As I walked into the small venue that is the Bar Academy, I was greeted by the tour man­ager who ushered Chi (bassist), Soup (drum­mer) and I into a tiny side room to begin the inter­view. The girls were extremely polite with their strong Glaswe­gian accents and seemed excited to be per­form­ing in Birmingham.

How long have you guys been together?
Chi: Umm about a year (looks at band mem­ber) Too long in some cases *giggles* it feels we’ve been on tour for a year!

Rock and roll seems to me to fol­low pat­terns, and in the past, women have been slated for play­ing their instru­ments and mak­ing rock ‘n’ roll. Have you ever exper­i­enced any of that?
Chi: No. I mean you come on and you find they will look inquis­it­ively at you and they’re like ‘what we gonna get?’. They seem to think we’re a man­u­fac­tured pop act or some­thing. *coughs* Girls Aloud. Nat­ur­ally people would assume that because there aren’t any all girl rock bands about, but any doubts any­one has about us are usu­ally extin­guished by the time the set’s fin­ished or after a couple of songs even, and you see them start to loosen up and they hate to admit it, but they go away and have enjoyed the show.

How did you guys get star­ted? What happened?
Chi: We all had dif­fer­ent bands when we first star­ted out and in Glas­gow there’s only really one rehearsal stu­dio that you kinda go to for prac­tice and stuff, and we all star­ted see­ing each other when we were record­ing and one night we just wanted a wee break from all the bands; some­thing that wasn’t ser­i­ous, so we could just jam and we star­ted writ­ing songs and just went with it, we never really set out to be an all girl band, it star­ted off as a laugh and began to snow­ball into some­thing really serious.

Can you tell me a bit about your influ­ences, what made you want to start play­ing music?
Chi: It was really a hobby at school, then I picked it up and star­ted play­ing in cover bands and all the rest of it.

Are there any cov­ers you like to do?
Soup: We don’t actu­ally do any cov­ers at all. Noth­ing at the moment anyway.

So, influ­ences?
Soup: Late six­ties, early sev­en­ties rock. The Ramones, The Clash, I’m a big Zep­pelin fan. My favour­ite drum­mer would be Bon­ham — John Bon­ham. I’m also a big fan of Ginger Baker — he was Hendrix’s drum­mer at one time.
Chi: I’m into a lot of the newer stuff: Funeral For A Friend, Bul­let For My Valentine. I love the Red Hot Chilli Pep­pers… but I fell out with them because of their newer stuff. No doubt I’ll get reac­quain­ted with them at some point. Don’t talk to me about their new album.

Why?
Chi: Well, being a bass player, one of my idols is Flea, but their new stuff is a bit repet­it­ive. They shouldn’t have done a double album. They should have stuck to a single album, they pushed it a wee bit.

I heard you guys played at Down­load?
Chi: Yeah, was it the Sat­urday we were play­ing? (to Soup) It was great. We were on the Snick­ers­bowl stage. With all the skaters, we were in this big bowl thing, and there were loads of people out­side and they had to shut the gates to stop them com­ing in, there was loads of people just gathered out­side the gates. That’s def­in­itely been a high­light of this year. There were quite a lot of cas­u­al­ties at the front that day!

I heard you guys also sup­por­ted Alice in Chains?
Soup: Amaz­ing. Yeah, it was a couple of weeks ago now… the fourth of July I think, it was at the Lon­don Astoria. What happened was, they got a copy of our album which had secretly worked its way into their hands and, umm, they really liked it. We actu­ally met Jerry Cantrell (Alice In Chains’ gui­tar­ist) back­stage at Down­load. He saw us on stage and invited me to go play drums with him, know­ing that we were their sup­port band for the Lon­don gig that was com­ing up. So we got to meet them. They’re really nice guys and the fact that they passed com­ment on our album… it was great to have that feel­ing. The singer was by the side of the stage in Lon­don and was really get­ting into it so we were dead chuffed at that.

Could you describe what your sound is?
Our sound is, well, its not just rock and its not just punk, it’s a com­bin­a­tion. It’s fast paced and ener­getic. Some songs have a heavy rock feel to them.

Is it a dif­fi­cult that you’re all girls? I can ima­gine the bitch­ing that would go on!
We have our moments *laughs*

Well, thank you very much
Chi: Thanks!
Soup: Thank you!