Judie Tzuke - Press Cuttings.
The following article was released in Kerrang Mega Metal Magazine in 1989.
TZUKE SUITS
The waif-like JUDIE TZUKE is back with a 'poignant work of ethereal mainstream' - aka a new album called 'Turning Stones'. Three long years in the making, you'd think its eventual release would be cause for celebration. But, as CHRIS WATTS discovers, the winsome British songstress is feeling far from happy at the moment...
RIGHT NOW Judie Tzuke, by her own admission, is "a bit messed up". It hasn't been a good week. When she sits dawn to think about it, it hasn't been a particularly wonderful three years either. But these past seven days have been the closest this British songstress has ever been to going down.
Barely a week ago there was cause for celebration in Judie Tzuke's comfortable, homely Weybridge cottage.
A new album, the recording of which had been dogged by problems for three years (going on a life time), was finished and awaiting release on a new label.
Her first UK tour for four years has been assembled by new management, and was ready to roll. With a new addition to the family, two-year-old daughter Bailey, Judie's career seemed stable. For the first time she was even confident at the prospect of touring.
But that was last week, and the very idea of the tour being cancelled was just incomprehensible.
"At the moment I'm just totally shell-shocked," she sighs.
"Having the tour pulled is probably the worst thing that's ever happened to me. That's saying somethihg with my career."
The official line taken by Polydor blames 'production difficulties'. Judie admits that such a phrase can hide a multitude of sins, but isn't about to divulge the real reason in public. The real reason is sad.
"I'd like to make the point that it really wasn't my fault. Nor was it ticket sales, or anything like that. There really was nothing I could do. I just hope that people won't think it was pulled because it was raining and I didn't feel like it. I'm worried about how people will see this. I hope people will understand that there was nothing I could've done. Absolutely nothing. Cancelling anything makes me feel so dreadful."
She smiles. "I was up at Polydor yesterday, and ending up getting all weepy on them. I don't think they quite knew what to make of it. I was sitting there, crying 'But what's going to happen to me?!'"
IT'S PROBABLY not the first time Judie Tzuke has wondered about her fate.
Since the release of her debut album almost a decade ago, her career has often been the innocent victim of circumstance. These have included record company politics, collapsing distribution companies and tactless marketing images obscuring her music.
Typically, the last time Judie had to cancel a show was when Pax (her affectionate nick-name for guitarist Mike Paxman) accidentally broke her nose on stage. Y'see, something's always happening to Judie Tzuke.
"Most of my problems stem from the fact that I've tried too reasonable in the past. What I've been saying up until this tour being pulled, was that I'm never going to be reasonable again! It doesn't work. Now I don't feel so
sure about anything. I find the music business totally, totally mystifying. At the moment I'm just defeated."
With the tour indefinitely postponed until arguments are settled, the release of Judie's first album since 'The Cat Is Out' has also been delayed.
Ironically, despite the problems that nearly resulted in her being dropped from Polyder, 'Turning Stones' is perhaps Judie Tzuke's most consistent, poignant work of ethereal mainstream. She plays it down with characteristic charm.
"We just wrote a load of songs really."
Fresh from the small independent label, Legacy, Judie was immediately caught up in the ever changing boardroom at Polydor. No sooner had she signed, than the staff over-seeing the project had been ousted and new faces appeared.
"Originally we were working with these different producers because the refcord company wanted us to." She explains. "That was nothing to do wityh me. I also got pregnant completely by accident. In the end we recorded the whole album with someone that wasn't right, just to keep everybody happy. I kind of knew it wasn't right but I believed it would turn out fine. I finished the album, had Bailey, and hated the album when I heard it three months later!"
I JUST DIDN'T know what to do. I couldn't tour with it, couldn't promote it. He'd taken out all the odd chords we often use, all the odd timings and smoothed out all the rough edges, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't me."
That was also the opinion of the new faces at Polydor.
"Apparantly they were considering dropping me when they heard it. We sent them the original demos, how we'd planned the songs to sound, and they were estatic. They didn't understand how I could've been working on something that I hated. They gave us the time to do the whole thing again form scratch."
This involved a trip to the bank and the building of a red-bricked studio at the bottom of the garden where the band could directly control their music without a third party's outside interference. It worked.
'Turning Stones' is Judie Tzuke at her most distant and therapeutic. Developing the trait of bright, electronic rhythms beneath the lush acoustic and electric layers, overlaid with Judie's strangely accentless vocals, her music has evolved from the simple likes of 'Stay With Me Till Dawn' and 'Southern Smiles'.
On 'Turning Stones' her ballads have become 'Sound Of My Sister's Tears' and 'Modern Killers'. Impassioned and articulate, Judie is now seldom obvious. The rock edge has grown from 'Black Furs' and 'Infromation' into 'We'll Go Dreaming' and 'All They Can Do Is Talk'. She wrote the later one when she was angry but can't remember why!
"I think I'd buy this album," she confides. "I don't think I'd buy '... Cat'. I can't listen to it, it irritates me. We did everything wrong, mainly not knowing how to use our own equipment and trusting an engineer who didn't either. I think if we did anything in America and had the chance to remix the back catalogue, '...Cat' and 'Ritmo' are the albums I'd like to get my hands on.
"I love this album, it's not perfect, but it's the closest I've ever got to a sound that was accurate. It was just me, Pax, Bob (Noble) and Paul (Muggleton - Judie's percussionest, long-term boyfriend and father of Bailey). I can't make any excuses, because we had complete control over the finished results. As usual everything went wrong after we'd finished recording. That's pretty normal in my career."
THE TIMES once described Judie Tzuke as 'a waif', a phrase which pleased her immensely. She still owns the expensive hi-fi sent to her by a journalist from a notorious music weekly who castigated 'Sportscar' for not being fashionably offensive. Judie Tzuke equal parts unsure and determined has never had deliberate cause to chase controversy, didn't she ever want to be obnoxious?
"No!" She retorts. "I'm not like that, I'm not an actress. I basicaly like to write and sing because that's what I think I do best."
"That's basically why I still write. I always found the stage thing very awkward, I was always nervous because you do get a certain pressure to be an actress. I'm more comfortable with my self now. More relaxed, less vain. I don't panic about having to look a certain way or having to be something I'm not."
Has having Bailey made a difference to your music?
"I don't know whether it's made a difference to my music, but it made me give up smoking. I have changed, but it's difficult to know how, I'm thinking about her more than me, I can switch off with her. I'm not particularly lonely, but although I talk a lot and I'm quite open to a certain extent, I'm really quite solitary. There's a lot I don't give out. I've got a very special friendship with Bailey, we're very close and I like that."
"I nearly didn't have children. Everything changes. Your whole way of life changes. Basically I just want to be happy and secure."
Have you written a song for her yet?
"Not yet, I'd like to, but I don't want to make it soppy. You know. 'Oh I've had a baby and I love her so much!' If I do write about her I'd like to write about the emotion. I've always done that in the past.
"'Late Again', for example, sounds as if it was about being stood up. It's actually about my father forgetting to come and pick me up from boarding school. I just felt so awful. It still makes me tearful even now. But people can read what ever they want into my lyrics."
"Having Bailey is certainly the most dramatic thing in my life. It brings you down to an animal reality. I'm sure the emotion surrounding the whole thing will help me in the future."
SOMETIMES YOU get the impression that Judie Tzuke, fiercely writing her sweet songs on an old piano, would much rather be somebody else. You see, something's always happened to Judie Tzuke.
"I guess I feel grown up," she says. "Not old, but I don't want to be a struggling pop star anymore. I want to be someone who justs makes albums and goes on tour every year. I don't want it to be all down to how old I am. I have other things now in my life, not just to worry about myself.
EDITOR'S NOTEBy the time you read this, the new Judie Tzuke LP 'Turning Stones' should have been released. At the time of writing it was scheduled to hit the streets on April 17.
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