Hepburn - The Story

Fiesty girl band Hepburn first launched into the top ten in the spring of 1999 with their debut single "I Quit." This was swiftly followed by boppy top twenty hit "Bugs," and six months later with the dark and moody "Deep Deep Down."

"It was an amazing experience," says Sarah. "Seeing your face on television is weird at first, and then it's just normal. I never kept track of all the appearances, or the magazine articles."

"We were the bastard child of Hole and The Spice Girls." Sarah grins. "We were pop, but we played guitars and performed live on Top of the Pops, and a lot of people couldn't handle that!"

In their year of being signed to Sony Music's Columbia label, Hepburn faced a lot of flak. "A lot of the respectable music press were very cynical about us - they saw us as being manufactured, faking our performances, miming our songs. It was hard to get people to see through that." In reality, Sarah began playing bass at the age of eleven - the same age Tasha began playing drums - Lisa also had many years of experience, and Jamie had been performing on stage since childhood.

"In the music world, there's a lot of people out there who think there's this huge divide between pop which is written for profit and sung by puppets, and respectable music which is real and creative and written by artists." Sarah disagrees: "The reality is very different. There's always an element of both happening. A lot of people get exploited and suppressed creatively in the music industry. Sometimes it's down to poor management, sometimes it's the deal they've struck to get signed. Often there's no way to get out of that except wait for your contract to expire!"

Beverley Fullen, Hepburn's original drummer, parted ways with the band in the late summer of 1999, only a few weeks after "I Quit" had been released, much to the amusement and delight of the music press everywhere. Headlines "She Quit!" littered magazines and newspapers everywhere. Though not made public at the time, Beverley left to continue her romance with one of Hepburn's two original managers, Ash, who departed for reasons that never fully became clear. Hepburn and their remaining manager regrouped and took on a replacement, Tasha Baylis. "Tasha is one of the best drummers in the country," Sarah says. "We made the right choice!"

Hepburn went on to have two more top twenty hits and a top twenty album. They travelled to Miami and did shoots for Disney, and reshot their video to "I Quit" on the set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And then a year after the release of "I Quit," Hepburn split...

"In the end it came down to the record company," says Sarah. "Sony decided that we weren't doing well enough for them. We were all tired, Jamie wanted to go solo, and our manager and his pals seemed to be a lot happier and doing a lot better out of Hepburn than we were."