Stockwell Rose

Stockwell Rose started on the stairs of a block off Lansdowne Way, where the concrete made an echo better than any studio. Yvette Charles had the high, clear lead; Donna Mayers, tall and a year younger, sat underneath her on the low harmony; Carol Ann Thorpe took the top line and wrote nearly everything in a notebook she carried to school and back. In 1980 a Brixton producer heard them singing at a youth-club talent night and had them in his studio above a record shop by the end of the month, over a band that played for half the lovers-rock singers in South London.

Their songs were the ones every girl at Stockwell Park school knew by heart — Meet Me By The Memorial, about the clock on the war memorial at the crossroads where everyone met; Phone Box On Lansdowne Way, about the only phone that worked and the queue outside it; Skatepark Boy, about the lads on the new concrete bowl down the road. They split in 1983 when school finished and life started. Donna went into nursing, Carol Ann kept writing for other singers, and Yvette came back five years later as the voice of Kilburn High Road.