I The Same Girl a rare cover version, originally by Barbara Acklin, which gave the duo their penultimate Top 40 hit, peaking at 21. It can still be heard regularly on the radio today. For some strange reason this album hasn’t been available on streaming platforms for some time so it’s inclusion here gives those who don’t tend to buy music an opportunity to revisit and reappraise this.

The highpoint of the set for me is the inclusion of the Live At The Jazz Cafe album. Recorded in December 1992 but self released by the band in 1993 in Japan as there was no appetite from any of their labels. It features choice cuts from the first 3 albums, albeit evolved versions, rearranged to suit the the live experience. As well as putting Corinne’s vocals in focus it also highlights Andy’s prowess as a composer and arranger.

The final four discs included in the set are made up of remixes and B-sides. Regarding the former Corinne openly says, “We had arguments all the time about people doing remixes…we didn’t want them; it was all coming out of our money”. They’re nice to hear once, but it’s unlikely they anyone is going to want to play 6 versions of Notgonnachange repeatedly unless they’re an über fan. I do see the value in having a definitive collection though which contains everything. The B-sides are a little more interesting, with a number of them starting out as just sketches or ideas. These range from Dirty Money, the first thing they recorded in the studio to the epic 11 minute Alone, via tracks recorded in Johnny Marr’s bedroom and a piano and vocal only cover of Windmills of Your Mind.

If you thought Swing Out Sister were just one hit wonders who briefly appeared on mid 80’s Children’s Saturday morning TV shows or only worthy of being name checked on nostalgic ‘The Story Of….’ or ‘Hits Of The 80’s’ etc you’d be wrong. Blue Mood, Breakout and Beyond offers a welcome reminder that the band have more songs in their repertoire that you’re likely to recognise. It also serves as a jumping-on point for their later output (the most recent of their 10 studio albums being released in 2017).

Although two of the founding members of Swing Out Sister, Andy Connell and Martin Jackson were formerly in A Certain Ratio and Magazine respectively, two of Manchester’s most influential post-punk bands, I don’t think they have ever got the recognition they deserve as being one of Manchester, nay, Britain’s seminal exports, not that possibly it is a big deal for them. Before you could argue that Corinne is from Nottingham, her grandparents were from Bury and a certain Tony Wilson considered her “an honorary Mancunian”… I’m not going to argue with him.

My conversation with Swing Out Sister could have been very brief; the instantly recognisable Corinne Drewery summarising over Zoom, in a very self-effacing manner, “Our first album went to No 1 thirty-something years ago and then we’ve gone downhill ever since.”

The truth, however, is a little different…

Louder Than War: To start I’d like to talk about the early, pre Swing Out Sister, days starting with Andy as a member of The Immediates and the Manchester Musicians Collective.

Andy Connell: You had to go to some meetings to get a gig supporting someone at say The Band On The Wall, so we’d go to these meetings and then we got a gig at the Cyprus Tavern. It was a risky venture to do that but we were supporting somebody and didn’t have a tuner. We had all these pop songs ready to go and had to tune so I’d play a note on the keyboard and then the guitar player would tune to that. We did about a minute and got in tune, and as we were about to start the first song there was a ripple of applause, and it was the only applause we got that night. The people thought it was some sort of art statement.

LTW: In 1982 you joined A Certain Ratio at the invitation of Simon Topping and stayed there until 1986, Swing Out Sister being ‘the side project’?

AC: We weren’t getting in the studio much and I wanted to mess about with keyboards and Martin had just left Magazine. He got a drum machine and I got a keyboard and we thought why don’t we just have an easy life and sit in a room and tinker away. So, we did, until we had a singer forced upon us.

Corinne Drewery: I had been designing clothes and done a fashion and textile course at Central Saint Martins College of Art and set up my clothing label but I wanted to sing. I’d been in a band when I was at college and a mutual friend was managing Andy and Martin whilst they were doing dance tracks for Street Sounds Electro UK, but he was looking to get them a deal and had been told they needed a singer. They didn’t want one. I had actually met Andy once when I sang with Working Week at the Hacienda, that was the first ever gig I did. It was an audition gig and it was terrible, I got the sack. I think Andy sort of remembered.

AC: I thought you were great!

CD: I turned up with some songs that I’d written at their manager’s flat. I think they thought, “She’s not a proper singer”. We did some demos at Drone Studios in Chorlton. Whilst recording they were all pulling faces and turning their noses up and I was thinking, ‘If my singing is that bad, why can’t somebody tell me?’ So I went storming into the mixing room and said “Look if you don’t like what I’m doing why you just tell me and I’ll go home”. They replied, “We weren’t even listening, he (the A&R guy) just farted!”. When the others came back a little bit worse for wear I got the job. Drink played a big part.

LTW: Just before discussing the boxset I was interested in what the ’scene’ was like at the time, from my limited retrospective perspective (I was only 15 at the time!) around Manchester, New Order was somewhere between Low-Life and Brotherhood, the Happy Mondays were coming last at a Battle Of The Bands at the Hacienda and The Smiths were recording The Queen Is Dead.

CD: In London, there were all sorts of soul and jazzy kinds of things. I think it was the same in Manchester. I think there was Berlin in Manchester run by Colin Curtis. In London we used to go to The Wag Club, I used to love Paul Murphy’s nights, and there were lots of little bubbling under clubs, but everyone was listening to soul, old jazz and Blue Note. I think probably it was a lot to do with the fact that all these records were ending up in Charity Shops because people were starting to convert to CDs, I think we were quite lucky to be able to get all that stuff fairly cheap. Also, it was us coming out of the punk and the whole New Romantic thing. We thought, where do you go from there? Everyone decided on elegance. A friend of mine, a designer called is ‘piss-elegant’. It was put together out of junk shop finds, we made our elegance on a thrifty budget. We were all Great Pretenders really.

LTW: Was there a difference between London and Manchester?

CD: I think in London a was a bit more posey, whereas in Manchester it was more the kind of beatnik Bohemian. The Hacienda was a bit more ‘raincoats’.

AC: Only because it was cold in there.

LTW: What was the process like for putting together the boxset?

AC: We just sat and went through everything, it was an interesting experience. You never really sit down and go through them all like that, so suddenly, you can see arcs of what was an influence. You can find the reasons why you did things even though we weren’t aware of them at the time. It’s like one of those things where the narrative seems to make a lot more sense when you look back at the whole picture and interesting we seem to have a lot more of a plan than it felt like we did when we were doing it.

LTW: After signing to Mercury and having a ‘club hit’ with Blue Mood, was it a surprise that Breakout was such a hit? In hindsight, it feels like a distillation of the ’1980s sound’ which immediately transports you back.

AC: Listening to it for the first time on the radio, I heard it somewhere in the street, I thought, “if that’s not a hit, we will never have a hit”. Meaning we probably will never have one! The record company had taken it to the radio and said, “this isn’t what people want to play”. It turned out exactly because of that it sounded fresh, it wasn’t what people were playing. It had horns on it and all those things, and it just fell into the space that everybody else had left. I think it sounded so refreshing on the radio. So, in a word, yes, it was a huge surprise.

LTW: Do you get frustrated that when Swing Out Sister are mentioned, the first thing people think of is Breakout?

AC: No. I mean the fact that they think anything is a victory I think in that there are other pieces, there’s a body of work and this, that and the other but just simply that people think anything at all… Just to be part of a fabric of something and people will still even now, 30-something years on think something I don’t mind. If it’s the only thing they know us for, I’m very happy with that.

CD: I think everyone’s got a sort of signature song, signature dish, signature something. What do you hang things on in this world? There are so many things we are bombarded with. Bits of information constantly, all kinds of stuff and it’s harder and harder to remember anything. So if there’s something memorable, that’s cool.

AC: I always remember Jimmy Webb, we were sitting with him, He was talking about Up Up and Away which had been a massive hit for 5th Dimension and he said, “I never liked that song,” and it was his most popular song. You know, people go “Jimmy, Up Up and Away,” and I thought what a curse that must be, the song that everybody associates with you, you can’t stand, but then he’s got Wichita Lineman as well. So, it’s not so bad and it’s the key to the other songs. I think once you’ve got the foot in the door then hopefully people will think, “well I like that, I might like this”.

LTW: When you perform live you rework the songs before you play them live anyway so to breathe new life into it all the time I guess?

AC: Yeah, I mean that’s just to keep us interested, which might be a selfish thing. Why do you want to hear us do it a million times the same way? You can buy the record.

LTW: Moving on to Kaleidoscope World, I found it interesting that it came out at the same time as Acid House and the whole Madchester thing, but you were making a very cinematic, soulful album.

CD: The second album was our tribute to the Brill Building really and the love of songwriters, songs and arrangements. All the things that inspired us to make music. We put a bit more groove back in, that’s another element of the music we liked. It’s usually about the film soundtrack and how we can get as much music in and as few lyrics as possible. I’m so slow and Andy’s very prolific. So the more music we can get in and the fewer lyrics…

LTW: Was it a reaction to what was happening or just natural that you went in that direction?

AC: I think it was. I think the first one was contemporary in the sense that it was a lot more synth-driven, but that was because of where we’d come from, we didn’t have budgets for strings and timpani, that kind of stuff. We would use the stuff that we had at our disposal. Halfway through the process we did get some leeway in terms of getting strings and we could get horns but there is a lot of synth stuff on there. It’s a nice crossover of those things whereas the second one is just an ashamedly off the bat thing we’re doing with the proper arrangements and I think it was very much an indulgence. We knew we had a budget and we pretty much had carte blanche to do whatever interested us and you don’t get too many chances like that, so we took it with both hands. Probably, if you were looking at it in career terms, we thought it was a great success from what we wanted to do, but I think in commercial terms it wasn’t. It wasn’t an easy sell for the record company but you know, that wasn’t our concern at the time, perhaps in a foolhardy way.

LTW: I’ve been listening to it over the last few weeks and it stands up well. Not necessarily matured with age, but timeless. You can’t say, ‘Oh, that was made in 1989’.

AC: Well, I’m glad you think that. That’s how it feels to us, but you never know how someone else perceives it. I think you’re right as well. It was very much a kind of reaction to what was going on around the time. The house thing was getting a lot more rhythmic and songs were disappearing to me. I was very consciously trying to maintain that old songwriting tradition in the face of what we considered to be an onslaught.

LTW: For the third album, Get In Touch With Yourself. You carry on with that kind of sophisticated sound that you’d been developing…

CD: We’d gone so far down the songwriting homage on Kaleidoscope World, a tribute to those we’d been inspired by and loved, it was more about the craft of songwriting. With Get In Touch With Yourself, we wanted to get a bit of our groove back. Andy and Martin had started before I joined them doing tracks for Street Sounds UK, what they were performing was UK Electro. It was kind of a take on the New York thing, but more of a British version. It was almost a take on early hip-hop sampling and experimental dance stuff and then I came along! We got our groove back, but with some orchestration as well. It was back to some of our loves, like Northern Soul. I’ve always been inspired by Northern Soul, Andy’s more Jazz orientated stuff, but also the soundtracks in the blaxploitation genres, Isaac Hayes and Curtis Mayfield and such.

LTW: Tell me about the Live At The Jazz Cafe album.

CD: We put that out ourselves. Every time we go on tour we usually rearrange the songs to save on getting bored by them and Andy spends so much time arranging them. We always spend a lot more time rehearsing than we do touring, but that’s part of the fun of it. It’s almost like we rewrite the songs to perform live. With Live At The Jazz Cafe, we thought, well, these songs are so different, the arrangements etc, we could maybe put it out as an album, but nobody wanted to fund it. So we funded that one ourselves.

LTW: Do you prefer performing live or being in the studio?

AC: I prefer being in the studio. I’ve never felt comfortable performing live, I’m never relaxed. I just think there are so many variables and it always feels like it’s down to me. As the de facto bandleader it’s my fault if anything isn’t quite right and there are too many plates spinning for me in a live situation. It almost always feels like a tightrope walk for me the live thing and more often than not, I get very tense around that. In the studio, I thoroughly enjoy just sitting there and messing around with technology and the way it develops. The stuff you can do now is quite remarkable. That’s my take. I don’t enjoy so much the performing of it…

CD: Whereas I do! I’m just the eternal show off you see, and also I don’t have all the responsibilities that Andy has. If something goes wrong, I, in some sick way, kind of enjoy that and like to see what we are going do to get out of that one. I usually have something up my sleeve should anything break down. “You did this, you do that and I’ll do that”, and we’ll see what happens, but I don’t think that people mind if there’s no safety net. This is a band and it’s a band showing what they can do if they’ve got no backup and see if they can fall on their feet. It shows that there’s something live going on. We spend a lot of time rehearsing and that reassures us that if something does go wrong…

I remember once one of our Tour Managers kicked the mains plug out, so all of our gear is going through this plug and so we couldn’t hear anything we wondered what had gone wrong but we couldn’t hear anything. They could hear out front. We just went acappella for a while, but we all kept going even though we couldn’t hear each other. Then the plug got put back in. So Andy should pride himself on being a tough Taskmaster and making sure that we all know our stuff.

CD: We sang on a Jazz Cruise last year and a few things went wrong there. I lost my voice and I couldn’t sing half of the notes, so I had to write all the lyrics out for Gina and said, “can you be prepared to jump in?” I mean it was sending Andy into a complete frenzy but, you know, all credit to Gina, she took it on the chin. I had to announce to the crowd if they see Gina taking over from me it’s just because I’ve had a touch of laryngitis; so she is going to take the high notes and I’ll take the light low notes. The audience all came and said we did a great gig and they loved the fact that she had stepped in to help out, it’s a bit of real-life drama on stage, but I think Andy could do without the drama!

LTW: I noticed there are a lot of Japanese and American issues of albums and you seem to have a big fan base in those areas?

AC: Yeah from the first one, they pick up in different ways and on different tracks. I think the Japanese are very loyal, they are I suppose in America too. We did go around every single radio station in the country and so we’d done our groundwork there; but in Japan, it seems like they want to collect everything; they’re very keen to hear everything you’ve ever done, and they want to know the family tree and the whole history.

CD: When the Japanese pick up on your stuff they’re loyal and I think they’ve seen many people through careers that have dipped. We found all kinds of albums there from people that we would love that which we’d never heard of before, when they’ve gone off the boil in other places, the Japanese still stay loyal and they want to hear everything. They get all your references and I think they’re quite obsessive about collecting the whole set.

AC: Yeah, I think that, that’s true. I think we commercially shot ourselves in the foot with the second album. There was a sort of slow decline from the peak of the first one, not creatively, but in terms of sales. The opposite was true in Japan because they got all the things we were trying to do that maybe we’re a little bit too esoteric for the general audience here. So many people who loved that kind of thing in Japan who got all the references, Roger Nichols and all the various old vocal group things and it kind of crossed over.

So as we were descending here the interest there was rising to such an extent that we had a hit with Now You’re Not Here which was used as the theme for a Japanese daily soap called Mahiru No Tsuki (which translates as Midday Moon). It was a big hit in Japan to such an extent that we sold more copies of the single of that just in Japan than we did Breakout in the rest of the world. The Japanese market is a law unto itself. You have the domestic market and they have an international market. If you somehow break into the domestic market, it goes off the scale, which it did. I don’t know how we pulled it off, but it was quite a feat. That meant, that we had longevity in Japan that we didn’t have anywhere else, and which we are grateful for because we love it.

CD: I mean, we just love it there. It’s been such a rewarding thing and a dream come true. I can remember when we put out the first single I asked “When can we go to Japan?” They said, “Oh when you’ve got a hit in England”. When Breakout suddenly became successful, they said ‘You’ve got a hit in England so when you’ve had a hit in Europe and possibly America, and then you can go to Japan’. So we were kind of wishing and waiting and we finally did get to Japan. It was all we’d imagined and more and we have this kind of mutual appreciation society because we wanted to find out so much about Japan and they wanted to find out so much about us and our world. It’s been a great Voyage of Discovery.

LTW: Last question, this box set has got three albums in it; there are another seven after that. Will there be another box or another two box sets?

AC: I think that somewhere along the line of this one was officially called Part 1 or unofficially, maybe, but I think that the way of things now is it’s all about numbers now. Those first three would be the ones that, you know, their figures would show them if it’s worth doing. I think we would struggle after that, they’re in such a disparate state. The next was put out in Japan, America, UK, you know, there’s such scattered things that I think to make them all available would not be as easy as this has been because these were UK controlled.

I honestly think if they look at the numbers I don’t think there’s a Part 2 which is a shame. I think we’d love there to be part of it and put it together but we’ll see. You know, I might be wrong. I might be pleasantly surprised

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All words by Iain Key. See his Author Profile here author’s archive or on Twitter as @iainkey.

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