biography

Jacqui Blake and Carrie Askew met as teenagers at high school in Plumstead where they became best friends and partners in crime. In the early nineties they started writing ‘Last Exit’ the first fanzine for the Manic Street Preachers and later appeared in the video for ‘Little Baby Nothing’ alongside porn star Traci Lords. While still in their teens they formed Shampoo (according to their self-propelled urban legend the name derived from the schoolyard nickname ‘the shampoo girls’ due to their repeated retort that they were ‘washing their hair’ whenever the boys in school would ask them out!) Their first single ‘Blisters and Bruises’ with the b-sides ‘Paydirt’ and ‘I love Little Pussy’ was released by Icerink records on 7′ pink vinyl in 1993. This and their following single ‘Bouffant Headbutt’ recieved favourable reviews in the music press, such as the NME and Melody Maker but was largely ignored by the general public. Whilst their first two singles were all-out girl-punk racket the following year saw the release of ‘Trouble’ (to this day the only Shampoo song most people can remember) and the album ‘We Are Shampoo’ which displayed a much more radio friendly sound. ‘Trouble’ crashed up the charts and landed the girls on Top Of The Pops and the cover of Smash Hits. For the remainder of 1994 the Shampoo flag flew high as their infectious pop-with-attitude found fans in both the mainstream and alternative music scenes. The band famously became very sucsessful in Japan - possibly due to sharing a love of all things Hello Kitty.

However, by the time they released their next album ‘Girl Power’ in 1995 they were allready virtually forgotten in Britain and when the Spice Girls appropriated the phrase to great effect its origins went sadly un-noted. Interestingly though it is for this reason that despite using the words ‘girl power’ constntly in interviews and on merchandise the Spice Girls were never able to have an album with this title.

Whilst their homelands were ignoring them Shampoo were still doing well in Asia and to the astonishment of those who’d never heard of them made it into 1995’s ‘richest women in Britain’ list. The third Shampoo album ‘Absolute Shampoo’ was released soley on the internet in 2000 and the duo disbanded shortly afterwards.

Shampoo combined a poppy girlishness and a love of all things plastic, kitch, and pink (the album artwork for ‘We Are Shampoo’ featured a collage of barbie dolls and sweetie wrappers) with a punk sensibility. They often cited their main influences as being the Sex Pistols, Gary Numan and the Beastie Boys whilst also claiming to be huge fans of East 17 and Take That! They approached interviews with a studied insolence and tended to finish each others sentances claiming that they ‘they always think the same thing as each other all the time.’ Playing on an image that was part Johnny Rotten, part stubborn lolita infantilism, part lipstick lesbian and part razor sharp wit the girl’s tended to confuse both journalists and record-buyers as to who exactly their target audience was. Whilst this may have prevented an ongoing mainstream sucsess this was arguably also their greatest strength in an industry increasingly dominated by one dimentional artists.