It takes two, baby..
BITCHES will destroy your eardrums. Mine haven’t been the same since I unwittingly found myself trapped onstage with them, DJing between bands at one of their shows. From my crouching position behind Staz’s Drum kit I witnessed a high energy onslaught of brilliantly chaotic noise, that has been winning the band fans on both sides of the Atlantic for over two years now. A girlfriend/boyfriend duo from just outside of Oxford, bassist Blake and drummer Staz cut their teeth in various rock bands from an early age, before conceding to the inevitable and forming BITCHES with one another.
They have since relocated to London to attend university at Goldsmiths, where Staz studied music and Blake is still doing English. When I meet the couple for a chat in a crowded north London pub I've torn Blake away from writing an essay on the plague - which also happens to be the subject of one of the band’s newer songs.
He sounds less than inspired to be attending the famously creative south London establishment, that counts John Cale and half of Blur amongst its alumni. “I don’t’ really know anyone. I just go there, do the classes and go home. I don’t really like it all that much.” Staz loved her last year, but possibly only because she was leaving. “There are a lot of bands, and a lot were really awesome, but I wasn’t really part of the scene.”
BITCHES have been doing pretty well for themselves without being part of any uni-based music scene, playing a ridiculous amount of live shows over the past year or so. Staz has started to list them on their Myspace, which has become a testament to just how hard working the duo are. “Staz loves playing shows, but I’ve stopped drinking so I don’t really enjoy it as much anymore. I get very nervous.” says Blake. “We prefer smaller, more intimate venues where you are able to see the audience – you can’t crack jokes if you can’t see people’s faces.”
BITCHES intersperse their wonderful 2 minute rackets with the stories that accompany the songs, which are usually to do with throwaway incidences from the couple’s day to day life. “Our songs aren’t very long, which probably has something to do with my attention span,” Blake explains in typically self-deprecating style, “at our first show we only had about 10 minutes of songs. So I decided to talk about them a bit, to make us seem like we’re a proper band.”
Did the group have any preconceived ideas of how they wanted to sound when they got together? “We played our very first show about three years ago to fill a support slot for a friend’s gig.” Recalls Staz. “We had two other members, about three songs and sounded horrible. So after that we knew what we didn’t want to sound like.”
“We just wanted to play very simple rock,” continues Blake “We’d been listening to The Jesus Lizard and Big Black a lot, but we got less angry as we started writing, and it has become more of an ironic take on rock. We don’t take ourselves super seriously”.
Bitches played their second mini-tour in America earlier this year, where they went down a storm, especially with the Californian youth. “We played some all ages gigs over there. They’re a lot better than the under age festivals that are going on over here. They're really rowdy and attract a great mix of people, all of them music lovers. We're planning another tour for summer next year.”
The duo are currently in the process of recording their first album with ex-Testicicle and DIY producer du jour Rory Bratwell, with whom they recorded their single earlier this year. “It’s going to be a long record, with good pictures,” says Blake” I really love David Berman from the Silver Jew’s spoken-word style singing, and I’m going to record some poetry for the album. We’re not really sure that any labels are going to want to put out a long spoken-word/rock album, and we’re too shy to ask, so we’re going to release it out ourselves. Hopefully sometime around March next year.”
In the meantime, make sure you check out one of BITCHES brilliant live shows. They’re playing at the last ever Club Milk on the 11th December and at Ryan’s Bar on the 18th.
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