Melody Maker Interview with Marijne and Paul
"I am a very, very insecure person, but I am determined. Extremely determined. "I wanted to become a model, and I became a model. It was my determination that got me there rather than my looks. Sure, I'm tall, and I had the right figure, but I had to work to get that. More importantly, I wanted to do it and I wanted to be bloody good at it. I had the attitude, I was really bloody cocky. I worked in Paris for a year and, in a few months in Tokyo, I earned £20,000. "Then I wanted to be on TV and I became an MTV presenter, just literally walked into the job. "I've always wanted to make music and love it. I want this group to succeed and it will. Determination can get you a long, long way. If you want something badly enough, you'll probably get it. Like I say, I'm insecure, but I want to be in a band. So, if I can get on that stage anyone can fucking do it."
That's Marijne all over, Salad all over, a weird hybrid of the DIY punk aesthetic and hard-nosed individualism. But beneath all this pep-talking (relayed though in its quiet, fearsome tones of the true zealot) is a belief that, in pop music at least, determination, however obstinate, will never take you much beyond a feature in the music press. You need, says Marijne, "the X factor". By this she means talent, a muse, you know the sort of thing. And Salad have it. You can tell by the way they fuck with their peachy-clean melodies, delivering them in a buzzsaw blur, by the way their choruses make entrances and exits so fierce and unexpected your spine freezes, by the way Marijne can hit notes as skewed and deliciously surprising as Bjork.
Salad love making lairy, lovely bubblegum pop, full of filthy thoughts and nasty chords. SINCE Salad started, though, some two years ago, there's been a lot of ill will towards them. Most of it directed at Marijne. To begin with, she was a model, and a reasonably successful one at that. People don't like models doing stuff, other than modelling. With all the sneering, sniggering scepticism that greeted Naomi's record, Kate's photos and Cindy's (forthcoming) movie debut. Many women would prefer it if the beautiful didn't stray from the catwalk, believing that beauty precludes all other virtues. Many men further resent it because they like their women passive, obscene and not heard, as John Lennon once said after a New York fashion show.
But modelling wasn't Marijne's only sin and might well have been forgotten had she not compounded people's prejudices by becoming an MTV VJ. No matter that Marijne was more watchable than 90 per cent of the stuff she introduced, no matter that her relatively modest wage was used to subsidise Salad. For the millions that watched her, and the many in the industry who used her to flog millions of records, presenting MTV was seen as little better than prostitution. Consequently, Marijne and Salad were afforded far less serious consideration than their peers. Tokyo. Paris. New York. Camden. SALAD's journey from international glamour pusses to indie wannabes has been bizarre to say the least. THE STUD BROTHERS meet the bubblegum noiseniks who gave it all up for gigging.
She's left MTV now to dedicate herself full-time to the band. It's the second career she's walked out on in favour of something infinitely more precarious. "That shows true love for you, doesn't it?" she says, with a smile. Paul Kennedy, her former lover, sometime adversary (it's true, they're always arguing) and Salad's guitarist, nods. "I was at MTV for four years," she continues. "It had run it's natural course. But I did get that job through making music. I was taking in a Merry Babes [an early incarnation of Salad] video and someone just asked me to audition there and then. So I made my decision, went for it and," she giggles, "I got the job. People say I'm really brave giving it up, but it has nothing to do with bravery. I just wanted to dedicate myself to the band. . . completely."
Can you understand why people might look at you less than seriously? "Yeah, sure. There are obviously people out there who think it couldn't possibly be OK for someone to be an MTV presenter and in a band. And the thing is, if I were an outsider, I'd probably think exactly the same thing." "I would too", says Paul. "You're bound to think this is just some bollocks thrown together by some Svengali. But then I think that if you hear us, see us live, then you'll change your mind overnight."
"And also, before the band, we were actually four friends. I knew Pete [Brown - bass] from school and Marijne knew Rob [Wakeman - drums] from the house she was living in, so really it was very organic, the whole set-up. It's the complete opposite to what some people might think." "The problem is," adds Marijne, "that I just happened to have a job, like most people in bands do when they first start out. The trouble was that I happened to have a job in the public eye, that's all. People just shouldn't be so narrow-minded." "Anyway," says Paul, "it hasn't been that much of a problem. I think most people realise we're 4 Real. I'm not gonna carve anything into my arm, but it is the truth."
SALAD'S new single, written by drummer Rob and titled "Drink The Elixir", is a barbed celebration of the pursuits of youth and beauty and the crazed but ever-so-sane efforts people make to attain them. What Salad seem to be saying (though they're clever enough to not actually come out with it) is that beauty is a whole lot more useful than brains because, basically, people see a whole lot better than they think. Like the previous "Your Ma", a rampant punk paean to seduction (like "The Graduate" directed by Quentin Tarantino), it's very perverse, very Salad. Salad write wonderfully dirty, ingeniously obscene popsongs. "I think with Sleeper and Oasis and Supergrass doing so well," says Marijne, "we should do, too. It's what we want, it's absolutely what I want." A hat-trick of successful careers? Some girls have all the luck.
