Romeo’s Daughter – A Rock N Roll Journey That Started with Mutt Lange, & Freddy Krueger, is Still Going Strong

When British rock band Romeo’s Daughter debuted in 1988, they did so with a bang. Their self-titled debut album featured production from legends Mutt Lange, and John Parr, and one of the songs, “Heaven in the Back Seat,” was also on the soundtrack to A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child.

Of course, rock n roll is never a road without speed bumps. Romeo’s Daughter would breakup in the ‘90s, but reform in 2009 after what they thought would be a one-off performance at the Firefest festival.

Their current lineup includes original members Leigh Matty (vocals), and Craig Joiner (guitar, photo: far left), who are joined by Andy Wells (drums), and Stephen Drennan (bass), and they have a new album, titled Slipstream, due out August 31st, which will be followed by a fall tour.

Leigh explains what keeps the band going after all these years, saying, “We all have very busy lives, we have jobs, we have families, we have lots of things going on, but we still get drawn back to it because it’s a very important part of us. If you split me open I’d be one half Leigh, and the other half I’d be Romeo’s Daughter. For me, personally, it’s a very important part of who I am.”

With Slipstream due out at the end of the month, and a fall tour on the horizon, I caught up with both Leigh Matty, and Craig Joiner to find out more about the band’s history – including what it was like working with Mutt Lange, and John Parr – the realizations they had when they came back to a radically changed music industry in 2009, and the time they had to get their tour bus out of a lake.

Your debut album was produced by Mutt Lange, and John Parr. Looking back, do you feel that as young artists you fully realized the magnitude of working with those two on your first album? 

Leigh: No, we had no idea. We had absolutely no idea.

What’s it, youth is just so wasted on the young, isn’t it?

Hindsight is such a bitch because you have no idea what you’re doing, but maybe it’s a good thing, because if we’d have known, maybe it would’ve been daunting for us.

I mean, Mutt was this kind of god-like character. He was responsible for so many incredible albums, but he was the ex-husband of our manager, which is how he heard us in the first place. She was this character named Olga, I’m assuming she’s still around, and I think she must have gone to him a couple of times, and he didn’t show any interest. He was so busy working with The Cars, AC/DC …

Craig: I think he had just finished Hysteria (for Def Leppard), and he was also working on his first wife’s album, Stevie Lange. The whole time we were working, Stevie’s album was coming in and out. There was also quite a lot of work with Billy Ocean.

Leigh: So he didn’t really have very much time for us, but then he heard one of our songs, I think it was “Stay With Me Tonight,” and he just went OK, let me meet them. Then we met him, and we all really got on incredibly well, and for some reason he said he would work with us on this album. {laughs}

Craig: Yeah, how strange. {laughs}

Especially considering your manager was his ex-wife, not his current wife! 

Leigh: They still had a pretty good relationship, but he didn’t have to do it. Mutt is not the kind of guy that does anything that he doesn’t want to do, especially then.

Then John was this person who had always wanted to work with Mutt.

Craig: John did our very first demos.

He’d done “St. Elmo’s Fire,” he was riding high, and he got a new album out, and he knew Olga, and Olga being Olga got him to produce our first demos.

I think we had four songs, and we went to the Workhouse Studio on Old Kent Road. We were working there, and John was an absolute alarm bell, he was an absolute wake up call. He was so full on. I think it was such a huge punch in the face, really. He was fantastic. He knew so much about songwriting, about how you work in the studio. We didn’t know anything.

He was just such a force of nature when he came in.

It was those demos that Olga took to Mutt. He heard them, and we went from there.

I’ve heard Mutt can be pretty intense in the studio, so what was a studio session like with Mutt Lange for a young Romeo’s Daughter? 

Leigh: I mean, I remember it as being pretty easy. I don’t know about you, Craig.

Craig: Me, too.

Leigh: He just brought the best out in us. He really liked working with Craig. He thought Craig was really talented. I think he quite liked working with me. It was quite easy, and I don’t remember any huge moments where he threw his toys on the ground.

We recorded a lot in his home. He had this incredible house in the UK when he used to live there, and we would go down there for like a week on end. He had loads of bedrooms, and we would just kind of settle in, and we would work for a week, and then we would go back to Battery Studios, which was the studio where Jive Records was, which was our record label. So we were in-between his home, and Battery Studios, which was fantastic.

Craig: I remember we went down (to his home) for the first time, and we were gonna stay I think it was two, or three days, and we ended up staying two weeks. We only had the clothes we were in, and he really liked that because he thought it was rock n roll. He was quite happy with that. We didn’t wash any of our clothes, or anything like that, it was horrible. {laughs}

The thing with Mutt was, he made things really easy to understand. When you’re in the studio sometimes, and you’ve got a whole load of egos flying around, and different opinions flying around, he was fantastic at translating information from himself to us. We just seemed to understand it. Maybe it’s because we were green, and we didn’t argue the point that much.

Leigh: We were like sponges.

Craig: He was Mutt Lange, and what are you gonna do, you can’t argue. The last gig we did was in a pub in St. Albans, in Hertfordshire, and the next time we’re in a studio with Mutt Lange, one of the best producers, if not THE best producer, in the world. He’s worked with all these fantastic names, and we’re just sitting there trying to take it all in.

I don’t know about you, Leigh, but he never made you feel intimidated, did he?

Leigh: Oh not at all. I just think he brought the best out in all of us, which enabled us to go full with it. He taught us so much, really.

It sounds like it was one part album, one part learning experience. 

Leigh: It was. Very much so.

We were also doing something that was quite unusual, because there no female-fronted bands like us in the UK, so we had quite an individual sound. Because of how I sing, how Craig writes, how he plays, that just is there naturally, but (Mutt) was able to bring all those really interesting little bits out of us, and made such a huge impression on us, that we’ve kept doing that through the years.

The song “Heaven in the Back Seat” was on that album, and also on the soundtrack to A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child. Did you manage to score any cool Freddy memorabilia from that time? 

Leigh: No. We had great posters, though, from the time. I was in Kerrang, and Raw, and did these great centerfold shots with Freddy’s hat on, and a funny red jumper, but we never met him.

If we’d been in the States when it came out it probably would’ve been different, but we were doing everything from the UK, so we were way behind then.

OK, so you don’t have a lot from that connection, but staying on the topic of of memorabilia, do you have any favorite mementos, or photos from that initial era of Romeo’s Daughter? 

Craig: Oh loads. Loads of stuff. I have loads of old vinyl.

You remember the really small CDs, when they came out? We had a load sent over from Japan, and it was the oddest thing in the world seeing, first of all seeing all your lyrics translated from English to Japanese, and back to English again.

Leigh: Incorrectly, a lot of them. {laughs}

What did “Heaven in the Back Seat” turn into??? 

Leigh: There was some weird thing about fingers on my … I can vaguely remember it. It was very bizarre. It was like when somebody just talks into a translator. It was very odd, but it was fascinating seeing the different albums from abroad that were coming over.

Craig: We’ve still got a lot of vinyl, and lots of photographs from old photoshoots that we did. Our very first photoshoot that we did with John Parr, we’ve got that, and that was at the Old Kent Road Studios.

The only thing we didn’t have anything of, which I really regret to this day, is we didn’t have one photograph with us and Mutt. Not a one.

He’s very famous for not being photographed. 

Craig: He certainly is.

Leigh: Now you just have your phone and you take a quick picture. Then you’d have to take a camera with you everywhere. We just didn’t do that.

Craig: Well, we didn’t have cameras, did we?

Leigh: We couldn’t afford the camera. {laughs}

Craig: The first time we got a camera was when we went to America. We went to America for the first time, and I remember buying a camera because I thought we’ve got to mark this time in our lives in some way, shape, or form.

Leigh: I’ll tell you what was great, when we went to L.A., we went on this trip, it was a radio promo trip, we went to Cleveland, we went to New York, it was really exciting. At the time there were just three of us in the band, and Craig and I were staying just off Sunset in L.A., and you know the big Tower Records that was on Sunset, we went in there and there was a big cutout of … what was the cutout off?

Craig: Probably you. {laughs}

Leigh: Maybe me. I don’t know. We were just like WOW! We just couldn’t get our heads around that. It seemed like we were on the cusp on such great things.

You have to find that! It’s gotta be on eBay! 

Leigh: I don’t know where it is. I’m surprised we didn’t nick it, and walk out with it under our arms. {laughs}

Craig: I’ll tell you what I do have … when we first went into the studio with Mutt at his house they were bringing back all the mixes of the 12-inch versions of “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” and all those Def Leppard singles, and bits and pieces. They were obviously checking what they sounded like, and he had a whole load of them in a bin. I said oh what are they? Of course they were acetates, so they were all made of bakelite, and they were just in these cream, nondescript cases, and I said oh, can I have a listen to them? So I took a few home, and had a listen. I’ve still got a couple of them kickin’ around.

That’s awesome! Fast-forwarding a few decades, after a second album, Delectable, you broke up in the mid ‘90s, reforming again in 2009. The music industry had become a wildly different place by then. What would you say required the greatest learning curve when you came back? 

Leigh: Well the greatest thing, I think, for us, was that we actually didn’t need anybody to do anything other than ourselves.

When you’re part of a big machine, as we were with our first album, everything gets done for you. The music side of it, obviously, you’ve got to do, but everything else is kind of taken care of, and not always that well, to be absolutely honest. Also, people spend a hell of a lot of money on your account. We didn’t realize what all of this was costing us. When we went off to L.A. to do “I Cry Myself to Sleep at Night,” that video cost us £120,000.

That’s a lot of money. 

Leigh: That’s a lot of money. Then you don’t realize your bill is getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and bigger.

So I think in 2009 … we realized it’s a cottage industry, and we had to learn to do everything ourselves.

Obviously when you have a big company behind you, you have a far bigger chance of becoming very successful, so we had to narrow our expectations, but that was fine, because we really love Romeo’s Daughter.

Craig and I met in 1984, and we’ve been through a lot of life together, as music partners, and as very good friends. The other members of the band, Andy, the drummer, has been with us for a very long time, and Juliet, our manager, used to work at Jive Records, that’s how we met her. She left Jive, and then she very foolishly said she would become our manager. Bless her. {laughs} She’s been so fantastic.

We’ve just kind of learned as we’ve gone along.

Now you have a new album, Slipstream, on the way. Tell everyone about it. 

Leigh: It’s coming out at the end of August. The last one we released was in 2015. That was called Spin, so it’s been eight years. It takes us a hell of a long time to get round to them, but it’s because we’re very careful of what we put out.

In a way, we’re always being judged from our first album, which is quite interesting, but that’s fine. We’ve obviously matured, and whatever we do it always sounds very much like us, because I’m the singer, and Craig is the songwriter, and the guitarist. It will always sound like Romeo’s Daughter. Even if we did a completely different genre it would sound like Romeo’s Daughter.

What do you want to have define this era of the band? 

Leigh: I think that with us it’s very much a case of our relationship with the people who love, and follow us, and the effect that our music has on them. I think that is a really wonderful relationship to have with your fans.

People have gotten married to our songs. Lots of times they mail us, and say we walked down the aisle to this song. We get messages, and emails saying how our music has affected their lives, and it’s helped them through bad times. Just really really lovely stuff.

I think there’s no point in doing this if you don’t make an impression, or leave a mark. There’s no point. Life is too short, we’re too busy. It’s like going to see a film that doesn’t leave any impression on you, or reading a book that doesn’t leave any impression on you. We want to leave our mark.

You’re going to hit the road for a tour this fall, but you used to tour before GPS existed. Did you ever have a moment, back in the day, when you got hopelessly lost on the road? 

Leigh: All the time.

Craig: I can think of the classic, we got hopelessly lost, and our tour manager at the time, a fella called, I don’t know if he was born with this name, but he was called Ratty, he lost his way, and he drove the bus into a lake.

Leigh: Thank goodness we weren’t in the van at the time.

So often you would park in city centers, and you wouldn’t have a clue where you were.

Do you remember when our van was trashed? It was a nightmare.

It was a miracle we got to any gig.

It was a miracle they could dry out the bus! 

Both: {laughs}

Finally, I have to ask, has anyone from the band ever experienced Heaven in the back seat while you were on tour? 

Both: {laughs}

Leigh: Ratty did! That’s why he drove into the lake! He was having Heaven in the front seat.

Craig: You have to understand, it was a very very strange thing to be in a band with a female singer, you really … {laughs}

Leigh: It was all my fault they didn’t pull. That’s what he’s trying to say.

Craig: {laughs} 

For more Romeo’s Daughter, check out romeosdaughter.co.uk.