Mrs. Clash: A Chat with Pearl Harbour
The punk/New Wave era luminary offers insight into her wild career in rock ‘n’ roll
Pearl Harbour’s “favorite” album – 1980’s Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost Too – might have disappeared for a bit, but a new reissue puts it back on the map.
It almost requires some biographical cartography to appreciate, though, as its history involves an artist crossing multiple oceans multiple times, finding the best backing band in the world, and engaging in a notable fight with a record label. And, of course, a whole set of music that blends an even older history to outshine all the entanglements surrounding its original production.
The story begins innocuously enough with a young Harbour surrounded by four older brothers while growing up in Germany. Like Harbour, they were all record collectors, too, and would frequently come home with new albums from artists ranging from the Supremes to The Who to Joni Mitchell, a variety that would influence the young musician’s own writing.
“I got to listen to all these records and I loved them all,” Harbour said to Rock & Roll Globe. “When I was a kid I used to pretend like I was in the Ronettes. It was cool – I was lucky.”
It might not have been the music’s fault, but Harbour soon longed for the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, so she took off from Europe for California while still just a kid.
“I had never been to San Francisco, but I was always interested in it because I had read a lot about it,” she said. “This was 1973, when I was 17 years old and at that time I was really looking for where all the hippies were, and I figured all the hippies were in San Francisco, so that’s where I went.”
The parting, at least in retrospect, sounds almost comical.
“I did leave my home and my family. I was a bad teenager, so when I said to my parents, ‘I want to move to San Francisco and I’m not going to finish high school,’ they said, ‘Okay,’ and they just bought me a ticket and I was gone.”
Her music has never sounded “hippie,” but she explains her connection to the scene at the time.
“In 1973 there was no punk or no wave, the only thing to be if you were alternative or a rebel was a hippie,” she said. “’Hippie’ to me meant the guys had long hair and everybody smoked pot and that was two things that I liked – I liked guys with long hair and I liked to smoke pot, so I did just fine when I moved there. Naturally I got it all sorts of trouble when I first moved there because I was this little kid, but I soon learned the ropes and how to take care of myself.”
Harbour quickly met up with some people in the area and started going to concerts, saying that “that’s what interested me more than anything – going to see music every night. When I first got there I saw a lot of local bands.”
In 1975, she saw The Tubes and said, “That’s the band I want to be in.”
“The next thing I knew they were having a talent contest,” Harbour added. “I did my research on The Tubes and I found out they liked Roxy Music and Phil Manzanera, so I got a Phil Manzanera song and I knew I wanted to do a tap-dancing boxing number. I figured that would fit in really well with their show.”
Harbour won, the band picking her to dance with them for three weeks at the nightclub Bimbo’s. After that, The Tubes asked her to do more shows since they all got along so well. She also connected with musician, comedian, and (oddly) weather reporter Jane Dornacker (“a great teacher and a wonderful woman”) who wrote songs for the band, including the memorable “Don’t Touch Me There.” She had her own band called Leila and the Snakes and asked Harbour to join them. For a few years, Harbour performed with both bands, but eventually left The Tubes because they did so much touring.
In 1978, Harbour and the rhythm section for the Snakes – John and Hillary Hanes – decided to form their own band and write their own music. The group, called Pearl Harbour and the Explosions and filled out with Peter Bilt on guitar, quickly had a hit with “Drivin’” on 415 Records. Despite the fact that radio stations weren’t supposed to play the band because of their name, the label helped get the new wave single enough airplay for it to chart. Harbour had her big break.
VIDEO: Pearl Harbor and the Explosions “Drivin'”
“It got all kinds of local attention so we signed with Warner in 1979 and made the first record,” she said. “We toured extensively with Talking Heads and when thats finished in May of 1980 I moved to London.”
Harbour still hadn’t lost her penchant for getting into trouble, and that move would cause her some more issues. How she ended up in London being supported by the only band that matters came from the sort of weirdness that only she could stumble into.
“When I was still in Leila and the Snakes,” she said, “we were rehearsing and I was in the lobby and this English guy comes up to me and says, ‘You’re the second most beautiful girl I’ve seen today,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, brother, what a creep.’ And he said, ‘How would you like to see the best rock ‘n’ roll band in the world?’
That clever 19-year-old English guy with the spiky purple hair was Kosmo Vinyl (personal manager for The Clash) and the band in question turned out to be Ian Dury and the Blockheads. Harbour got to listen to them rehearse. She’d performed as the support act for Elvis Costello and the Attractions, and that group turned her on to Stiff Records, so she knew the music well.
Harbour became friends with Vinyl, who invited her to travel with the band and see the shows. She did, and wound up in a relationship with Vinyl. He understood that she wasn’t happy with the Explosions.
“They like more jazz and fusion stuff,” she explained. “I wanted to make a rock ‘n’ roll record and they didn’t. He said I should move to England and make a rock ‘n’ roll record with The Clash and Ian Dury.”
She made the move, and quickly started writing with Nigel Dixon, whose band Whirlwind was part of London’s underground rockabilly scene. Working with him helped simplify the process of making an album.
“The two of us told everyone what we were trying to do,” she said. “Nigel is a great guitar player, so he played and I sang and that’s what we did at rehearsal. Everybody learned the songs very quickly. There’s no frills, hardly and guitar overdubs. We tried to do everything as quickly and as simply as possible.”
That “everybody” included Paul Simonon and Topper Headon from The Clash, Wilko Johnson, Steve Goulding and Steve New. Mick Jones made a guest appearance, meaning 3/4 of the Clash performed on the album while they were also having the Sandinista! sessions. Gary Barnacle, Geraint Watkins, and BJ Cole all stopped by, too.
Harbour notes how easy it was for anyone to catch on with a clear understatement: “They’re all pretty good musicians.”
By this point, Harbour had collected a who’s who of the punk and New Wave scene. If she seemed like an odd fit as the one woman and the one artist coming from a different background, it didn’t feel that way.
Harbour said, “The Brits know their American music – old soul and old rock ‘n’ roll – and we all got along.”
As for the gender issues, she explained, “I never really thought about it in terms of male or female. When I first was in Leila and the Snakes it was all girls, but it changed soon after. Nowadays it’s not the same, but it was a lot harder then to find, for example, a great female drummer. I would have always liked to be in all-girl bands because it’s a great look. I also really wanted to have great music and great songs. In London it was all the guys. That didn’t bother me. I grew up with four brothers. Guys are not a mystery or intimidating. I just think of myself as a person who likes all the same music as these other people.”
With the chemistry clicking, she explained what she wanted, to take a bunch of “very old school” sounding songs drawing on ’50s and ’60s rock, girl group pop and rockabilly, and “speed them up and make them sound more modern.” And the band nailed it.
Harbour still likes the process, noting, “It’s a good idea not to overdo rock ‘n’ roll. Usually when a band is first playing the song is when they do it the best, because it’s fresh. When the guitar player or whoever is doing the solo just blurts out what they’re feeling, that’s usually the best. Once everyone starts listening to it and picking it apart and tries to change it, that’s when things lose their soul.”
The album has plenty of verve. And while rockabilly may be the most central sound, the band moves fluidly between styles, making an album with a consistent and coherent aesthetic that offers plenty of energy in a new wave setting. “Alone in the Dark” takes the rockabilly groove and gives it a punk edge. “Fujiyama Mama” covers Wanda Jackson, an obvious choice for Harbour.
VIDEO: Pearl Harbour and The Clash “Fujiyama Mama”
“I knew for sure I wanted to record ‘Fujiyama Mama.’ I was a huge Wanda Jackson fan and I liked to think that I sort of sounded like her,” Harbour said. “We have the same tone, we sing in the same key. She’s a way better singer than me, though! I knew that I liked rockabilly because it’s really pure, but the simplicity of rockabilly sometimes can be monotonous, so I wanted to make sure that I didn’t come across as every song sounds like that. That’s another reason I speeded things up and made it more modern.”
Album highlight “Everybody’s Boring But My Baby” shifts (with some wit) to girl group mode, again no surprise, given Harbour’s early days pretending to be a Ronette.
“I wrote that because I love girl groups,” she said. “For most of the songs I just picked genres that I really like – girl groups, rockabilly, ’50s rock ‘n’ roll. ‘Heaven Is Gonna Be Empty’ is kind of countryish and I really love country music. I just tried to incorporate all my simple songs and make them a little more interesting with the great musicians.”
Harbour’s career could have taken off. She had a unique and remarkable record ready to go, recorded by some of the coolest rockers in England. There was one little problem, though.
“Warner Brothers did not like the record at all,” she explained.
Her label had signed Pearl Harbour and the Explosions. They “put a lot of money” into that band and did promotion for their self-titled album. That’s who toured with Talking Heads and who Warner expected to work with. Then the tour ended and Harbour took off to London to do a solo career.
“They were really angry,” she said, “but they did have faith in me, so they said we’ll pay for you to do a solo album And we’ll see what happens with that.”
But then she gave them Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost Too, and they complained about it, and claimed it didn’t have a hit on it (falling into cliché). They refused to promote it.
There’s one more little detail: “They were mad at me because I didn’t credit any of The Clash or the Blockheads on this record.”
Harbour regrets it now, but she knew how tough the British music press should be and she thought it would be a punk rock move to not say who was on the record. She didn’t want anyone saying that the only reason anyone should listen to it is because of the more famous musicians. She and Vinyl thought it would be “a funny stunt” to leave off the names, but “it was a total failure.”
“The record company was really angry, and when I put out the record all anyone asked me was, ‘Who’s playing on this?’”
It gets worse.
“Then Warner threw me off the label.”
Harbour reamined undefeated, though, both personally and professionally. Her relationship with Vinyl had “run its course,” and she was single when she made the album, though Vinyl “was always in the recording studio as my manager and my friend, just to make sure everything was running smoothly.”
As she tells it, “When the record was finished, Paul called me up and said, ‘Do you want to go to the Tate Art Museum with me?’ because he knew I liked going to museums, so that was our first date and we started going out after that.”
Harbour continued playing live, often with Simonon (to whom she was married for some time) and Headon in the band. Her shows drew nice crowds and were well received (“I always do well live – that’s my favorite thing.”) Then she put together her own band and played in support of the Clash. When they went to Japan in 1982, she performed “Fujiyama Mama.”
“I immediately got a big following in Japan and they called me Mrs. Clash,” Harbour said. “They were obsessed with me. Here was a girl who was half-Asian who was hanging out with the Clash and singing with them.”
Things never quite took off, though. Harbour did make an album with Epic Sony, and recorded the LaVern Baker song “Voodoo Voodoo” with Wilko Johnson (included on the reissue as a bonus track). She also recorded the strong album Pearls Galore, but was unable to release it outside of Japan.
AUDIO: Pearl Harbour “Voodoo”
Now Harbour has zeroed in another side of her art: country music.
“I listen to a lot of country music now because I put together last year a really great country band,” she said. “I moved out to the desert in southern California. There’s a lot of great musicians – they’re recluse types.”
Harbour listens to the old classics like “Loretta Lynn and Wanda Jackson and George Jones and Tammy Wynette (all the regular stuff), but she also enjoys Lucinda Williams and Brandi Carlile. Right now she’s especially excited about Sierra Ferrell.
“I love her,” Harbour said. “She’s so refreshing because she’s a great singer and a great songwriter. She’s a real alternative wacky chick. I really admire her.”
Harbour’s career has been full of left turns, so of course she would go for someone a little offbeat. Harbour keeps looking toward the future, but she’s proud to have a moment with her past right now, getting a classic album a new release and a chance for a new audience to discover it. She describes the album best herself.
“I think that it’s pretty pure rock ‘n’ roll and I don’t think there are that many – except the real old records – real simple rock ‘n’ roll [records],” she proclaims. “I don’t think it sounds like anybody out there now. It’s danceable, it’s a fun party record. It’s pretty old school.”
- A John Cale Listening Guide - July 2, 2024
- Wishful Thinking: Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born at 20 - June 24, 2024
- Pokey LaFarge Ventures Into Rhumba Country - May 30, 2024
You May Also Like
-
October 5, 2018 -
August 29, 2021 -
November 21, 2018
Pearl, You are Remarkable. It ALL FITS. I knew You a bit during Your Mabuhay, Mill Valley, Snakes Period.
You knocked we three stoners off a log coming out of the water at Muir Beach. You had that totally Kool Red Falcon Wagon, Saw You at a Joel Selvin Party when You came back from Your European- London Excursion. Lastly, I told You about The Three Stoners on The Log at The Mill Valley Joe Stummer Gig, You kissed me and I got scared and Ran Away. You are a Totally Kool Highly Evolved Being, I have heard of Your Malady and You are on My Prayer List, my People do Well. Matters of The Heart are of The Highest Importance and are The Truest First Cause. Peace Out. Bruce Spiegelman San Rafael, Ca.