Jacqui Blake and Carrie Askew were best friends at Plumstead Manor School, a secondary school for girls in Plumstead, London. In the early nineties they started writing Last Exit, a fanzine for the Manic Street Preachers, and later appeared in the video for "Little Baby Nothing". They also wrote a fanzine for Fabulous.

During this time they formed Shampoo, the name deriving from their schoolyard nickname of 'the shampoo girls', for claiming to be 'washing their hair' when turning down date requests.^{[citation needed]}

Their first single "Blisters and Bruises" (co-written by Lawrence of the bands Felt and Denim) with the b-sides "Paydirt" and "I Love Little Pussy" was released by Icerink records (a short-lived label created by Saint Etienne's Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs) on 7" pink vinyl in 1993. This and their following single,"Bouffant Headbutt", received favourable reviews in the music press, such as the NME and Melody Maker, but sold few copies.^{[citation needed]}

Whilst their first two singles were typical of the Riot Grrl bands coming to notice, the following year saw the release of "Trouble" and the album We Are Shampoo which displayed a more radio friendly sound, but still with much of their previous abrasiveness: "Dirty Old Love Song" panned Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston (whose "I Will Always Love You" had been the previous year's biggest-selling single in the UK). "Shiny Black Taxi Cab" about a night on the town gone wrong (ending with a spoken section by the 'taxi driver' complaining to a new passenger about two drunken girls who had thrown up all over his cab the previous week). We Are Shampoo sold over a million copies, with the majority of sales in Japan and the rest of Asia.^[2]

"Trouble" reached No. 11 on the UK charts,^[3] landing the group on Top of the Pops and the cover of Smash Hits magazine. For the remainder of 1994 Shampoo did well, finding fans in both the mainstream and alternative music scenes – boosted in part by their links to Manic Street Preachers fanscene. The band became moderately successful in Japan. "Trouble" was included in the 1995 film Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie and also appeared on the film's soundtrack. It also appeared in the 1996 film Foxfire and the 1997 film Trojan War. The song "Don't Call Me Babe" was included in the soundtrack of the 1996 film Barb Wire. "Delicious" is played in the 1997 film Casper: A Spirited Beginning.