|
 At
the end of July, ‘LINC scribe Chris Skoyles, accidentally stumbled across
the website for Manchester-based three-piece, Geekgirl, and was
immediately impressed by their raw, blues-punk and dirty rock ‘n’ roll.
Thus, when he learned that Fi, Joel and Ted were heading to Nirvana, he
felt compelled to take them to a local pub for a chat that went something
like this:
The first boring, obvious question, where do your influences come from?
FI: [Laughs]
JOEL: They’re literally all over the place. I’d be surprised if there was
one band who we liked in common.
FI: That’s true actually, no, I think there maybe is, it’s not that we all
have different musical tastes, it’s more that we have.
TED: Different record collections
JOEL: OK then, from what to what?
FI: “From, Carley Simon to….”
JOEL: “to Spinal tap!!”
FI: “Which I’ve still never seen”
Oh come on, everybody has to have seen Spinal Tap at least once!
JOEL: Especially if they’re in a band!
After listening to the stuff you have on the website, and reading the
reviews of you guys, there never seems to be one way to sum up your music.
So if someone put you on the spot and said ‘Describe Geekgirl’s sound in
three words’, what would you say?
FI: In three words!?!
JOEL: I dunno, it depends on what day you catch us on really, we’re like
two bands, we’ve got the acoustic set we do as well.
TED: With the electric set, it’s like ‘raw, punky pop’ or something
JOEL: ‘Dirty country punk”
FI: ‘Retro punk pop!”
TED: As well…any others?
[The interview comes to halt for a minute whilst Joel pinches a
cigarette from a friend, before Fi tells him off and something that the
state-of-the-art Dictaphone doesn’t pick up happens, resulting in much
laughter]
Alright then, since you do both electric and acoustic sets, which one
do you prefer?
FI: It depends what mood I’m in.
[The band all agree]
JOEL: Whichever one we’re not doing a lot of at the minute
TED: Generally, if we’re playing acoustic then I’m like ‘aw, I really
wanna drum!’ but then if we’re lugging all the stuff across the country to
Brighton or wherever, we’re like ‘We shoulda just turned up with a
mandolin and a guitar’
FI: If we’ve had a bad week though, it is good to thrash it out with some
electric sets.
TED: It also depends on where we’re playing. I mean, we’ve played some
brilliant acoustic gigs just because of the venue and the crowd has been
brilliant. But then it works both ways because we’ve played some acoustic
gigs we’re it’s just like [puts hand to side of mouth as though shouting
over a long distance] ‘Hello? Anybody out there?’
JOEL: It is really nice to do the acoustic stuff. I mean, when it’s bass,
guitar, drums and singing, to a certain extent, loads of people do that. I
mean, not quite like we do, but when you’ve got guitar, a mandolin, two n’
half vocals and an upright bass, it’s…
FI: People do definitely take notice of that.
JOEL: Not many people do that apart from like, hillbillies and bluegrass
and stuff.
Do you ever find that, before people check out, they have
preconceptions of you?
FI: Oh yeah. I mean, for a start they think we’re all girls.
Guilty...
FI: Yeah that’s commonly what people think.
TED: Even with the beard!
JOEL: Yeah! Wait till Mardi Gras, that’s all I’m saying. ‘Gig-girl’ is
what a lot of people think as well. ‘Gig-girl?’ No, no..Geekgirl,
GEEKgirl.
FI: The pronunciations gotta be right.
JOEL: I think, for me anyway [to Fi], it’s probably different for you
because you’re obviously a girl, but when I say it people are just…a bit
confused.
When I first heard the name, before I’d got round to actually checking
out the website and listening to the tunes, I assumed you’d be like a sort
of ‘riot grrl’ punk band.
TED: Yeah, I mean, we kind of are just with us two clowns [Ted & Joel] as
well!
JOEL: We bring the ‘riot’ I suppose, and you [Fi] bring the grrrrl
FI: Yeah, I’m happy with that!
[Joel starts talking about a girl with 25 piercings in her head, whilst
your humble interviewer sits totally bewildered as to who he’s talking
about for a while]
FI: 25, that’s gotta hurt!
JOEL: And she’s completely and totally bald..[to Fi] like, balder than
your face. Sorry, anyway, carry on.
What kind of fans do you tend to attract?
FI: You know, we do have quite an eclectic group of fans, especially
because we do the acoustic stuff as well. I mean, we’ve had 16 year olds
coming up to us at gigs, and then we’ve had like, 40 plus, who all buy the
music, for different reasons obviously.
JOEL: My mum’s line is ‘Let me know when you’re doing an acoustic gig, and
I’ll get blahdy-blah and blahdy-blahdy-blah [Here’s hoping that ‘blah’
replaces the actual names of people, and that there aren’t actually people
in Manchester unfortunately named “blahdy-blah”] I mean, I don’t know
these people, but that’s for the mums.
Then when you play the electric stuff...
FI: That’s for younger people usually yeah.
With a lot of bands who have a female singer or frontwoman, say for
example Garbage, or Texas, it seems that the women get all the attention,
and the blokes in the band just kind of happen to be there in the
background. Is that the way it is with Geekgirl?
FI: To a certain extent it happens, but I think that’s because when we’re
on stage, I do a lot of talking, because I’m there, with the Mic and
stuff. But I think we do get equal attention, especially in terms of the
music.
[to Ted] I mean, you’ve got your fair share of fan-base!
And, somebody mentioned to me only last week, that they’d heard the
album, and they were like, ‘Aw, who’s your bass player? That’s excellent!’
JOEL: Who was that!?!
FI: Can’t remember now. I’ll get back to you.
TED: He plays bass like the devil, I play drums and the mandolin at the
same time if I need to.
Really? You’re gonna do that tonight?
FI: We could...
Aw go on, please?
FI: We could, because Ted happens to have the mandolin with him. But we
haven’t run it through soundcheck or anything.
JOEL: We haven’t put it on the set list or anything have we?
FI: If the crowd cheer for more, then…we’ll slip ‘em something special..
It’s a good tune, it’s not our tune, but I’ll get you a copy of it.
The song you did earlier in soundcheck [Elvis], was that one of yours?
FI: Yeah, yeah. That’s one of our newer ones.
That song blew me away.
FI: Thanks, it’s one of our favourites to play.
TED: I mean, the piano stuff is all fairly new to us. The stuff that’s on
our website was all recorded a year ago, but since then we’ve added the
piano and the mandolin and stuff.
JOEL: When we recorded that, we didn’t really have an acoustic set, did
we?
FI: No...
Where did the idea come from to do two different types of set?
FI: From convenience really. It’s a lot easier for a band to get around
acoustically and play a lot smaller venues in a city than it is
electrically. I was playing singer-songwriter nights on my own
acoustically, so everybody knew who I was as a solo artist and it was
really easy to say ‘Oh, I’ve got a band now’. So everybody would come and
see that, and then everybody would come and see the electric set, so it’s
like, a pre-empt to the bigger gigs some how.
So are you the principal songwriter then?
FI: Not really now. I mean, when we got together I had a whole backlog of
a lot of material that we do play now. But as we’ve grown over the last
year and half, we’ve started writing stuff together. I still come up with
the lyrics, but we come up with the tunes together. We definitely have
written all our own bits to all our songs.
JOEL: Like, sometimes a song will come from a bass-riff or, you know
whatever.
FI: That’s what I mean, like now you can’t say that somebody starts a
song, because we all jam it out together.
Favourite Geekgirl song?
JOEL: Mine’s probably ‘Get it on’. I think that encapsulates what we’re
about, I mean I probably sound really pretentious now, but I think it
captures all of what our electric set’s all about in one three minute
song.
FI: Yeah, I like that one a lot. But my favourite one to play at the
minute is ‘Elvis’ because of the reaction we always get, and it feels so
good to play, but I do like the shouty ones too. “**** You” is a one of my
favourites, especially if I’m feeling angry. That’s one of our more
frivolous songs though, whereas ‘Elvis’ is a lot more meaningful.
TED: [After careful consideration] I would say, ‘Devil and the Dolly’
because I can do this a lot [Pulls a contorted face]
That’s your Country-Metal song...
JOEL: That’s a good one, stick that on the list...
TED: Country-Metal, or “Kettle!” [Yeah, it should technically be ‘Cetal’,
but ‘Kettle music’ seems far more funny]
What’s the long term plan for the band. Say, 2010, where will you be?
JOEL: 2010 that’s like, five years from now. [Well done :p ] Well, we
could be ‘Coral and release an album every year, or we could do a Stone
Roses and release one, then hide for ten years, and then release a second
one where everybody goes ‘Ugh, it’s not as good as the first’
Hopefully, in five years time...
TED: A couple of albums under the belt, just doing what bands do, touring
up and down the country. I really wanna go to Europe.
FI: Yeah!
JOEL: I wanna go to Japan. We’d be massive in Japan; they’d love us.
FI: What I really wanna do, is just to get paid for doing it. Not to have
to have a second job and concentrate on the band.
TED: Not having to actually work, that would be nice.
FI: Not that it’s not hard work of course!
TED: Oh yeah, waking up for soundcheck, sleeping, gigging...
What’s it like playing Wigan?
FI: The first time we came we played The Lux club, a tiny little venue and
it was packed on a Wednesday night, and you wouldn’t get that in
Manchester, unless you were playing a major venue.
TED: I think it’s surprising how concentrated it is in Wigan. It’s like,
there’s a gig here so everybody goes, or there’s a gig there so they go
there. Whereas in Manchester it’s like...
JOEL: There could be too much going on.
There’s kind of a buzz generating about the ‘scene’ in Wigan at the
minute.
JOEL: Yeah, I guess there’s a sort of ‘civic pride’ in smaller towns,
we’re they’re saying ‘Well, we’re not just a satellite of Manchester,
we’ve got our own thing going on'. And a lot of people seem to be, really
proud of their own scene. It’s the same in Bolton and places like that.
But do you think that Manchester’s still the place where you have to
be?
FI: It’s where we are more than anything. I think if we met in any city,
we would stay there just through convenience and commitments to work and
things.
JOEL: I think Manchester’s still got a certain amount of... what’s the
word... not credibility but...
TED: No, I think it has got loads of good venues that manage to stay open.
FI: But you quickly learn to sift out the c**p.
TED: But we’ve played Wigan before, and Bolton, and we’ve always enjoyed
it, because here you get people who actually want to go to the gigs and
listen to the music and not just amble in.
Recommended Links:
www.thegeekgirl.co.uk
►
Return to In the Hotseat
|
