EVERYBODY'S BORING BUT PEARL HARBOUR!

EVERYBODY'S BORING BUT PEARL HARBOUR!

FEATURES

by Iman Lababedi

At the end of a nine-week American tour, on Easter Sunday 1980 in San Francisco, Pearl Harbour and the Explosions, er, exploded. Due to musical differences, as they say in the trades. Though of no great loss to anyone, its immediate effect on Pearl was to convince her to move to England with then-boyfriend Kosmo Vinyl (then Clash publicist) to wipe away her tears. Nearly a year later I'm sitting opposite her in an office at Warner Bros., and it's obvious she hasn't been exactly idle. In New York to set up dates for her new band and do interviews in support of Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost Too, even she'd admit this is her first real stake in the rock games we love so well.

"The new album is-well, I don't want to say where I'm at `cause that sounds so dumb-but it is. I love my new album and that's more then I can say for the first one! It's really a good feeling to like something you've done. I like simple songs, all the songs are nothing new but that doesn't bother me."

Now 24, Pearl has lead an eventful life. She lived in Germany, where her father was stationed by the Army, till she was 17, suffering outrageous bigotry due to her Filipino mother and as much from Americans as from her German hosts. Today she admits that she dresses to shock in part as a reaction to those early years. She left for San Francisco at 17 and became a dancer with the Tubes, which led to the off-shoot Leila and the Snakes and eventually formed the nucleus for the Explosions. "None of us had written any songs before, all we knew was that we wanted to write our own stuff and come up with something different, blah, blah, blah. It was very experimental, the boys would come up from the basement with something different and it was all funk and R&B oriented and I like that so I didn't object." Though she did, in the end. Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost Too got its title from the back of a Teddy boy’s leather jacket and the music is as 50’s-inspired as its title suggests, almost a paean to her rockabilly-saturated upbringing. If at one time it was felt that Pearl was nothing much more than an overrated groupie, this album should go a long way to shutting her detractors up. The band isn’t behind the door either. With two drummers, “before I’d even heard of Adam Ant, ” she’s quick to point out, Bobby Irwin and Paul’s kid brother Nick Simonon. Ex-Rich Kid Steve New and Nigel Dixon on guitar, Otis Watkins on keyboards and Barry Payne on bass. Altogether they give this album a distinctive slam, an almost casual roughhouse sawdust and spit.

“I didn’t want this album to sound 50’s.” Pearl admits. It does. “Wow! You think so?” So much for empathy. “I thought those rockabilly albums sound thin, on this album I’ve got two drummers and my lead guitarist plays real wild. I didn’t want to recreate the 50’s sound though I think the material sounds 50’s. I write real simple rock ’n’ roll songs.”

Tell me about it. Don’t Follow Me, I’m LostToo is in no way a bad album, shouting . plagiarism is beside the point. Sure “Everybody’s Boring But My Baby” is a Shirelles rip-off, Pearl is the first to admit it, again: “People always used to tell me that I should cover Ronettes, Shirelles, Shangri Las tunes, but to me it just seemed so unoriginal, a woman with my voice. It is sort of similar, not exactly but I can imitate them. It didn’t seem that risky of interesting or original, so I wrote my own!”

Pearl Harbour (the band) have just finished a 30-day tour of England. If that was playing to the converted, their support role for the B-52’s and Talking Heads European tour was less then fun. “We are definitely a rock ’n’ roll band, they don’t have a rock audience and their audience didn’t like us at all. They were gawking with their mouths open. This was in Brussels, Amsterdam, Scotland and London. I would lean over the stage and go “I’m a Fujiyaaaama Babeee” and everybody would lean back. The new album was recorded at the same studio where the Clash were making Sandinista! We both had fun going into each others’ studio, it was really good laughs.”

I had one major complaint about the album, that it leans heavily on the past without adding anything of its own. Pearl shrugged off my comment with an “I suppose you’re right.” I suppose I am, though it’s worth buying if for nothing else, Gary Barnacle’s withering sax. As a first step, it’ll do fine for now, but how does it develop?

“Ummm...Let’s see _ here...The new things are in a similar vein to the album. The way that I hope to change, branching out further musically, has a lot to do with your environment. In London, when we were all working together and all listening to the same type of music—oldies—it made sense and it was very easy for us to come up with the sound and type of music we are doing. Now if we all moved to New Orleans we could all pick up on the environment, the atmosphere and the vibes that were going on and create something out of that, which is what I’d like to do for the next album. ” ¶|?