by Alan Pedder | view as PDF

INTERESTING POP FACT: Bespotted Brighton lady lungsmiths The Pipettes (aka Becki, Gwenno and Rose) and their backing band The Cassettes (Jon, Seb, Joe and “Monster” Bobby) have the bestest theme song ever. Forget your Monkees and your ain’t-no-party-like-an-S-Club-party, theirs is an uncompromising, foot-stomping, hand-clapping, tongue-in-cheek righteous bid for world domination — “take us, take us to your planet / give us your mind and we’ll scan it / sell us a ship and we’ll man it / because we mean it!” Not since the heyday of Smash Hits [sniiiiiip! RIP] has fun been so, well, fundamental to a collective’s common purpose. And what really takes the biscuit (tin) is that The Pipettes make pop that it’s ok to like, if not impossible not to, thereby guaranteeing guilt-free swingorilliance. On tour, they’ve supported the likes of The Magic Numbers, labelmates The Go! Team and indie gooners Kaiser Chiefs and after two years hard grafting on the circuit, their finely-honed harmonies and brassy repertoire will be making it to a record shop near you with an album due in the summer. With their recent single Your Kisses Are Wasted On Me cutting a swathe through chart-hogging bulimics and mediocre premature granddads, Alan Pedder got Rose on the blower for a chat about Simon Cowell and bringing the world to its longstockinged knees…

So, Rose, if you saw Madonna walking down the street tomorrow wearing some polka dot designer ensemble, would you go and confront her and say “oi pop magpie, you’ve nicked our idea?”
<laughs> Yeah, but it’s a bit late for that. Polka dots are in all the shops now so we’ve got girls turning up to our gigs wearing nicer dresses than us and that’s not on! So I think we might have to have a bit of a rethink at some point. It is something we’ve been doing for a couple of years now so, yeah, we could say we started the whole polka dot revival! At first it was just something that people could instantly associate with us. It’s nice for us to have matching outfits. It’s as if in that moment we put our dresses on, we become The Pipettes, kind of like a gang.

Like the Pink Ladies but with polka dots!
Yeah, that sort of thing. It’s our uniform!

What’s next then, stripes?
No… I think you run the risk of that kind of very defined image becoming tired and we don’t want to be seen as a kind of novelty band? We really care about our songs and our writing and we know there’s a lifespan to everything. We don’t want to get bored with ourselves either!

I like the way you’re basically saying don’t put too much stock in so-called ‘integrity’ and saying that anyone can have a go at making music. Is it the ultimate everywoman pastime?
I think that’s something we definitely believe in. One of the things we hate about musicians is this sort of mystification and “oh my god, they’re amazing geniuses” attitude. I think a lot of musicians play up to that, especially male guitar bands. They’ll promote that idea themselves and it’s really false and boring. It doesn’t make for anything new or exciting to come through. And I think the most interesting things that I’ve listened to have come from our guitarist’s night in Brighton called Totally Bored. It’s once a month at some café and he gets all kinds of people turning up to play their little songs. And it might not be the most technically brilliant thing but something that has, you know, a bit of heart about it and a bit of risk taking as well. I think that’s maybe what’s really missing from the current music scene.

I think we’ve seen a bit of a resurgence of that kind of thing in recent years, especially in New York with the whole antifolk scene
Yeah, I think that’s a classic example of what we’re interested in. It doesn’t even have to be something new, just having a different way of saying things is great. People who aren’t classically trained or whatever are going to more easily access that than someone whose brain is crowded by all of the so-called rules that they might know. In a way, that’s a different thing to us, because we’re coming at it from a traditional entertainment angle.

How do you think The Pipettes would go down in New York?
Oh god, I can’t really imagine what they’d say. I bet they’d think it was ever so quaint or something.

How do you respond to naysayers who think that having such a firm emphasis on fun means you’ll lack longevity?
Hmm, I don’t know. I think that’s something that people are immediately going to confront us with, but that’s only looking slightly on the surface of what we’re doing. We want to make really great records for people to dance to and have a great time. We want to have that instantaneous effect but we’re really interested in everything to do with songcraft and the way that things are structured and work quite hard on those elements. We’re certainly not flippant or blasé about the music that we’re making so I hope that comes across as well. There’s always going to be people who look at us and say, you know, “there’s three girls having a laugh on stage, it doesn’t mean anything” and that’s fine, that’s cool, but we’re quite serious really!

Given the revival of the Sixties girl group sound in indie music with The Long Blondes, Raveonettes, Chalets etc., would you be surprised to see Simon Cowell wade in with a manufactured replica?
Maybe. We don’t necessarily want to be marginalised to the indie market. I think people kind of assume that because we’re a live band that that’s where we’re coming from, but the indie circuit is just something you have to do when you’re a live band. I think our aspirations go more towards TV shows like CD:UK and Top Of The Pops than the NME. I would be really happy to see Simon Cowell create some big band, if only for us to piss all over it and show them how to do it properly! <laughs>… we’d like to stand up against bands like Girls Aloud and Sugababes and that kind of thing.

Do you make a distinction between the Sixties girl group sound and the girl group ethos, which was all about the svengali super-producers? Are you careful to distance yourselves from the idea of some sort of managed post-modern attempt at pastiche?
I suppose so, yeah. I mean, you can never really control what people are going to think and I think that’s a very risky business. We’re very much aware of all those issues but the difference between us and bands that came from that era is that we sort of wanted to manufacture ourselves in a way, before anybody else got the chance to. From the very beginning, we had these ideas and we’re all very much in control of these things. We don’t do anything by mistake really. It’s all carefully thought through and all seven of us are involved in that. There’s no real leader of the band as such. There’s no main songwriter either. We all write songs and us three girls are in control of what we’re doing on stage. But we can’t escape certain misconceptions, and in a way we kind of like people to be a bit confused by what it is we’re doing. A lot of people seem to go “oh I see where you’re coming from, you must be a post-feminist” and we’re like well maybe we’re not and maybe it doesn’t have to be like that. There’s other things.

People like a bit of mystery, don’t they?
Yeah. Well, no not really, it makes them a bit angry sometimes I’ve found! <laughs>

Really?
They’re like “surely you must be able to put your name to some kind of cause!”... so, yeah, I don’t know.

A lot of the songs of the girl group era were pretty much just glossed up morality tales. Is that something that you try to bear in mind lyrically?
Hmm, no not really. I think that our songs are really just about the way we feel.

They’re coming from a more modern place are they?
Definitely, very much so. I think it would have been very stupid to try and replicate those kind of themes. So much has changed; the political climate and all kinds of things are completely different. We have no experience of what it was like forty years ago so I think all we can do is write about what we know. But these are the sorts of songs where it’s more that the framework is from the past rather than just copying them directly. We like our songs to be a bit cheeky and fun and even though they’re not the most profound poems, they’re still real and important because there’s a truth to them and a universality as well. People have compared us to riot grrl, and while there’s an element of that [Becki‘s a fan], we’re not making bold political statements in the same way. And in a way, it’s because we don’t really feel we need to. We’re just doing it for ourselves and that’s enough for us. We are empowered by the music that we make, the gigs that we do and the way that we dance on stage, and that’s our choice.

A lot people have accused The Beatles of killing off the girl group sound, much like Elvis appropriated and demarginalised R&B. Do you think the music industry is still the kind of place where men can achieve a kind of permanency off the back of a sound that women are rarely remembered for?
I really do feel that. It is still very much a male-dominated world and unfortunately not much has changed really. Boys tend to be taken a lot more seriously than girls, and especially girls like us who are sort of playing around with feminism. I mean, people are so quick to judge us in a way that they would never judge a man. But we know that and it doesn’t frighten us but sometimes it’s still a bit difficult.

Before you got signed, is it true that a lot of labels said they didn’t really know how to market you? What makes Memphis Industries different do you think?
Yeah, it’s true. I think their attitude is different. They have this ethos that each act they manage they want to be different to the last. They’re quite a new label and I think they really enjoy taking risks. Obviously as with any label they want to make money but I don’t think that’s the key thing. They took a bit of a gamble with us. I mean, they really liked us but they weren’t really sure where we were going to fit, but that didn’t necessarily matter. That’s what’s really great, that they’ll say “let’s just give it a go”. So yeah, I don’t really know what they were thinking! <laughs>

In the girlgroup era, labels were often described as a sort of family, is that how you see your set-up?
Sort of, yeah. We try to get on with everyone we work with and there’s definitely a sort of “oh you’re a Memphis band” kind of attitude. But we don’t really get to see people that often with everyone jetting off to places, doing their own thing, so in that sense of family, maybe not.

So before you recorded your first album recently, you hadn’t spent much time in the studio, more on the stage. How’d it go?
It was great. It was such a lovely chance to finally get some of these songs down. I mean, some of them we’ve been playing for over two years now, so we were really quite ready to have them properly recorded. Especially with a proper concentrated amount of time. Although, actually it turns out we did it in about two weeks, which is really quick. But we finally had the opportunity to work with the string quartets and horn trios that we’ve been carrying around in our heads from the beginning. And it’s actually been realised now, which is really exciting. In our eyes, it’s definitely the record that we wanted to make, which is quite an achievement I think! <laughs> Not to blow our own trumpet or anything but you hear a lot of people moaning about how they didn’t want things this way or that way and we felt like that about our previous recordings. I think we actually did get across what we wanted to, but it is definitely a leap for us, with proper blood, sweat and tears put into it. So we’re really excited to see what people make of it because I think that perhaps it’s not the record that people expected us to make, so we’ll see.

OK, last question, as there’s seven of you, The Pipettes have a melting pot of influences and I hear you’re a bit of a folkie at heart... can we expect some kind of ceilidh dance video in the future?
<laughs> No I don’t think so, probably not. I mean, you never know, but I think that’s my main kind of influence but I don’t think the others would share in it. It’s not really a part of the current Pipettes oeuvre. It would be much to the horror of Riot Becki I imagine!!