the first line-up of the Playthings featured Jay Clarkson and Janine Saundercock both sharing the song writing, singing, guitar and bass reasponsibilities along with a little help from Nicki Carter (ex Basket Cases) who also played Flute, guitar and sometimes sax. Dave Toland (Future Stupid/ Belle Motions) beat the skins.

Janine was a bubbly girl who wanted to try everything and wrote some great pop songs while a more mature Jay wrote the serious stuff with some quite complex arrangements.

When Paul Kean returned to live in Christchurch after the break up of Toy Love (a whirlwind 18months of gigging and recording - 3 singles an album and about 450 live performances in New Zealand and Australia!!) he took on the role of manager, sound engineer and producer. He formed one of New Zealands 1st indie labels, Playmusic, that released 2 Playthings EP's and a live album. When Janine left the band after the 1st Ep was released (double A-side with 2 of Janine's songs, "Had Enough" and "Stand-up/Sit- down" with Jay's song,"Coloured" on the flipside) Paul joined as bass player / guitarist to record another couple of Jay's, "Birds Eye View" and "Pure Frost" plus an instrumental of Paul's called "Dumb". Flying Nun assisted with distribution. "Birds Eye View received a very good review in The Australian Rolling Stone.

and then
When the band split, Jay went on to form "They Were Expendable" later shortened to "The Expendables" who had various line-ups, released a couple of EP's (if anyone's interested, email us and we'll write up some details) eventually winning the Rheineck Rock Awards recording grant worth a sizeable $40.000 - big money for the day. Jay Clarkson recorded a couple of very good solo albums and a couple of singles and recently had music she composed for classical guitar, performed at a festival in Dunedin.