The March Violets: 'It gets to the point when you think, "If you don’t do it now, when are you planning on doing it?"'

This week sees the group, these days led by original singer Rosie Garland and guitarist Tom Ashton, return to the city for a gig at The Old Woollen in Farsley. Talking to The Yorkshire Post via video, Garland, now 63, says simply: “We’re old giffers and life is short. When you get to a certain age you get some pretty rough reminders of it – I’ve had cancer and Si (Denbigh, Garland’s original co-vocalist) has had his awful, life-changing stroke, and it gets to the point when you think, ‘If you don’t do it now, when are you planning on doing it?’”

She’s full of praise for Jungle Records boss Alan Hauser who has worked with the band on a reissue campaign that began with the release of some BBC sessions for Record Store Day in 2021. “Obviously record labels want to make money, but these guys are nice, they’re good guys, and they’re a pleasure to work with,” she says. “The BBC Sessions came out when it was lockdown and we thought ‘it’s going to sink without a trace’ but it sold out its entire pressing in 24 hours. Hence Jungle Records going, ‘Actually, can we carry on talking?’ and we went ‘Yes, you can’.”

Garland began trawling her own archives and found a bootleg tape of a gig at The Warehouse in Leeds in 1982. “Tom and I were listening to this bootleg and there were tracks on it that we’d forgotten we’d written. We had vague memories of some of them and it was just interesting to hear them again,” she says. “We’ve got quite a lot offstage and Jungle Records are going to be releasing them over the next few months.”

She and Ashton (“fabulous guitarist and gentleman of rock ’n’ roll”) recently spent some time together in the US, where he and March Violets’ bassist William Faith now live. There’s even talk of new material.

The March Violets’ present line-up is, they estimate, their 15th since the band’s formation in Leeds in 1981. Garland fondly remembers sending off a demo tape to BBC Radio 1 taste maker John Peel “with a pot of African violets”, adding: “If it wasn’t for John Peel, the history of interesting and independent music in the UK would be non-existent, really. You can’t underestimate him. He did what he wanted and it changed music forever.”

Their EP Grooving in Green, released on the Sisters of Mercy’s label, was an indie hit and was followed by Crow Baby and Snake Dance, after which Garland quit and Cleo Murray took over as frontwoman for the indie club staple Walk Into the Sun. Denbigh left in 1985 and the band dallied with a poppier sound before finally imploding in 1987.

Garland says of her departure: “It was a really hard decision because I loved being in the Violets but I knew I needed to do something else.” For a while she worked as an English teacher in Sudan before returning to the UK and founding a successful career as a poet, burlesque performer and novelist.

She rejoined The March Violets for a “packed to the walls” gig at Leeds Beckett University in 2007 ​​​​​​. “It was chaotic, because March Violets wouldn’t be the same without the chaos, but we had a whale of a time,” she says. “Basically people who came made it clear that this was not going to be a one-off gig, so we went ‘Oh all right then’, and wrote more stuff and started to release it independently and with Kickstarters.

“That all went very well until 2009 when I had throat cancer. In 2010 I was one of the very lucky people who got the all-clear. Again that was another wake-up. I worked really hard on getting my voice back and in 2010 we started giging and performing again. We stopped in 2015 because Si had his stroke and we honestly thought that was it. We all talked about it and there was the idea of well, we could slink away, but we’ve never been slinkers.

“While Tom and I are still standing, and now we’re working with William, who was our bassist on our last tour, he’s a superb bassist and such an all-round gentleman, he was in Faith and The Muse and other Chicago-based bands, we thought let’s do it as a trinity. Si can’t really leave the house so we can’t tour with him and we really feel for him and full credit to everything he’s done, but (as a band) we thought we can either just fade away or have a farewell party, and there you are.

“We’ve had 14 iterations along the way, this is now the 15th, so we’re going to go out partying with some Violet music.”

The March Violets play at The Old Woollen, Farsley, Leeds on Thursday June 1. https://oldwoollen.co.uk/event/4896854/623593991/the-march-violets