Peggy Sue interview

by Ine De Jonge

One of the newer bands around to keep an eye out for is called Peggy Sue. They have recently released an album "Fossils & Other Phantoms" which is out now on Wichita Recordings, a label to have launched the career of many a hip band. Read on to see what the girls in Peggy Sue (who are actually called neither Peggy or Sue) and drummer Olly had to tell Ine.

PRT: Before, you’ve only recorded ep’s. I was wondering how it felt to put a whole range of songs on one album. How is the proces different?
Rosa: It felt amazing. It was different in the sense that the songs we wrote for the ep’s were just seperate songs we were really excited about, and that we just wanted to put on an ep. Then we came to the conclusion that we wanted to make an album and we wanted it to be a collection of new songs. So in six months we wrote a lot of songs. Writing with a certain aim was what’s different. It’s also a much longer period, and we went to New York. It was very isolated, it was just us three. And then we started recording right away, we didn’t even have time to see the city.
Katy: When we started writing the album, we didn’t realise how difficult it was to actually put the songs together. We argued for three weeks about the order of the tracks. There so much more that goes into making an album. For the ep, we knew it was going to be these four songs. For the album, we didn’t know how we could take certain songs out and put new ones in. Because we were writing new songs while we were recording. Then we thought: “wow, these songs are great. Can we put these on instead?” The difference was that it was a proces, where we had e certain length of time and the chance to really work out what songs we wanted to have on the album.

PRT: How much of New York is there on the album?
Rosa: There are certain songs that we wrote while being there that definately have a certain influence of the city. It did have a certain effect since we really lived there for a month.
Katy: We had written most of the songs before we got there. So they’re more London or Brighton-songs , not necessary location songs. The producers we worked with were obviously really New York. There were two different areas in Brooklyn we were working in. I don’t know to what level we can say New York had an influence on our songs when all we did was spend time in our flat, go to the studio and then come back right ahead. It was a really intense period. We’d go to the studio at midday, then come back at three in the morning and then do the same the next day.

PRT: Why did you go to New York?
Rosa: Basically, because the producers we wanted to work with were there.
Katy: It was not like we were specifically looking for New York producers. We did like the idea of going away from our hometown to have this intence experience.
Rosa: It was also cheaper, in many ways. And it’s way harder to find a recording studio in London. We ended up doing some recording in Brighton, because most of the instruments on the album are played by our friends. So we did some overdubs in Brighton.

PRT: What recipes does one need for the Peggy Sue recipe?
Katy: Harmonies. A little bit of extra drums. Maybe a little bit of folk. Some r’n b roots. A bit of country.
Rosa: There’s a lot of different things going on. Katy will write a grunge guitar riff and then Olly will make up a strange drum and bass beat. Different ideas come together.
Katy: The songs usually come from one lead guitar part, or one accordeon or ukele part. Then we don’t like to do what is usually expected. Sometimes the ingredient contains doing the opposite from what you would expect. Then Olly will write a drum beat you wouldn’t expect. It keeps things interesting.

PRT: What comes first in the writing proces?
Katy: Guitar. And then the lyrics.
Rosa: One instrument and lyrics, that’s what comes first usually.

PRT: What is the biggest strength of the album? Why should people buy it and listen to it?
Olly: I think our biggest strength is the fact that you hear something different than what you would first expect. Hopefully. It’s hard to analyse your own music, but if people look into it, they might find something that they like and that they didn’t expect. I think it’s nice when that happens.
Katy: We have a lot of different influences. In the course of the album, we take one influence and then we show the different sides to it. There’s a similar mood on the album, that was the mood we were in when we were writing. Some songs have more country influence, others are more folk. It’s quite ecclectic.

PRT: Is it important for you to be very open to other influences? Or does it just happen?
Katy: I think it just happens. We are three people who have some musical interest in common and some are very different. There is music that some of us likes, and other things that some of us don’t like.

PRT: What is so different in your musical taste?
Katy: The fundamental music that we like is the same. But our favourite music is different. Olly for instance really likes classic rock ’n roll. And I hate it.
Olly: My favourite band is The Rolling Stones. I love The Who, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, The Jam. Things like that. Those are my biggest influences. But the girls won’t say those bands influenced them. But in general, what they like, I like as well.
Rosa: I also think that the longer we play our instruments... well we’re still teaching ourselves how to play really, but we like to learn to play a new instrument while we’re still busy trying the first one. The way we think about the music as a result, or the way we write songs is different. If I’m writing a guitar part on top on Katy’s, we’ll first hear it as a harmony and then try to complete it.
Katy: Olly understands the drums, and Rosa and I know our guitar parts very well. But if you’d ask me to play some song, I wouldn’t know how. We don’t necessarily know the rules of the guitar. You have to be creative with it and just trust your ear. I don’t know what chord you’re supposed to play after another one to make a chorus. Sometimes that means we have a song without any chorus. You just do what you think sounds right and trust yourself enough to do that.

PRT: So it’s all based on instinct and feeling the moment?
Katy: You just have to go along with what you like and assume that someone likes it as well. Even if that doesn’t always work out.

PRT: To what level do you need each other? Do you disagree often?
Rosa: Oh yeah. But I think you need that in a band.
Katy: I don’t think that the band would be the same if one of us was gone. If one of us would be replaced by someone else, it would be a completely different band. Except for Rosa.
Rosa: It’s really intense though. We’ve on the road for 3,5 weeks now, then we’re home for four days and then we’re going away together again. You spend so much time with the people you are playing music with, and there’s obviously a lot of love and you get to know each other ridiculously well, but you also fight. That’s healthy. If you don’t like a song, there’s a good and bad ways to say you don’t like it. Sometimes having a big discussion about that can make the song better in a way that everyone likes it. But I agree with Katy, no one could be replaced.

PRT: Who started the band?
Katy: We both started the band. We met at school. Rosa’s a year older than me, but we were friends at school. Then we went to uni in Brighton and we became better friends there.
Rosa: Katy was playing music and someone had heard a cd she had written. We were helping each other out, singing on each other’s song, harmonizing. She then asked me to come and sing with her, and that became our first gig. We were a band from that moment onwards.

PRT: When did Olly start to play in the band?
Olly: It’s nearly two years now.

PRT: To what extent did he change the music?
Katy: A lot.
Rosa: He changed the music in two ways: he brought along new influences and allowed us to do more. For example, if there’s drums, you can do so much on top of that. It adds to the whole bottom layer. He encouraged us to play more instruments as well and play around more
Katy: You could also do less if you have drums. In the beginning, when it was just the two or us, we just had one acoustic guitar and some funny toys like klockenspiels. Then you could not leave out the guitar, because then you didn’t have anything left. Now that there’s drums, if there’s other things going on, then you can not have things, or you can not have two voices all the time. Now we can have more textures. It’s really good.
Rosa: We used to do the percussive parts with our mouths.
Katy: Which meant we couldn’t always do the harmonies because someone was busy trying to create a beat. And it wasn’t always the right rhythm. It didn’t look very attractive either.

PRT: How personal are your songs? To what level is music a medium to express your feelings and thoughts?
Olly: What a question!
Rosa: I think the album is definately very personal. Our songs are often quite honest. We used to be more comical when it came to writing songs. When Katy and I first started writing together, the songs were more removed from us. We’d use funny anecdotes and metaphors. But as we got to know each other better, and started to trust each other more, it became more honest.
Katy: I think lyrics are often a way of saying things you don’t necessarily want to say out loud. Or they are like conversation that you want to have with people in a straigh-forward way. Sometimes you don’t feel ready to say it, but you want someone to understand something. Then sometimes you use lots of methaphors, and other times you say exactly what you want to say. Lyrics are always very personal. But at the same time, because there’s two of us, we’re slightly more protected from getting too personal with the lyrics. If I’m singing one of Rosa’s songs, that’s not my experience I’m singing about, even though she’s my best friend and it stays a personal things, and you can be emotional about someone else’s lyrics. This album is quite sad, it has a lot of emotional content. But because it has stories of two people, it’s not so much of a confessional thing. When you’re singing someone else’s words, you find your own meaning to them instead of if being confessional.

PRT: You said that Careless Talk Costs Lives is about the use of words and how they can be misunderstood. How ambiguous are your songs?
Katy: I think some of them are quite up front and others are more ambiguous. We’re not into explaining songs completely to people because we think it’s quite nice it they work them our for themselves. If there’s an idea that someone wants to cling on to, and you say it’s about this moment at that time, then you take that away from people. But sometimes it’s also nice to say what’s it about when it doesn’t necessarily take anything away.

PRT: Blood Red Shoes really despise interviews because then they have to think about they music too much in such a way that it doesn’t feel natural anymore.
Katy: That’s so something Steven would say.
Olly: Definitely Steven.

PRT: Do you mind having to think about your music all the time?
Katy: I quite like it.
Rosa: I don’t know.
Katy: If you don’t want to discuss something, then you just don’t put it in your songs. If there’s something you don’t want people to confront you with, even if it’s a friend or one of us.
Rosa: Of a partner. You just don’t write it down then. There’s definately a proces of self-editing. Sometimes you’d use metaphors to cover it up or to confuse things. But if you really don’t want to say something, you just don’t do it. Also, what Katy said earlier, about not wanting to explain the entire meaning of the songs to someone, the album definately has a certain mood, but the songs themselves are really different. I can go months thinking one of Katy’s songs is about this, while it’s actually about something completelty different. That’s the nice thing about being able to read into something yourself.
Katy: I quite like it if someone asks us about our lyrics, because that means you’ve thought about it. If someone says: “this is what I get from this songs”, then that’s cool because they’re interacting with you about it. Songs are condensed ideas, there’s more to say about it than what’s being told in the song itself. If it’s a good lyric, there’s more to it than just the lines. This way you can expand your ideas.

PRT: What is more imporant to you: that people really understand your music, or that there’s still some mystery to it?
Rosa: I think it’s impossible to completely understand, unless you find out what the person is specifically singing about and thinking about at that point. The only time I think something if mysterious when I listen to an album, is when someone is singing something I really don’t understand. I think everyone brings themselves to music, that’s what you do. I have friends who always think that a song is about a certain things because they think it’s obviously directly related to them. You can make a song about a break-up, or about dying, or about a day in the park, but it all depends on who you are and what you make of it.
Katy: This is the first tour where we’re playing countries where the audience won’t necessarily understand the lyrics. It’s quite scary. Because it’s such a big part of the songs. We can fuck up our instruments, but still keep on singing perfectly. It’s quite frightening when you want to say something while you’re not sure if the people are going to grasp what you are trying to tell. It’s much easier now we’re more musical than when we started. Then is was all about the lyrics, and the humour was quite English. It would be hard to still be doing that and tour Europe. I’m sure a lot of people do understand, or partly understand, but it does take away a whole element of what we’re trying to say.

PRT: What has been the weirdest interpretation you’ve heard?
Olly: There was something about Matilda.
Katy: Someone in an interview once said that all of the songs on the album are quite mysterious, except for Matilda that is apparently quite obvious. They said it was about a break-up, while it’s actually the only song that isn’t about a break-up. We’ve never really said what it’s about because it’s quiet subtile and it was just funny that they thought it was so obvious. Or mishearings are usually quite funny.

PRT: How much attention do you pay to details? Are you perfectionists?
Rosa: A lot.
Katy: We’re huge perfectionists. Although the imperfections end up being our favourite bits. But we’re still obsessed with details.
Rosa: We’re only three people, but we try to make as many noise as we can with limited number. We often play a lof of old folk instruments, like ukeleles. One of my friends said that everything on the album sounds like it’s really supposed to be on there. Because there’s not that much going on. I think that’s true, because we’re extreme perfectionists.
Katy: Perfection doesn’t always have to be perfection. Sometimes you need the good kind of wrong.

PRT: Where did The Pirates go? Did they loose in a duel with Pete and The Pirates?
Katy: Olly beat them up. And they left. So we kept Olly. And they’re never coming back, because Olly’s better.

PRT: You have toured with a whole range of different bands. What makes Peggy Sue fit amongst this variety of music?
Katy: I think it’s the fact that we’re not really genre-specific. We’re not particularly setting our ways of what kind of music we’re making. We take influences from everywhere, and there’s always an element of the music they’re playing in our music. Also, I think it’s really boring when the support act is exactly the same as the the main band. It’s more intersting if someone is doing completely different.
Rosa: It has always been about the music. The music the bands make that we have toured with always attract people who are into music. It’s not cool if you go to see the support act and they turn out to be a copy of the headliners. But all the bands we have toured with are basically friends of ours. We have appreciation for the same music as them, and they know that.

PRT: What kind of general atmosphere did you want to create for the album?
Rosa: A lot of people see it as a really depressing album.
Katy: Lyrically, not musically.
Rosa: But I think even lyrically, even if you hear two songs after each other, you hear the similarities. There’s definately a certain moodiness. Sometimes it’s about trying to see positive things in the end, it’s not all as negative. It could be a slightly grumpy album.
Katy: A bit grumpy, but also a bit rowdy (?)

PRT: What kind of weather would fit the album?
Rosa: Winter.
Katy: Snow. No, maybe not snow.
Rosa: Someone texted me and said that she was listening to the album while it was snowing and that it was perfect.
Katy: Maybe a cold and fresh autumn day.
Rosa: We actually had a discussion, because the album is released in the summer and we said that it was definately a winter album. Loads of the songs are written for people to listen to with their headphones and by themselves, not necessarily to hear live. We really thought about the listening-proces. I think it’s a winter album. I can see people cuddled up in a blanket, listening to it.
Katy: Hopefully it works at any time of the year. It’s definately not an album to listen to when you’re getting ready to go to a party though.
Olly: It’s not a beach party album, no.
Katy: Or a first day of summer album. Or a last day of school album.
Rosa: The next one will be a last day of school album.