The March Violets: 'Every time we write a new song and every time we go on stage it is a vote for life'

Garland, now an acclaimed performance poet and novelist as well as the band’s singer, is full of praise for Jungle Records for the high quality packaging of the reissues, which also included a singles compilation, Play Loud, Play Purple. “Jungle really did us beautifully proud, and I guess that’s what sparked us off again – the idea of why don’t we just do this thing? We’ve got so much creativity buzzing around in the ether,” she tells The Yorkshire Post in a joint transatlantic video call with Ashton, now based in the US state of Georgia, and Thorpe, in Manchester.

Guitarist Ashton recalls he was determined that a fraught period for The March Violets around the release of crowdfunded album in 2015 would “not be the end” of the group. “It felt like the wrong way to go,” he says.

“The plan originally was just to make sure that the legacy got out there and that people got to hear a lot of stuff that they probably hadn’t heard (before), fill in a few blanks and get all the back catalogue into nicely packaged artefacts that people would like to carry around, look at and, of course, listen to,” he adds. “That got received so well and we just thought, life is short. There was lots of material left lying around from Made Glorious (their 2013 album) that never got used and we thought, hey, now’s the time.”

With the revival of interest in gothic rock through a number of books and festivals such as Tomorrow’s Ghosts in Whitby, now seems an apposite time for the group – who reformed in 2007 after a 20-year absence – to “let people know what might have been”, Ashton feels. “And do it with a bang rather than a whimper,” Garlands adds, mindful that there have been “various health issues” they’ve had to confront, not least her own recovery from throat cancer and the retirement of Simon Denbigh, the band’s original songwriting mainstay, following a serious stroke.

“Every time we write a new song and every time we go on stage it is a vote for life,” she says. “This is why we’re doing this. It’s about being positive.”

Although not an “obviously” political band, Ashton believes that they still have a message of positivity that’s worth sharing. “We did the same back in the day with Thatcher and all that nonsense, and it’s a continuation of that,” he says.

“We’re not an overtly political band but just doing your teeth is political, walking outside the front door and being different is political,” agrees Garland. “Our music has always reflected the times that we live in. I know people are saying the times are too terrible to write a poem or write a song but we all really believe that one of the most important things you can do as a response to chaos and dark times is to create something.”

The band had written and recorded Crocodile Promises with US musician William Faith last year, but after Faith was forced to pull out of The March Violets due to other musical commitments, Mat Thorpe of Manchester band Isolation Division hastily re-recorded his bass parts and will now take his place onstage. “I played bass for the Violets when they reformed in 2007, and I’m a good friend of Rosie’s so I’ve been behind the scenes helping them, supporting whenever I can,” he says. “Some of the old demo tapes that Rosie had that went out on Jungle, I digitised them for them and then last year I was doing front of house sound for them with William on that tour. Then William left and lots of things just fell into place for me. In 2007 I had a full-time job, there’s no way that I could’ve been in the band permanently; I’m not in that situation now, so it was an ideal time for me to say yeah, I can step up and help.”

“It’s a match made in heaven,” says Garland, smiling.

Back during Garland’s first stint in The March Violets between 1981 and 1984, the band only cut a series of singles and EPs. It seems she is relishing finally being able to get her teeth into writing something more substantial in a group setting. She talks of “a kind of alchemy” that happened that “really felt like the antithesis of fragmentation” that they experienced when they worked on Made Glorious remotely in 2013.

“For me, it was really satisfying to finally get all the musical ideas that I had been wishing for in the past, which had been a struggle,” says Ashton of the new record. “We prepped, (Rosie) had been working on lyrics and I’d been sending rough ideas, but the real work didn’t get done until we were all together, which included William as well because he was playing bass at the time. With three people in the room, we got all the guitars, bass parts and the most important thing was to get all those vocals​​​​​​​ down and recorded properly. Rosie was writing lyrics while she was here​​​​​​. She’d go for a walk in the woods for a couple of hours and ​​​​​​​it was then, oh, she found another armadillo skull.”

“It satisfied my skull fetish,” says Garland.

The song Mortality was supposed to be the title track on an album that was aborted in 2015 – it proved to be “the first layer of building brick” for Crocodile Promises. Another track, Virgin Sheep, was first demo-ed in 1982 but had been forgotten about until Garland stumbled across a cassette tape at home 40 years later. “Through the magic of Mat, he managed to digitise a couple of tracks that had been lost – Virgin Sheep was one of them and The Palace of Infinite Darkness was another,” Garland recalls. “None of us had heard it since 1982. Once I heard it, I thought, oh yes. Not every song we write ever gets recorded but I thought, this has got legs.”

Garland says she was not “consciously sitting down with a theme” in her mind while writing the rest of the album, nevertheless current events inevitably influenced some of her lyrics. “I don’t live in a vacuum, so things are bound to seep in, there was stuff on my mind,” she explains. “For example, the whole idea of Crocodile Promises are promises that might look really shiny and glittery on the surface but they’re dangerous and you can’t trust them. That idea of things that aren’t what they seem and things that might look attractive on the surface, but just scrape the surface a bit and you get into what’s really going on, that was part of the theme behind the lyrics, and that kind of runs through quite a lot of the lyrics that are in the album.”

Although Crocodile Promises is only just about to come out, the trio seem keen to start work on a follow-up. Ashton hopes that between two US tours that they have planned for later in the year they can make use of his studio in Athens, Georgia. “We’ll probably bang down some rough ideas while everyone is together,” he says. “If we can get it 60 per cent done before next year then we can use those quiet months in January and February to finish it. It’s much better to release two short, sharp, brilliant albums than one long opus,” he says.

Thorpe sounds keen to contribute to the songwriting too. “I’ve only just joined this band and I’m hoping there’s a lot more life in it yet,” he says. “I’ve been a musician since I was 14, so that’s 40 years, and I’ve never had this level of playing and involvement, I’ve never been so happy onstage with other people. Without gushing too much, it’s been a revelation to play with these two, so I’m hoping there are a lot more things to come with this band.”

“Well, we’re not planning on going anywhere at our stage,” Garland says. “Life is really short, none of us know what’s around the corner, so whatever you’re going to do, just do it now.”

Crocodile Promises is out on Metropolis Records on Friday July 19. The March Violets play at the Brudenell Social Club, Leeds that same night.