It's a good job for Phil Spector that Fostex hadn't hit the stores when he was piecing together his girlie-group classics.

What would have been his place in Rock's pantheon if the Shangri-Las had collected themselves together, said "Naff off. Shorty," and settled down to some serious overdubbing?

Would he have swapped his place in the Hall of Fame for a seat in the outside loo if the Ronettes had clustered around their A-8 and multitracked their own Pop epics?

We'll never know — but maybe a few pointers could come from two girls living in London's scuzzy New Cross. Going under the collective handle of Fuchsia Shock, Julie Usher and Janelle Sciala are themselves veterans of the all-woman format. And as you can tell by the lack of male names in the band, they're still pursuing that elusive grail of a band that is both without menfolk and without the tag of fluffy brainlessness that seems to attack itself to such lineups via the patronising patrons of the industry.

But we're getting very Guardian, lentil macrame and Germaine Greer here. Let it merely be placed on record (and it may well be) that they're determined to make a manless mark and the tools of their insurrectionary aims are a Fostex A-8 and several instruments.

Janelle is a classically-trained musician, and can play piano (yes, even the black notes) exceedingly well, not to mention a variety of wind instruments of which saxophone is the major one used on their own material. The piano expertise comes in handy of course for those modern versions of the ol' eighty-eight, the synthesizer, and to that end the synth parts are handled by a Roland JX3P and a Yamaha DX7. Julie plays the guitar(s) which in general are a Yamaha SG2000 and an Aria fretless bass, the six stringed bit of which is played through a Marshall 100 top and a 4x12 cab or a Roland Jazz Chorus JC50 combo. She also programs the drum machine, which is the popular Sequential Circuits Drumtraks. Both sing, and as far as the basic noisemaking bit goes that's about it.

Of course that's only the beginning of the story as far as we're concerned. And it's much the same for Julie and Janelle, because so far, and at least for the near future, their aims definitely don't include gigging around the pub circuit as support act to thousands of dubious HM bands.

Thus their songwriting is directed very strongly towards the things that will sound best when put down on tape, and the process itself is often done using the marvels of modern recording rather than the good old biro-and-paper method.

The studio is the front room upstairs in a largish thirties semi-detached house. As for soundproofing — there ain't any.

"Really there isn't that much that's loud enough for us to need it," explained Julie. "The drums, the synthesizers and the bass are all DI'd straight into the mixing desk. The guitar is almost always miked off the speakers; but I've had a friend of mine make me up a dummy load to go across the amp so I can get real distortion at almost no volume. So the only thing that might cause any aggro with the neighbours is the sax. That's really loud and the only thing we can do is to try and record it at times when they're likely to be out.

"Mixing is no more of a nuisance than someone playing a hi fi so that stage is no problem."

The monitoring being (as is usual for home recordists) a hi fi anyway, that's not entirely surprising. It is a better-than-usual hi fi, with a Sansui amplifier driving Mission 720 speakers, and, luckily, a part of it is the mastering machine — a Sony TC339 reel-to-reel tape deck.

So the Fostex A-8 goes straight through the Fostex 350 8:4:2 mixer and onto the mastering machine? Not quite. The girls have a trick up their sleeves for the eight-into-two bit of the proceedings; they hire in a Lexicon PCM60 reverb, a very professional and high-priced bit of gear indeed, for use on mixdown. Why?

"It's one of the absolutely essential effects, reverb," explained Julie. "And a good reverb can lift your track from sounding like just any old demo to pretty near studio quality. The Lexicon is a long way above most of our gear in quality, but when you hire one for a single day it doesn't cost that much and it makes such a huge difference. The way we look at it is that if the cost of a Lexicon makes the difference between somebody being impressed by the songs or just interested enough to ask us to go and do them properly, then we've saved far more money than the initial amount we paid to hire it.

"We use it on all the vocals, of course, sax, and often drums, keyboards, guitar... you name it. Hiring for one day does tend to make it a little bit of a rush to mix if it's a complicated track, but it's quite possible."

Of course the hired-in super-reverb isn't the only effect in the ladies' armoury — the other bit of time-delay circuitry is a well-used Roland SRE-555 chorus-echo, which was for many years a fixture on Julie's amp and an aid to her guitar sound. It's a fairly noisy device, so they tend to keep it away from the more delicate bits of the songs, but its no-nonsense effect does come in handy here and there, usually on guitar. The guitar itself, in fact, comes in for some quite drastic treatment, but not in the way that one would expect. Rather than the pretty wash of flange, echo, chorus, or whatever, it's put through the overdriven Marshall and Eq'd drastically until it sounds like somebody slapping you in the ear with a cat. Which is the intended effect.

As Julie and Janelle's material is mainly synthesizer-based, the guitar plays a secondary function of adding occasional hooks and rhythm chops, so they like it to really make a mark when it does make an appearance.So the Eq and overdrive combine to produce a toppy, harsh sound that pops out of the mix spectacularly.

Sax is used for much the same purpose — incidental hooks and the odd solo — but the opposite principle is used in getting a good sound.

"We were really surprised the first time we tried recording the sax," recalled Janelle. "We were expecting it to be really difficult to get a decent sound from, but all we did was stick a mike down the bell, fairly close, and it came out great first time!"

The Lexicon is used tastefully to enhance the sound, and that's it.

The mikes used in this case, and in fact for everything, are Shure 545s — good, robust general-purpose numbers, but not the best studio microphones that money can buy. Hence the next acquisitions on the list will be, hopefully, one or more decent studio-type mikes.

Bass is handled by an Aria Pro II fretless two-pickup number which Julie plays. She's only had the bass for a few months, but surprisingly as a guitarist she didn't find the transition to fretless bass that difficult.

"I don't play anything very complicated," she said. "I mean, I don't do any of that really fretless stuff; I just play it quite straight and watch what I'm doing so I don't go out of tune. But I prefer the sound of a fretless bass, it's warmer and more human."

But of course the backbone of the sound is, or rather are, the synths. The JX3P is a favourite for its in-built sequencer, which is capable of more than you might imagine from its somewhat limited note capacity. And when the Roland fails to play a particularly long or complicated bit, Janelle's classical training comes to the fore as she wraps her fingers around the more complex sequences. Surely a retrograde step, a human imitating a device which was originally intended to imitate a human?

But the girls don't think so — after all, a lot of their songs are written on the machines themselves, with the sequences a vital part of the structure.

The DX7 is, of course, as most people say, a means to achieve superb noises easily and that's pretty much it. It plays well, it sounds good, and it does all the right up-to-the-minute noises. What more could you want?

What more the ladies of Fuchsia Shock want is, as one would imagine, a deal. Their eight-track demo delights are shortly to be shunted around record and publishing companies in the hope of a multi-trillion pound deal (or thereabouts). But they've got their future strategy worked out; rather than spend their advance on time in a posh studio, they're planning on keeping their own studio and equipping it to pro standard.

Julie's got her sights set on eventual production duties, too, so the possibilities of any sunglassed mentor to take total control look pretty slim.

Anybody for Phyllis Spector?