Shampoo: Complete Shampoo
3CD/1DVD BOX SET
If there was ever a release that felt both criminally overdue and like it has come at exactly the perfect time, then this is it. The 90s are in again, and everyone from Charli XCX to Miley Cyrus has been tripping over themselves to pay tribute to Shampoo in recent months.
This isn’t one of those flimsy ‘best of’ releases comprising two songs you like and twenty-five terrible trance remixes of one you don’t remember. This is a lavish box set compilation of the band’s entire back catalogue, including previously unreleased and hard-to-find gems. Most notable, perhaps, is the first physical outing for their third album, Absolute Shampoo. Released online in 2000, it was a digital launch significantly before mp3s became a mainstream way to listen to music. Subsequently, it became almost-lost media, passed around between fans and seemingly doomed to never see the light of day in an official capacity again. It’s wonderful to find it included here and restored to its full glory.
Other treats include a DVD of promo videos, adverts, and unedited behind-the-scenes footage. The official music videos are another long-overdue and exciting prospect, as anyone who wished to view them until now has been relegated to ripped-from-VHS resolution with dubious audio on YouTube. As one waggish commenter wrote below an upload of Viva La Megababes: “my left ear likes this song.”
In the years since their unannounced, early naughties disbandment, Shampoo’s legacy has been left in the hands of others, somewhat abandoned and scattered to the wind. It’s fantastic, then, to see their blistering smash and grab through the late-90s pop landscape stylishly repackaged in this way for 2024, finally getting some love and the treatment it deserves. For any fan of the band, this is an unequivocal must-have, and for everyone else – what better way to become one?
This release marks, after twenty-odd years, not only the return of much of their music to the public domain, but also of Jacqui and Carrie themselves. Read on for a deep dive into the contents of Complete Shampoo, along with an exclusive and long-awaited interview with the band!
Culture, alienation, boredom, and despair.
Disc 1 (B-sides and pre-album releases)
More than most bands of their generation, Shampoo were born out of the Pritt-Stick and photocopy fanzine culture of the early 90s. The pre-internet version of social media where word of mouth spread scrawled across the backs of envelopes and in the tiny pages of ‘friendship books’ making their slow journey around the world. They had the DIY aesthetic and ‘f*ck you’ spirit of snot-nosed punks while being equally inspired by the glamorous, shiny pages of teen magazines. They were, in short, one of us.
Jacqui and Carrie made their first marks on the music scene producing a Manic Street Preachers fanzine named Last Exit and later appearing as prototype versions of their future selves in the band’s video for Little Baby Nothing. With lyrics like “If I’m starving, you can feed me lollipops,” this moment reads as more than a passing cameo in an indie band’s promo clip; it’s a prophetic dark mirror to the kinder-whor* aesthetic they would soon become synonymous with. I have often wondered what strange, disturbing, and wonderful concoction a version of the track with Shampoo singing Traci Lords’ parts would have been – so wrong it could have been right. Even as early as this first foray into notoriety, it becomes tempting to dissect the appropriateness of both their appearance in the video and their image overall. One thing is clear, though: these two petulant Plumstead girls approached everything they did with an immutable independence and agency of their own. I can only imagine the agony of trying to corral them into any outfit, any venue, or any situation they didn’t want to be a part of.
Their debut, standalone singles Bouffant Headbutt and Blisters and Bruises (captured here on Disc 1 of the box set) crackle with a lo-fi, snarling menace. Bouffant Headbutt, in particular, is a masterpiece of teenage vitriol culminating in the spat-out threat, “when we get you outside, YOU’RE f*ckING DEAD.” You don’t want to mess with these girls. B-sides Paydirt and Excellent follow in a similar vein to Blisters and Bruises, an edgy, discomfiting tone of sad*stic pleasure – they will f*ck you up, and you will like it. Monster sees the girls drawling languidly over a Lust For Life riff about how old and boring everyone else around them is, while I Love Little puss* repurposes a nursery rhyme about a feline friend into something more open to interpretation. This fabulous clutch of gritty little songs is the closest they ever came to the Riot Grrrl bands that surely influenced them, but with a cheeky wit of their own already in evidence.
Straight out of the gate, and barely out of high school, Shampoo embodied the boredom of British adolescence in a way that was both familiar and new. A way that was very specifically female. A classless anarchy that was both relatable and untouchable. They might start a riot, but only if they could be bothered. Jacqui and Carrie were the kind of girls you were, the kind of girls you wanted to be, the kind of girls you wanted to be friends with. Or, in my case, the kind of girls you were in awe of but also rather afraid of. Mixing together indie, street, and vintage fashions into their own iconic look, they were style queens too. I, personally, owe Shampoo a solid decade of dressing in Barbie vest tops, Lolita sunglasses, and those sweetie necklaces that you had to remind yourself not to actually eat (because you had been wearing the same one for at least the last year). In some of their more memorable sartorial outings to come, Carrie would sport a t-shirt with baby-doll faces covering each boob, while Jacqui would champion a top with the word TART emblazoned across it in tiny diamantés. Shampoo had arrived.
Never mind the bouffant, here comes Shampoo.
Disc 2 (We Are Shampoo)
Citing influences from Gary Numan to Take That, Shampoo bridged the gap between indie-cool and bubblegum pop. I had never heard an artist positively name-check the Sex Pistols and East 17 in the same sentence before, and in many ways, they were my gateway drug from the respectable cul-de-sac of introspective bedroom poets to the dazzling plasticity of manufactured sh*t-pop. It’s not that I blame them for the fact I ended up buying the Steps album a few years later, but I do a bit.
Their debut album, We Are Shampoo, ratchets up the pop factor significantly from the earlier singles, with slicker production, more electronica, and wall-to-wall pop hooks. There’s a myth about Shampoo, perpetuated even by themselves, that they can’t sing and are musically untalented. That they somehow tumbled into fame through sheer luck and a good wardrobe. There’s a grain of truth in it – they will never be the next Adele – but for all the shouting and talk-singing in their songs, there is also a core understanding of what makes a great pop chorus and how to write a memorable lyric. There is a sweetness to the melodies, especially from here on out, that stops it from being one big headache.
Even if you weren’t really paying attention at the time, Trouble is the one song you will have found it hard to avoid. A passive-aggressive, sardonic tale of missing the last bus home and the parental wrath it will incur. Like all great earworm pop songs, Trouble refuses to die. Covered a couple of years later by Carter USM as a B-side to their single Young Offender’s Mum, it has since popped up on everything from the soundtrack to The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, the St. Trinian’s movie, and most recently, of all things, Strictly Come Dancing. If you are ever going to find a Shampoo song in a karaoke bar, it will be this one.
While Trouble was the big breakout single, and you may also recognise Delicious from the recent Miley Cyrus perfume ad, We Are Shampoo is packed with equally punchy pop bangers. Viva La Megababes and Shampoo You execute expert self-mythologising, while the verbal spars of Skinny White Thing, Saddo, and Dirty Old Love Song leave no target uninjured, the latter notably taking a pop at the bland clichés of contemporary MOR balladeers like Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston. Shiny Black Taxi Cab sets a Trouble-esque scene of ‘throwing up your kebab’ during a late-night ride home. B-sides from the era collected here, such as School is Boring, further expand on the general theme of insouciance and teenage delinquency. Kinky Ken finds the girls gossiping, pre-Aqua, about Kinky Ken and Bondage Barbie, who run a swingers hook-up joint on the English coast. “We’re itchy, we’re bitchy, we’re getting kind of mad!” they shriek on Girls ‘Round Here, while We Don’t Care contains the, frankly hysterical, line: “You’re so old, you’re barely alive. You’re so old, you must be twenty-five.”
My own personal standout from the album and one of the most perfect examples of the concealed cleverness of Shampoo is Game Boy. An apparently straightforward story of a kid who can’t get off his Nintendo, which on closer inspection reveals something altogether less prosaic. “Life could be so sweet if you weren’t hanging out on the street. Time goes so slow, ’till you get a trick and then off you go-go. You don’t get sick of it all. You’re still on the game, boy.” Like a pop version of Eats, Shoots and Leaves; sometimes one comma can make all the difference.
Last but not least, the album includes a rather bonkers cover of East 17’s House of Love, rap and all.
Aphrodite, Venus. Nothing could come between us.
It feels a little icky now, as an adult, to be discussing the innuendo that often accompanied these very young girls, but it is an inescapable part of the technicolour explosion that surrounded their debut album. And for many other young girls, it was something lacking in pop-culture iconography of the time. You couldn’t shake a stick in the mid-90s without hitting five eyeliner-wearing boys draped across each other, but there was a distinct lack of representation for gay women in British pop. Never mind anything that felt in any way young or exciting. Despite making it clear they were just the best of friends, there was an irresistible frisson of flirtation surrounding Shampoo. Not only with each other, but with imagery that felt queer-coded. Or at the very least was reminiscent of the kind of no-boys-allowed, incestuously all-consuming friendships rarely seen outside of an Enid Blyton boarding school. A two-headed hydra that finished each other’s sentences, living in an almost amniotic bubble of Shampooness. Whilst this was never exploited in as transparently cynical a way as fellow teenage troublemakers Tatu would the following decade, they had their moments. From the early B-side ‘I Love Little puss*’ to Jacqui’s fabulously glam-butch suits, it’s hard to believe that it wasn’t at least a little knowing. But like so much of what makes Shampoo great, the combination of genuine naivety, faux-innocence, and biting wit is what makes it work.
Girl Power (we glower)
Disc 2 (Girl Power)
The revisions section of the Shampoo Wikipedia entry became a war zone in the early 00s as fans of the band, the Spice Girls, and Helen Love all duked it out for ownership of the now iconic words. For what it’s worth, Geri Halliwell has, in recent years, admitted she nicked the idea from the ‘Poo. (The jury is still out on Helen Love.)
Shampoo’s vision of Girl Power was rather different from, and significantly more lawless than, the bubbly, euphoric, and frenetic silliness of the Spice Girls. One where they want to play with knives and smash your place up “just for fun.” Yet where the effervescence of Spiceworld was, we now know, masking neuroses and anxieties and all of the classic kinds of in-fighting and bitchery one might expect from a group of young women living and working together, Jacqui and Carrie remain best friends three decades later. They claim to have never fallen out once. Despite the bad behaviour, the vodka blackouts, and the hotel trashings (or perhaps because of it), they seem to have manifested a much more genuine version of female solidarity. Skipping hand in hand, like the Grady twins, through the destruction in their wake.
The album follows a similar musical style to We Are Shampoo and, along with the title song, rattles through single-worthy corkers like War Paint (“Perfect makeup, we don’t care. We’ve got tangles in our hair”), You Love Us, and I’m Gonna Scream. Don’t Call Me Babe takes its tagline from, and was featured in, the 1996 Pamela Anderson movie Barb Wire. Swapping out East 17 for The Waitresses, there is an enjoyable cover of I Know What Boys Like, while Gary Numan’s Cars and Top Of The Pops by Scottish punk band The Rezillos also pop up, newly Shampooified, in the B-sides collected here.
For me, the standout track from the album is Bareknuckle Girl. A spiky little song that, like its protagonist, hooks with its left and jabs with its right. A harsh admonishment of someone even more f*ckless than themselves, it opens with one of my all-time favourite Shampoo lyrics: “Suicide bomber all dressed up like Madonna. And they say she’s really cute, but inverted commas.” Ouch.
You just think we’re bubblegum.
Also tucked away on Girl Power is another of my favourite tracks, We Play Dumb. “Are we real or are we fake?” they ask. “You don’t understand. We play dumb.” The studied sulky attitude and monosyllabic answers, the giggling at seemingly idiotic in-jokes, and declarations that everything is BORING. Answering every question with “dunno.” It all paints a picture to the casual observer of two girls with not much going on in their heads apart from sweets and second-hand Barbies. And it’s not that they were not those girls, but it’s not all they were either. They were also whip-smart lyricists revelling in the performance of stupidity. How much of this artifice was planned and how much it simply evolved, who knows, but in the end, it became one of the most enjoyable and successful facets of the band for me.
Can’t go out. Can’t be bothered staying in.
Disc 3 (Absolute Shampoo)
Absolute Shampoo is a considerably mellower record than its predecessors. It has a laid-back groove that at points even hints towards a dash of maturity. Which is not to say that it isn’t also daft and irreverent at the same time. Terrorist TV mulls over the unending supply of daytime chat shows, while Take a Break lampoons the garish headlines in women’s magazines. First Class and Jet Lag sneak in to remind us they are big world-touring pop stars now, albeit ones who really need a bit of a lie down soon. Shampoo’s Cupboard is an absolute delight, a nostalgic trawl through the childhood memories of ‘the young Shampoo girls’ encompassing everything from Jimmy Hill to white dog poo.
Star of the Show is a hilarious, non-stop ragging of some poor middle-aged sap who dared to cross their paths. But this time there is no yelling; it’s all delivered with a sweet, bouncy, butter-wouldn’t-melt smirk. Somehow it’s just as vicious. “There’s no beef in your burger bun, as milkshakes go you’re a triple thick one. Flat co*ke, your bubbles all gone. Cherry pie, you’re not a hot one.” Love Hate Baby is the cuckoo in the nest, being the only track that has a much darker edge to it, and is surprisingly most reminiscent of the early B-sides like Excellent and Paydirt.
The album as a whole, however, has the lazy feeling of a Sunday afternoon at your nan’s house, flicking through daytime TV and sipping milky tea. Like the hangover after the first two records had finally landed. Despite the shift in tone, both musically and to a lesser degree lyrically, it still feels thoroughly Shampoo.
We’ve got fifteen minutes before we go POW!
Shampoo have become sort of mythical, Greta Garbo figures to fans over the years. Not only have they avoided the usual retro-media circuit, but in a period where even non-famous people have a ‘presence,’ they became completely invisible. They maintain this wasn’t intentional, and perhaps that’s true. Perhaps, as children of the Speak & Spell generation, they are just natural Luddites who couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of it all. But either way, it meant they remained, for the general public, suspended in a perfect time capsule of teenagehood. Forever sneering in their sunglasses after dark, trapped in amber somewhere around 1997. I was thrilled to hear that this kind of release was finally happening, but part of me wondered if it might puncture the illusion. Would this be the beginning of them turning up on TV shows hosted by Vernon Kay to offer soundbites on comedy one-hit wonders? And if it was, would that be such a bad thing really? For a band who once turned an appearance on the Zig and Zag show into something weirdly flirtatious, anything is possible.
Shampoo have left a visible trail of influence behind them, yet were never quite given the credit they deserved. Mistakenly seen as more throwaway than they were, the band was often disregarded in much the same way that pissed-off teenage girls are in so many areas of life. A string of suspiciously similar acts followed in their wake, from Donna Air’s almost plagiaristic outing with Crush to the bratty schtick of Daphne and Celeste’s Ooh Stick You. Even in more recent years, it’s hard to listen to Icona Pop’s I Love It without hearing an echo of Jacqui and Carrie in the chorus. Ultimately, they deserve to be recognised. To be discovered by new audiences and, if they want it, to be visible again. We all need more Shampoo in our lives.
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You say talk, we say run. Interviews are so much fun.
With multiple songs in their back catalog mocking the idiocy and futility of tabloid journalism and the interview process in general (most notably one that opens with the words ‘Shut your mouth, you stupid cow’), it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I approached the task at hand. Would my questions be deemed too BOOOORING? Would I offend them to the point of being told to ‘fack off’? Or… even worse… would they have gotten all old and boring and no longer be any fun themselves??
Thankfully, none of these things came to be, and as you can read below, I escaped in one piece, with the definite feeling that I had very much just interviewed SHAMPOO.
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LTW: How does it feel to be back? And are you back to stay?
Shampoo: It feels really strange doing interviews again … it’s been a while! But we love that we are spending more time together.
LTW: Is the story true that the band name originated from you dismissing boys with the excuse that you were ‘busy washing your hair’?
S: It was all a lie, we never washed our hair!
LTW: My first encounter with Shampoo was your brief but brilliant appearance in the video for Little baby Nothing. What was it like filming that and were you already hatching plans for your own by that point?
S: We had a great time filming the Little Baby Nothing video. We got paid £70 each which we spent on clothes and sweets. At that point we were constantly being told that we should be in a band and that we looked like we were in a band. We had started to write a couple of songs together in our bedrooms.
LTW: If you could bring back one item from Shampoo’s Cupboard in 2024 what would it be?
S: An item from Shampoo’s cupboard……white dog poo obviously! (LTW: Obviously.)
LTW: With the blonde hair and permanently-on shades you had an immediately recognisable and replicable image, almost a costume. Was that something you planned?
S: The image was never something we planned, it was just something that we did as soon as we changed out of our school uniform. We both loved the same stuff, we would spend our weekends in the big Topshop on Oxford street, Kensington market, Hyper Hyper, Boy, Shelleys and our favourite at the time Sign O the Times. We wish we could go back! We also used to make and customise our own clothes. The sunglasses were just to hide behind when we had a hangover and had slept in our make up!
LTW: Shampoo’s music straddles genres and scenes. Where did that breadth of taste come from and were you aware how unusual it was at the time?
S: When we started to go to gigs in our early teens it was always indie bands. The Manic Street Preachers at the Marquee was one of our first. We loved all the old punk stuff but we also loved the bubblegum pop stuff too. By the time Shampoo was taking off we were playing the Bull and Gate and the Just Seventeen and Smash Hits roadshows!
LTW: Best shampoo for bleach blonde hair?
S: We really should have had our own hair care products, or at least a sponsorship deal shouldn’t we!
LTW: Today’s pop stars seem more careful about watching their ps and qs than the ones we grew up with, how do you think the young Shampoo girls would have fared in the current media environment?
S: We dread to think, it would have been a complete disaster!
LTW: You were infamously ‘big in Japan’, did the time you spend there influence your music or style in any way?
S: It definitely influenced our style. The shopping was amazing in Japan. There were all these amazing little independent shops in Tokyo and they were selling everything that we loved at the time. We loved Superlovers, Hysteric Glamour and Pile of Trash. The fashion magazines were great too. We never really got to hear much Japanese music at the time as they were so into the British thing.
LTW: Favourite and least favourite Shampoo songs?
S: Favourite Shampoo tracks – Bouffant Headbutt and Me Hostage. Least favourite – Not saying!
LTW: If you were to return the favour and cover something by Miley Cyrus, what would you pick?
S: ‘WTF Do I Know’ from Plastic Hearts. (LTW: This would be amazing, make this happen please)
LTW: You obviously have a rock solid friendship, but were you aware at the time that you were gay icons for a lot of teenage girls too?
S: We don’t think that we were aware of (it) at all at the time. We would often walk around holding hands just because we did, we were best friends and we were inseparable. We have never fallen out and although we may not see each quite as often now or walk around holding hands anymore we are still the best of friends.
LTW: Shampoo’s songs are not just a time capsule of teenage life in the 90s, but are also very specifically British. Did you have to spend a lot of your time explaining to fans from other parts of the world who Richard and Judy were, or what cheapo strap-on roller skates were all about?
S: We didn’t actually promote the last album abroad so that didn’t come up. But with the other two albums the Japanese were obsessed with our Britishness, they didn’t care that they didn’t understand it they just loved it.
LTW: Shampoo came out of pre-internet fanzine culture, but you were also one of the first bands I was aware of to release an album exclusively online. Do you think the musical landscape has been improved by the digital revolution?
S: Although we were one of the first bands to release an album exclusively online it was probably too early back then. We are glad that we were part of the music business before the internet, back when it was still demos on cassettes and black and white photocopied fanzines.
LTW: Was it a deliberate decision to disappear, and if so why?
S: We never really disappeared on purpose we just got on with life. We never wanted to do the reality (tv) stuff it just wasn’t our thing.
LTW: Girl Power: woz you robbed?
S: We never felt robbed, everyone said that we were robbed but we never thought that. Carrie’s Nan on the other hand felt very robbed ….. she was well angry. And you didn’t mess with Carrie’s Nan, she would have won a fight with Scary Spice hands down!
LTW: What does the phrase mean to you now and has it changed since you wrote the song?
S: Oh course it was different then. We were around when the Riot Grrrl thing was kicking off and we were at the girls only gig at the Subterania. It was exciting seeing all those girl bands back then. Our take on Girl Power was different and it has changed again since then but that’s how it should be.
LTW: Let’s wrap up with some quick fire ‘this or that’ questions. Just like something out of the Smash Hits Biscuit Tin..
Sindy or Barbie?
Jacqui: Sindy
Carrie: Sindy
Take That or East 17?
J: East 17
C: East 17
Hangover or jet lag?
J: Jet lag
C: Jet lag
Sid Vicious or Johnny Rotten?
J: Johnny Rotten
C: Johnny Rotten
Dolly Mixtures or Liquorice Allsorts?
J: Dolly Mixtures
C: Dolly Mixtures
(Laughter ensues at the perfectly matching answers)
Well, there you have it. Its 2024 and Jacqui and Carrie are still every bit as smart, funny and telepathically conjoined as ever. And they didn’t swear at me once! Now all we need is a musical epilogue to follow the Complete Shampoo..
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Follow Shampoo on Instagram, Facebook and at their Official Website.
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All words by Susan Sloan. More of her work for Louder Than War is available on herarchive. Find her on Instagram as@thesmureviewsand view Susan’s websitehere.
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