‘I Can Feel’ was the final single release by Strawberry Switchblade while they remained a going concern, though it was released only in Japan, in March 1986, to coincide with their final live tour, four dates played in Japan that same month.
‘I Can Feel’ was a non-album single and, sadly, the interest in Strawberry Switchblade had waned so much in their home territories by this stage that the single did not even merit a release in the UK. Other than the original 7″ single release, the original 3’41” single version of ‘I Can Feel’ has only ever been re-issued on the Japanese CD copies of the ‘Strawberry Switchblade’ album in the late 1990s and onwards.
This A side single version of the song is a high-energy, synth-driven number that by the sounds of it has taken a good, hard listen to Dead Or Alive’s ‘You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)’ to inform the breathlessly dark stomp of its sonic make-up. By contrast, an earlier, much gentler demo take on the song was released decades later on the budget-priced compilation CD of the band’s material, ‘The Platinum Collection’ in 2005. Quite the contrast, a different animal altogether.
Meanwhile, on the flipside of this original 7″ single (pictured here in its promo edition format) was an extended version (6’30”) of the earlier single ‘Since Yesterday’, which also got an outing on a Japanese only album ‘The 12″ Album’ late on in 1985 – oddly, considering that the original UK 12″ release of the song never had an extended mix to it. (You might also want to take a peek at an earlier VersionCrazy post about the Japanese 3″ CD edition of ‘Since Yesterday’.)
As mentioned above, this single coincided with a set of live dates in Japan in March 1986. There’s a very nice souvenir tour programme that was available as part of this tour and it lists the band members of this final set of dates as Jill Bryson (Vocals and Guitar), Rose McDowall (Vocals and Guitar), Paul Heard (Keyboards and Bass) and Frog (Keyboards and Guitar) – Frog being bass player with The Farmer’s Boys bass player and Jill’s future husband. Two dates in Tokyo (10th and 11th March 1986), one in Nagoya (12th March), and one in Osaka (13th March). (I sourced these dates from the promo poster for the shows that is in circulation via Instagram – and as printed in the tour programme.) These were by the sounds of it large capacity gigs.
The band themselves are quite scathing about the single in the interviews available on the welcomingly reactivated https://strawberryswitchblade.net website, a fantastic treasure trove that if you are not already familiar with then you should set some time aside to fully investigate!