C h r o n o l o g y

This week, All About Eve release 'Ultraviolet', their first LP for MCA.

 
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July: All About Eve release their first single, 'D For Desire' on the independent label Eden. Sounds journalist Chris Roberts describes it as "a gouache Baltic ballad with stirring vocal interplay and a heart like a dynamometer."
September: All About Eve play their first gig before a bewildered crowd of fifty at the Pindar Of Wakefield, London.

 
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April: 'In The Clouds' is released to unanimous critical acclaim. It's named Single Of The Week in Sounds. All About Eve find themselves courted by every independent label in Britain. Cherry Red records offer them the extraordinary and somewhat insulting figure of £750. All About Eve gracefully decline.
June: All About Eve embark on their first UK tour, by all accounts a brilliant if rather alcohol-drenched affair. Andy Cousin: "We've seen a different side to Julianne, the 'innocent girl' right out the window. She's come of age. We don't do anything. Julianne's off with everyone, running naked round hotels." Onstage Julianne Regan is said by Sounds' Ron Rom to possess 'a plain sensual beauty that is as red as the Autumn apple... she's gifted with a magnetism stronger that the North Pole and it's framed with a virginal grace.'

 
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April: 'Our Summer', produced by The Mission's Wayne Hussey and Simon Hinkler (the latter of whom was having a relationship with Julianne Regan) is awarded Single Of The Week in Melody Maker who call it 'a well delineated giant of a song.' The lyrics seem to yearn for the innocence and optimism that characterised the Summer Of Love '67. The follow-up, 'Flowers In Our Hair' has music press and style magazines pondering a hippy revival. "Hip or hippy?" asks the NME in a feature that goes on to wonder if, in 1987, they aren't one and the same thing. As the single goes to Number One in the Independent Charts, Julianne tells Record Mirror journalist Roger Morton: "Just because we've written a song with bloody flowers in the title doesn't mean we're spearheading a hippy movement. It's ridiculous." All About Eve sign a deal with music industry giants Phonogram and set about writing and recording their first album. Mark Price, formerly drummer with the Nik Kershaw Band and as a child star of a Hovis advert, joins All About Eve, replacing the drum-machine and finally breaking all obvious connections with the bands' Industrial/Punk past.
October: Massive public demand forces Phonogram to re-release All About Eve's indie hit and live favourite 'In The Clouds'.

 
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February: All About Eve release their eponymously titled debut album, produced by Paul Samwell-Smith of The Yardbirds. Melody Maker's Steve Sutherland says of the record: "With so many alternative and alternatives to alternatives bustling for predomination, All About Eve have just about achieved the impossible and wedded attitude to accessibility." The album goes double-gold, selling in excess of a quarter of a million copies. It also spawns five hit singles, including 'Martha's Harbour' that goes Top Ten and spends over two months in the Charts.
May: All About Eve play two sold-out nights at London's Hammersmith Odeon. Present is Melody Maker journalist John Wilde who later savages the group in a live review. In subsequent weeks Melody Maker receives an unprecedented number of indignant letters from All About Eve's fans. Wilde catches hepatitis and is convinced that Julianne Regan, who is rumoured to practise witchcraft, has placed a hex on him. He later apologises for the review in print. His health is restored but his superstitions are confirmed.
July: All About Eve begin working on their second album in a rural studio in Sussex. During the sessions Tim Bricheno and Julianne Regan become romantically entwined. Tension in the studio is said to be nerve-wracking. International Musician, who visit them, describe the group as "chronically aware of all the obvious problems associated with a second album, especially when following a successful debut." Asked by Melody Maker if her relationship with Bricheno was the cause of the tension Julianne is adamant - "Exactly the opposite. I feel our relationship has probably been better for the band because I don't feel so alone."
August: In a feature with NME Julianne Regan tells journalist Simon Witter that, despite the band's burgeoning success, she feels less optimistic than she has ever done. "I have moments of deep cynicism now and mourn my lost naivete." In the same interview she explains that All About Eve are looking towards English Folk for their inspiration. "We're increasingly acoustic now," she says, "but it's just one of our many sides - a very pure form based on classical songs rather than clever effects."
December: Julianne Regan is voted Best Female Singer in the end-of-year Melody Maker Readers' Poll.

 
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January to June: All About Eve continue work on their album.
June: All About Eve play to 70,000 people at Glastonbury Festival. Ciao 2001, Italy's Smash Hits, describes Julianne Regan's voice as combining "the toughness of Grace Slick with the tenderness of Suzanne Vega." Other critics are less impressed, seeing All About Eve's appearance at Glastonbury as ultimate confirmation of an endemic happiness. Julianne Regan's response is typically forthright. Talking to Sky Magazine's Richard Rawlinson she says: "Flowers, clouds, trees and dreams should not be trivialised as hippy jargon. They are part of everyone's environment and nature. Even skinheads dream."
September: All About Eve release 'Road To Your Soul', the first single from the now-complete 'Scarlet And Other Stories'. The song is variously described as 'poetic' (Record Mirror), 'superb' (Kerrang), 'a hit' (Music Week) and as being 'somewhere between Harold Budd and Heart' (Melody Maker). The single charts.
October: All About Eve finally release 'Scarlet And Other Stories'. Melody Maker's Steve Sutherland, who had interviewed the group during the album's recording, greets it with an ecstatic review: "If their first LP was their 'Songs Of Innocence,'" he says, "a refreshing but naively escapist approach to survival in the big, bad world, 'Scarlet And Other Stories' is All About Eve's 'Songs Of Experience' wherein every route of escape and form of succour is tried and found wanting."
December: All About Eve release 'December', a song that elicits favourable comparisons with The Cure.

 
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April: All About Eve play three nights at London's Royal Albert Hall. In the same month they release 'Scarlet', the album's title track. The song's lyric is variously rumoured to be about Julianne Regan's relationships first with the Mission's Simon Hinkler, then Tim Bricheno. (In September of the previous year The Mission had released 'Butterfly On A Wheel'. Few doubted the song concerned Regan's torrid and ultimately disastrous relationship with Hinkler and her subsequent breakdown). Within a month Julianne Regan and Tim Bricheno break up and Bricheno joins The Mission, ironically replacing Hinkler. He will later join The Sisters Of Mercy.
August: All About Eve support The Cure at the Crystal Palace Garden Party. Later Bricheno's place is taken by English guitarist Marty Willson-Piper from cult band The Church. With Willson-Piper the band begin writing new material for their third album.

 
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January to June: All About Eve are ensconced in a recording studio on what will be their worst-reviewed album. During this period Phonogram release a live version of the now 5-years-old 'In The Clouds', a move fiercely opposed by the band. It's now widely rumoured that relationships between group and record company are rapidly deteriorating.
July: All About Eve release 'Farewell Mr Sorrow', a single that disappoints even the group's most vocal supporters. Julianne Regan will later admit that the song was written under pressure from Phonogram's sales-hungry A&R department - "We'd written this popsong that didn't quite suit us. The working title for it was 'Here You Are, Mister A&R' and that was exactly it's function."
September: All About Eve release 'Touched By Jesus'. In the wake of 'Farewell Mr Sorrow' the album receives scathing reviews from the music press. In Melody Maker, Sally Margaret Joy tears into the band, not only rubbishing the album but accusing Julianne Regan of having cynically manipulated herself a photo-opportunity with the now-permanent All About Eve guitarist Marty Willson-Piper. Julianne Regan responds by firing off a letter to Melody Maker that instantly becomes notorious. In it she accuses Sally Margaret Joy of malicious slander, misogyny and finally of being a "patronising, condescending, envious would-be starfucker." 'Touched By Jesus' goes Top Twenty. In an interview with Melody Maker, Andy Cousin attacks the band's critics saying: "We're a young band. Really we're a new band. Marty's only been with us for a year and we're still learning to write songs with him. The mistakes we made this time we won't make next time. Anything can still happen."

 October: Differences with Phonogram and All About Eve are irreconcilable. All About Eve part company with Phonogram. A little later they sack their longtime manager and friend Tony Perrin.
December: After being offered numerous deals by independents and majors alike, All About Eve sing to MCA who guarantee the band 'absolute artistic freedom'. The also employ Dai Davies, manager of the critically acclaimed anarcho-prog-rockers Levitation.

 
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September: All About Eve release the 'Phased' EP and then their first album for MCA, 'Ultraviolet'. The album is a product of the past two turbulent years. Infinitely heavier and more acidic than any of their previous work, it's a million miles from the early unburnished optimism that had had the group branded nouveau hippies. All About Eve have finally come of age. 'Ultraviolet' is fierce, beautiful, utterly compelling, headspinningly psychedelic and resolutely of this time...