Jayne Casey played a key role in Liverpool’s emerging music scene in the late 1970s
Jayne Casey played a key role in Liverpool’s emerging music scene in the late 1970s
Jayne Casey’s mum died when she was five and her dad was an alcoholic. It was a situation which left a young Jayne Casey, spending her formative years just trying to survive. But decades on from that extremely tough start, Jayne, 69, is widely thought of as one of the most influential figures in Liverpool’s music scene.
For a person who has always been on the cutting edge of cultural change it might seem strange to think of the former Big in Japan musician and Capital of Culture chief as someone who didn’t have particularly broad horizons to begin with.
She told the ECHO: “I’d come from a really, really difficult background, so my only thoughts were about surviving. I wanted to survive these horrendous circumstances that I had been born into, so I didn’t really have any actual dreams.”
Having survived a difficult childhood, it was during her teenage years that she began to take refuge in music.
“Music kept me going, Motown kept me going when I was young and then David Bowie kept me going later on and and I ended up in children’s homes and I’d turn up with a little record under my arm which I had picked up along the way. It was Simon and Garfunkel, I used to listen to ‘The Boxer’ over and over again and music was the thing that kept me going, but I didn’t dream that I would ever be involved in that industry at all.
“I was completely into fashion, I had my own take on things. So, I left school and hit town, I worked in a hairdressers and I was a little Marilyn Monroe lookalike and all the boys used to fancy me and then I shaved all my hair off and they all hated me.
“I had a look that was ahead of its time and it was that look that lead me into the music industry.”
Jayne said that it was being spotted by Cavern Club DJ Bob Wooler that gave her a break in the industry. “One day I was followed around by an older guy, I was followed around town for a few days. Eventually he approached me and it was Bob Wooler who had been the DJ in the Cavern, so we [Ian Broudie and Holly Johnson] became friends with these older people who had been in Liverpool in the 60s.
“So, for me it was interesting to meet these people and find out about the life that had been there, so the first time that I met Bob Wooler, he said to me ‘I have been following you around and I’m obsessed with you.
“The first time that I saw you I realised that life had come back to the city’. It was as if the 60s had never happened in Liverpool, so you were dead aware of this void that was there and I personally wanted to understand it, so those guys, Alan Williams (who owned the Blue Angela and the Jacaranda) and Bob Wooler kind of helped you to understand.”
However, when she did finally break into the industry as the lead singer of the band Big in Japan, it was quickly instilled in her and other rising young musicians that if they were to make a name for themselves, they would have to “make their own way”.
She said: “Quite quickly, Roger Eagle, who ran Eric’s called a meeting one day and it was me, Pete Wylie and Ian McCulloch and he told us never to listen to The Beatles. It wasn’t out of disrespect, it was out of the fact that it was probably that we would never create anything if we had listened to The Beatles, because they’re so genius, it was just about finding your own way.”
“I was a kid from nowhere, so it was like being in a candy shop, suddenly you were in the middle of this great scene and you were holding stage.
“It was a grouping of really bright kids, everybody read books and talked about literature, films, it was a very bright grouping of people. You had Holly [Johnson], Bill Drummond [of KLF fame], Ian McCulloch [Echo and the Bunnymen], who were all interested in books, art and film. It was like being in a sweetie shop and I was miss queen bee.”
Jayne is often acknowledged as being one of the pioneers of Liverpool’s punk scene, which was emerging in the late 70s but, she said that at the time, she was almost completely unaware of the label.
“There was a little group of us, [it was] me, Holly, Paul Rutherford [Frankie Goes to Hollywood] and Pete Burns [Dead of Alive] and we were doing our thing before punk, so were already looking a certain way and and going down a certain path, and the first time that people called us punks, we were quite insulted and didn’t like the fact that we were having a label put on us.
“I look back, and you get those little memes that say ‘what would you say to your 18-year-old self?’ and I’d say ‘god you were brave’, we were a brave little posse and I’m really proud of that bravery and that spirit. I think it’s amazing.”
In a music career that spanned a decade, Jayne rose to fame as the lead singer of Big in Japan with the likes of Holly Johnson, Bill Drummond and Ian Broudie also forming part of the band during their two years together.
While the band’s time together was relatively short-lived, they were considered a key part of Liverpool’s thriving music scene at the time, alongside bands including Echo & the Bunnymen, the Teardrop Explodes and OMD.
Throughout the 1980s, her career continued to go from strength to strength as she formed Pink Military with John Highway [guitar], Wayne Wadden [bass guitar], Paul Hornby [drums] and Nicky Cool [keyboards). In their time together, they found chart success with their album, Do Animals Believe in God? After latterly going on to form Pink Industry, she swapped her punk sound for a more electronically orientated one as she teamed up with Ambrose Reynolds and Tadzio Jodlowski. After releasing three albums together, the band split and Jayne’s time on stage came to an end.
Fast forward a few decades and while she later moved away from a career on stage, music has continued to underpin her life.
In the years since her rise to fame in the music industry, Jayne has continued to be a key cog in Liverpool’s cultural makeup having played a pivotal role in the city’s 2008 Capital of Culture events as well being instrumental in the regeneration of the Baltic Triangle, after she co-founded the Baltic Creative CIC [Community Interest Company] with Erika Rushton, which saw the company buy and refurbish warehouses turning them into creative enterprises.
Now, she co-owns District music venue in the Baltic Triangle with Eric Gooden. In more recent years, she has taken her creative pursuits slightly further afield after opening District House in New Brighton.
She said: “Whether I was given the opportunity or I made the opportunity, to impact the city I lived in, that’s been an amazing experience. Now as an older person, I look back and that was an amazing experience. I walk around the Baltic [Triangle] and I go ‘wow, this is my manor’.”
She added: “I’m proud of what we did in [the Capital of Culture] 08 and my impact in that, so I do live with this fabulous sense of pride, but I don’t wear it at all, so people will just meet me and I’m just Jayne.”
