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We catch up with the extremely talented McQueen shortly before their
headliner gig at the Carling Academy in Newcastle to find out more about
the band, their music and their recently released debut album 'Break The
Silence'.
MM - Hi girls, thanks for taking the time out to talk to us today,
we really do appreciate it.
McQueen -
No problem, it's an absolute pleasure.
MM - Would you like to give us a brief history on how
the band came about, did you know each other before or did you advertise
for like minded musicians?
Leah
- Well basically we've been going for about 3 years now and we all
just knew each other before, like a lot of bands do. When you're a
musician and you're out on the music scene you meet other musicians and
you end up with bands breaking up and new bands forming all the time.
It was just exactly that really, we all came together in a very small
world.
MM - How do you feel that the bands sound has developed since you
originally started?
Leah - I think we've managed to create a real sound which is McQueen
and I think that has come from being stuck in rehearsal rooms for long
periods of time, listening to other bands and getting inspired by the
bands.
Hayley - I think also because we tour as much as
possible, to that effect you can't help but get influenced by the bands
you tour with and the experiences you have. I think our sound has
grown, but at the same time I think it has remained very distinct as McQueen.
Leah - If you listen to the McQueen album that is out now, you'll
see that it's a bit of a journey because we have some punkier tracks, then some
rockier tracks. We've got some moshier tracks and then some slower
tempo-ed moshier tracks. All together on the one album. There are so many
different musical flavours that have gone into it, but still we've retained
the McQueen sound. We're very proud of that.
MM -
At what age did you become interested in being a performer and who/what
inspired you to join a band?
Leah - Well I
can answer that very very simply because I grew up listening to rock music
and Guns N Roses really did it for me. I saw all these Guns N Roses
Videos and DVD's when I was growing up and it was just like WOW! I
really want to be doing something like that myself and so I just applied
myself to it and carried on. Here I am now in a band doing what I have
always wanted to do which is great. I think for me it was definitely
Guns N Roses, Skid Row and Pantera. They were the main three that really made
me go WOW! that is what I want to be doing with my life!
Hayley - My brother's a drummer and I used to always go along to see him play,
then one day I was asking him to let me have a go on his kit and as soon as
I got on it I knew that was it, the drums nothing else would do. I went
through school and college and all the time I knew I didn't want to do anything else apart
from play the drums. That's how much it influenced me. Any
type of music, I would just listen to everything I could and then I would play
it. Now I'm just out on the road now having fun doing it.
Cat - Similar sort of thing here really. Ever since I was little my
brother played guitar and I would always ask him to give me some
lessons, but he was always too busy with his friends and his own band. In
the end my mum worked out a deal where she'd pay him some money to teach
me a bit and so that's how I started off. He was into Punk bands, the
Sex Pistols and stuff like that. I just always thought he looked really cool with
the guitar. It all carried on from there, ever since I was a little
nipper.
Sophie - Again my story is pretty much the same. My
older brother got me into the late 80's metal where you had bands like Megadeth, Metallica and Pantera. I
remember he would always get me to start headbanging to it when I was about 5 years old.
I always thought yeh why not?
MM - Why not indeed.
Sophie -
Yeh! Exactly!
MM - The
band have been together for 3 years now and have finally released their
much anticipated debut album 'Break The Silence' last Monday. Would
you like to tell us about some of your particular favourites off the
album?
Leah - Definitely, I'd like to say we love every single song on the
album! It's hard to answer that question because my favourite song changes all the
time. We've had copies of it and have been playing it live for a
while so it
changes all the time. I'll be doing a show and be doing something
crazy with a song and it will feel really good at that time. I'll
think yeh this is it. At the moment I'm really loving 'Neurotic'.
I love the way it's the first thing you hear when it goes into your stereo
and it's just so unforgiving. It's so full on from the moment it
starts, it's menacing and I feel it is quite a dramatic McQueen song.
It's just so aggressive and I just love that about it.
I love all the
songs and the whole point of being in McQueen for all of us is that we
wanted to write an album of songs, that we ourselves would want to go out and buy. We don't write songs for other people.
We don't write
songs for a particular scene. We don't write songs for someone with
a specific hair cut. We write songs because that's what we want to
write and that's what we like. If people like it then that's fucking
great, but if they don't I really don't give a fuck.
Hayley - My favourite at the moment is 'The
Line Is Dead', simply because it's so fucking great to play. It
really is such great fun to play. Also 'Not For Sale' from the album is
another one of my favourite tracks. Actually tonight we'll be starting
the show with 'Not
For Sale'. My arms are a bit cold and although I'm into it, it takes me a bit
to warm up for songs so I'll have to warm up for that.
As far as the
recordings go though I fucking love 'Not For Sale'. When we were in
the studios recording it there was this huge fucking thunder storm going
on outside and I could see it out the windows. There was lightening going
off all over the place and the clouds were all purple. It felt a bit kind of
freaky because here I was playing this song and going fucking mental
inside and outside it was also going fucking
mental. I was playing so
fast and I was feeling so tired at this one point, then I hit this huge crash at
the end of the song and the all of a sudden the desk just went dead.
Everything just went completely dead. The storm cut out the power on
everything, but it was
just so weird how it all happened. I was like Shit! did I just do that???
Cat - I like them all and find there's a different song with a
different flavour for whatever mood you're in.
Leah - A bit
like a packet of Opal Fruits!
Cat - Yeh! If I had to choose one
favourite then I would maybe choose 'Break The Silence', the title track on
the album. Because it's the title track it really means a lot to me
and actually talking about the recording, it was actually the first song we heard
played back
and we were like ... fucking hell that's quite heavy isn't it! ... It's a
real moshy tune and I remember it was one song as soon as we'd finished
recording it, we just wanted the producer to play it back again and again and
again! We all just sat there and were almost crying. It was like ...
oh my god, look what we've done, did we really do this? ...
Leah -
Actually I have some scoop on that, the middle eight vocals were written
in the studio because there wasn't a vocal line over that particular part in
the song. Our producer had said that we really needed some vocals over this
part and so I went in and wrote something really quickly. I
took it into the vocal booth and we put a lot of effects on it. It
worked really fucking well on the spot, but we'd actually left this
particular effect on the vocals, we'd forgot to turn it back off. So in the last chorus
where you hear the
vocals, you can actually hear me breathing in between the words, which you
wouldn't normally hear. It sounded really good and when we first put
the record on we couldn't figure it out, finally we did and we loved it so
much we told them to leave it in.
Hayley - Yeh we said fuck
it, it was obviously meant to be, just leave it.
Sophie -
'Break The Silence' is my favourite without a doubt. It's just so aggressive and
it's just like a big fuck-you, bring it on. It's brilliant and I just
love the bass line on it as well, it's one of my favourites.
MM - The album is released on Demolition Records. How did you
come to hook up with them and is it just for the one album or does it go
further than that?
Leah - Well I hope we're going to be with Demolition for some time
because they are really really cool guys. Plus, they are so rock-tastic
because they've got David Lee Roth, Hanoi Rocks, Twisted Sister. They know
all about releasing rock albums because they specialise in it. We
think they should be
worshipped by everybody because they really know their stuff.
Some
of the bigger record companies who tend to deal with the more mainstream
stuff, pop bands and things like that, they don't really know what to
do with an album like the one we are releasing. It's a hard, heavy album.
When you look at our music I can see where they would maybe get a little
bit confused with it and wonder ... who do you sell it to?
When they
have pop artists they don't have to think about it too much, but with a
band like McQueen and other rock bands who are doing a similar kind of
thing, it's very difficult to try and find where the market is. But
these guys have been doing it for donkey's years and they know their shit.
They're also from Newcastle and they're like a family. That's how we
run as a band, we're like a family. Our management, all of our agents and
everything are all very very close to our hearts. We have a very great
team around us already so to bring Demolition in, you can really feel that
love is already there. We really love them.
Hayley - How it
all came about was the daughter of the top dog came to see us play.
Leah - Yes the daughter of the big chief himself!
Hayley -
Yes, the daughter and his brother both came to see us play independently
at different shows and they both went to him and said something like ... fucking hell you've
really gotta sign
this band! He didn't even come to see us play because he trusted his
daughter and his brother and that's how that all came about. It
really was that whole family thing again.
Leah - It's great and it
feels good working with Demolition because they know their shit
and if you're going to put your career into somebody's hands, you really
want them to know what they're doing. I totally trust them and
totally believe in them and I think they're fucking wicked!
MM - Yeh, well they obviously must love you too because otherwise they
wouldn't have signed you in the first place.
MM - You've toured with a wide variety of acts over the past few
years, which ones stand out the most in your minds and why?
Leah -
Wow, well there's been so many.
If we take it right back then we did about 5 or 6 dates with Juliette and
the Licks and that was great, that was really good for us. We
also did a tour with Viking Skull, who are very good friends of ours
and we love them to bits. We got another one off date with Juliette
and the Licks and flew over to New York and did a show with them
there, then some more shows in the UK. It was just such
great fun. We also did Electric Eel Shock who are our label buddies this past year and
then we did WASP.
WASP, now let's talk about
WASP. Those guys are fucking wicked, I mean seriously they're
great. It was a real honour for us to go out on tour with WASP and
believe me the fans of WASP are fucking wicked. They're all coming back
to see the McQueen headline shows, which we all totally appreciate.
Blackie Lawless is a real character. We adore him for being a
character. He is very cookie and very eccentric and although we
didn't actually get to meet him, his demands were great. That guy is
so fucking cool. The other guys in the band like Doug the guitarist, were
all
so nice and so sweet to us. On the last night of the tour the bass
player came over to us at the Islington Academy and he brought us a big bottle
of Jack and he just said ... there you go girls. It was so fucking
great.
Also touring with The Almighty after Boxing Day, we were here
in this same room with The Almighty and they are such a great bunch of
guys. It's so nice to be able to go out on tour with people who
are just so fucking great. You go out and the crowd is fucking great
and everybody's having such a great time.
Most of the bands we've
toured with have been totally wicked and we've had loads of fun with them.
You know that after the gig everybody's fucking tired and everybody
fucking stinks bad, but you just have so much fun with them and that's
what we love to do, we love to go out on tour and just have fun.
MM - The support slots have covered a wide range of bands that appeal to
all ages, was this a purposeful direction you took or did it just work out
that way?
Leah - Well it's not
really down to us, it's down to our agent and it's down to our management.
They decide who we go out on tour with. It's been really great
though,
we've supported 80's rockers LA Guns and a whole mixture of other bands.
Cat - The great thing is we can play with 80's bands, we can play with
metal bands, we can play with punk bands, we can play with all sorts of
fucking bands. We still appeal to the audience because our sound
isn't just one particular sound. We don't sit in one particular box and
musically we tend
to spread out a little bit, plus our music also appeals to both sexes in the
audience, which is great.
MM - I get the impression that it would be all
too easy to try and pigeon-hole you and pitch you to perhaps the younger 'Kerrang'
crowd, but having been to both The Almighty and the WASP gigs, the older
classic rockers and metal-heads really dig you, and that's hard for a
young band to get that kind of instant response and win them over so quickly.
Leah - Yeh, we went out on tour with those
guys and now we're back to do our own headline tour. Many of the guys
who came to see WASP have come back to see us on this tour. There was
one guy who
had seen us on tour with The Almighty and is now coming along to 4 dates on this UK
tour! We have such a wide range of fans. Yes, we do have the young
kids, but we also have the older guys and the older females coming along
too. We've actually got as many females coming out to see us as guys and
that's so nice to see.
Hayley - It's so nice for us as a
band because it shows that people get us, they understand what we are
about. When we go to do the merchandise stand after a gig, it's so nice to
just talk to such a wide mixture of people. The conversations you have
there are
just so interesting. Last night I was speaking to a guy who was just
17 and probably shouldn't have even been in the venue, but then the next
person I talked to was a 40 year old guy and it was just such a completely
different conversation. You just meet so many different walks of
life and I love that about McQueen, I really do. Even on MySpace we
just have such a wide mixture of people that are all so much fun to talk
to.
Leah
- It's nice for us because we haven't tried to be pigeon-hole into a
certain type of show anyway. We wouldn't say we were an Emo band, or a
Metal band, or Punk, or specifically just Rock. We have so many
different flavours in there and I think that's one of the things that
appeals to all the different age ranges as well. They can see where
we've come from and can spot the obvious influences of what we've grown up
listening to, but then there's also this a new flavour to it as
well which we have given it and that's what makes it all so fucking great.
We've done well, but we've also worked hard too.
MM - Have you ever felt under pressure to turn on your girly charms and
use your sexuality to win over an audience rather than your musical
skills?
Leah - You know what? There isn't a feminine bone in my fucking
body. We are just so not typical girls at all. Yes we are all female, or
so they say, it does say that on our birth certificates, but we're not
really delicate flowers and I don't think you could really get through
all this by being delicate flowers. Plus I'm not going to be a fucking
delicate flower and batter my eyelids for anybody. I think that whole
thing is all bollocks. If somebody doesn't want to do something for
us or whatever, then fine.
We have a really great team around us that
work with us and I don't want to use, or need to use my girly charms.
I'm not really that kind of person anyway. I'm not manipulative in any way
shape or form. If I want you do something I'll just fucking ask you
straight out. You're not going to get any fucking flowers or
whatever from me. We're just normal fucking girls doing stuff that
predominantly males do, but hopefully things are going to change and we'll
get to see more girls who are given the opportunity to do this, because it's great and
they should be able to do that.
MM - At The Almighty gig here there was some older male rockers who'd perhaps had a few
beers and were getting quite excited watching you girls, leaning over
the barriers and stuff. The security guard went over and took one to one side
and said ... Don't touch the girls, don't crowd the girls, they don't like
people getting too close and touching them. I was pretty sure from
what I saw if someone had got too close or touched you and you didn't like it,
you'd have just cracked them out.
Leah
- Actually yes I do remember that because there was
a guy who bless him was trying to have my wrist bands off.
Hayley
- Oh yeh that guy, I remember him too! I tell you what, the rest of us
girls were more worried about the guy than Leah!
Leah - What
had happened was I'd leaned over because I like to get in peoples faces
and get really intimate and I don't mind people touching me, although touch me in the
wrong place and you'll get a hard fucking smack. I really don't mind people
touching me at all, but he was going for my wristbands and this one,
(points to one on left wrist), this is very special to me because I got
from a very dear friend who's in a band in Finland called BloodPit. This guy was
trying to rip this particular one off me and I was like ... get the fuck off! ...
and so raised my fist.
After the gig he came over to the merchandise
and he was fine and dandy, all he wanted was the sweatband so I gave him
a different sweatband in the end. I remember is was a
struggle at the time because he wanted this one and I thought ... you ain't
having it! But yeh, we're quite gnarly for females, well I am.
Hayley - So really it wasn't the fact he was touching you that you
minded it at all, it was just that he wanted your damn wrist band.
Leah
- Yeh, he wanted my sexy wristband! Bless him.
MM - I read somewhere that one of your songs 'You Leave Me Dead' was
actually used on the soundtrack of a paint-ball movie? How did that
come about and have you ever been paint-balling yourself?
Leah - Well I've never actually been paint-balling myself because
what I'd
really like to do is just join the army and do it for real, that would be
great. I have actually got the DVD (Angels and Demons). I have no idea how it all
came about, I think perhaps they just heard our song and thought it would
be cool to have it on there, which we think is fucking great and we
happily gave it to them to use because it's such a great song for what
they were doing. It was shot out in America and you have these two teams
of paint-ballers properly geared up like they are going into Vietnam, which
is actually where we are going next week! (The girls are
playing at the Unite Festival in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam on the 2nd
Feb).
Anyway, you have these guys with all the
gear on and running about in true military style shooting at each
other and all these giant fucking inflatable things, but it was the
victory dances that really got me. When they'd won they were like galloping
about as if on horses and during the McQueen song the funniest thing I have ever seen
happened, one of these guys was like pretending to ride this horse about and
doing this little victory dance and then there was this guy who was standing behind
this chicken wire fence thing and he was going ... this is fucking shit
man, I've never seen anything like this in my entire life. He was
really going for it and getting gnarly because he thought the other team
had cheated and he was saying the referee was a wanker and all this shit.
I just thought that was the funniest thing I'd ever seen because there was
such passion there.
But that was what was so great about it and that's why we were happy to
donate the song, because there was such passion in what they do and
there's that same passion in what we do too. It's
just so funny though when I'm singing ... "You leave me dead" ... and
they're like running around shooting at each other. It's so fucking great, I love
it.
MM -
You've also had songs appear on a new Sony Playstation game and in a
Broadway play, is this the start of a McQueen invasion?
Hayley - Oh yeh, I've never really thought of it like that! Yes
it is the beginning of a McQueen invasion!
Leah - Actually when you think about it,
it has been
kind of like that. EA Games took two of our tracks and put one on
to Road Rally and I think the other one was maybe FIFA 06?, which was great
because I'm a big gamer myself. When we were out in LA we got to tour EA
Games and I tell you something, I was most delighted. I did actually
manage to get some
discounted games so I was really happy about that. I think it's
great because videos games reach such a wide variety of audience
and that's exactly what we want to do. It's fucking wicked to be
playing a game like Road Rally and 'Life Support ICU' comes on.
It's like ... WOW!, that's just so fucking wicked! I absolutely love it.
MM - Tell me one thing about yourself that most people don't
know, never have known, and probably never would have known about you if
they hadn't read this interview?
Leah - Actually it's quite funny because people are starting to get
the fact that I'm quite particular about my whiskey and have been ever
since I first started drinking whiskey and got to know the taste of it.
If
I'm going to have a Whiskey and Coke then it has to have just one ice-cube
in it. Specifically just the one ice-cube, if there's any more in
there they just go flying across
the fucking room. It's really funny because I didn't think that many
people would know about that, but then now we have people turning up to gigs and
they go ... there's your Jack and Coke and ONE ice-cube as requested!
I think ... who did I tell?!?
I can't think of
anything that most people won't know about me. I think most people know
most things about me now and the things that they don't know, I don't know
if I want to tell them! I might want to keep them to myself! I
suppose most people perhaps don't know that I cut and dye my own hair.
Oh and perhaps most people don't know we're actually really poor and need more
whiskey!
Hayley - Yeh, you dye your own hair and I just don't
brush my hair!
Leah - Yes, most people don't know that Hayley
Crammer does not brush her hair. Also most people don't know that Cat De Casanove lives up a back
passage! MM - Ah so you're a back-alley Cat?
Leah - Yes and Gina, Gina's got relatives that are the Italian
ice-cream people, she's actually called Gina Ginelli!
Hayley - Most people
don't know she's actually related to the ice-cream family so if you bring
Leah a Whiskey and Coke, then you also have to bring Gina Ginelli an
ice-cream!
Leah - Oh and most people don't know that Cat De
Casanove, that's actually her real name by the way. She is in fact related to
pirates.
Cat - Yes that is in fact true! MM -
Any particular pirates?
Cat -
Well I know they tried to blow up Christopher Columbus when he was trying
to discover America. If they had they could have changed the whole
history of everything.
MM - Any final words to all your fans out there before I leave you?
Leah - Yes, anyone who has been paying attention visit our website
at
www.myspace.com/mcqueen or
www.mcqueenmusic.com . Come and say 'Hi!'. We reply to all
messages personally but bare with us because it sometimes takes a while to
plough through them all.
Hayley - Can I just say that
this has quite possibly been the most fun interview we've ever done and
your questions totally rock!
Leah - Yeh, we like you because
those questions were just slightly different from the norm and that's
good, that's really really cool.
Cat - Are you coming
tonight? MM - Yes, see you down the front!
MM - So there you have it folks, you wanted to know more about McQueen
and now you've got it. Our thanks go out to Leah, Hayley, Cat and
Sophie (aka Gina) for their time, good humour and very enlightening interview.
These girls kick major ass and are wicked to watch live. If you
haven't already seen them perform then do yourself a favour and check them
out. So long as you don't try to grab any wrist bands you'll be fine!
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