Interviews

Belladonna

Steven Morgan 28/09/2009

Through pounding rhythms and dirty bass riffs, this pair squeeze more sonically than a lot of bands with double their members. On top of it all, the vocal lines demand your attention exploiting a range of deliveries from a sultry purr to a pleading yelp, they're perfectly suited to the music. It's a journey through infectious hooks and stomping rock numbers that are destined to fill future dancefloors.

What's the reception been like on the UK tour?

It's always the same for us when we play new places, throughout the first song people look at us like we're aliens, a bit like we're in a shop window on display. Then by the second song they've got their heads round what we do, got into it and are down the front. We normally get bombarded with questions when we come off.


Are you more comfortable in the studio or on stage?

We love both, but being on stage turns us into a different animal, with totally different headspace and energy to being in the studio. In the studio it's more intense brain work and sometimes we do hit barriers that we need to work through whereas on stage we feel totally natural.

What sort of audiences have you been getting at your shows?

Everything from skater boys to old punks, foxy chicks and other musicians checking us out. We always seem to end up with a couple of old pervs as well!

Do you adhere to your recorded sound being reproducible live or are you open to open ended multi-tracking?

We keep all drums, bass and vocals live and always will, we do have a few electro samples that we pre-recorded, but everything that we can do live we do. If we could sprout four more limbs each we'd play it all live.

What are your goals for the band, what do you want to achieve?

We're not going to say world domination because that's such a cliche. We pretty much want to achieve what all bands do, people to buy our music, come to our gigs and love what we do. It would be cool if someone ridiculously famous went onstage wearing one of our t-shirts, hmmmmm maybe Eminem?

Your band get a lot of Yeah Yeah Yeahs comparisons, do you think that's fair, or symptomatic of lazy & sexist journalism?

Of course it's easy for someone to look at us and compare us to one of the few successful strong female musicians out there, it is the obvious thing to do. We did recently get compared Chaz and Dave by the NME though which we thought was quite inventive.

Who are your influences?

Eastenders, shoes, sat navs, biscuit boosts, john smiths, red wine and cathedral cheese and occasionally hubba bubba

What's the back story of the band, how did the band start out?

We've worked together in various different bands and got sick of the usual set up so thought we'd try something different to see what would happen. Six months after that, we were in the studio recording our debut album.

Do you enjoy working as a two-piece?

No, there's never enough of us to carry the amps! Sometimes it makes things harder but most of the time, it's the best thing we've ever done-we wouldn't have it any other way. I love her and she loves me.

What was it like working with Fred Purser on the album "Hey Weirdo", did everything go according to plan?

It was amazing. He's on the same wave length as us and it's the first time we've worked with a producer who totally gets us and our music. On our lunch breaks he'd tell us his old rock'n'roll stories of playing in a punk band. Some tracks went smoothly, some tracks were a headf*ck but we got there in the end and we loved every second of it, even the times when we were climbing the walls with studio fever. We even shared our cheese with him.

How do you feel the bands sound has changed between the Triple Shot EP & the recording of your album?

It's definatly become more diverse. Those first Belladonna recordings were more to the punk end of what we do, Hey Weirdo has more varied influences on. Our songwriting techniques have changed alot and we've stopped drinking so much, so we write better songs.

The McQueen remix of Don't Be Fooled By The Romance is currently getting heavy support from Annie Nightingale, what's your opinion on remixes of your work?

We love hearing remixes, it's great to hear someone elses creative interpretation of what we do. It's also good to reach audiences that perhaps otherwise wouldn't listen to our music. It was amazing last year at Bestival hearing a DJ play our tune to an arena full of dance fans going mad.

Your album has been receiving glowing feedback, what can we expect next from the band?

We've got a new single coming out on the 9th Novemeber called We Are Your Diversity, so you'll be seeing us gigging round and about the UK then. See you soon.