Interview: Kitty, Daisy & Lewis

So how’s the tour going so far?

Very well. We played Berlin last night and flew over today but this is the first set of dates we’ve really done in England. In general there seems to be more call for us to play in Europe and Australia so we just don’t get the chance to play here very much.

And did you enjoy tonight?

Yes we’ve had a lot of positive feedback which is obviously encouraging especially as we didn’t feel we were at our best. Lewis’s guitar got broken in transit by a baggage handler at the airport and it sort of put everyone off a bit.

You’ve said previously in interviews that you don’t like being described as a rockabilly band. Could you explain this?

Well for a start it’s a term that we heard being used again and again about us in our early years and it just gets tiring to be boxed up like that but also we don’t really take any inspiration from rockabilly. It’s a genre that really only lasted a few years and, in our opinion, didn’t put out a lot of good music. It was used as a term for describing the revival of rock’n’roll that was going on at the time but that’s what we play – rock’n’roll – not some revived pastiche of it. Rock’n’roll for us just encompasses so much more and we’ve never played a rockabilly song in our set.

How did you approach the songwriting for the new album?

We’ve always written our own songs so it came fairly easily and we had a few of our own on the first record. You need to understand that our attitude towards the songs we covered on the first album wasn’t ‘let’s cover these songs’, we’d just always played them. They were handed down to us from our parents and we’d grown up with them so it just sort of made sense. It was more of a folky thing with songs passed down through the generations and we’d just picked them up and put our own twist on the whole thing. All said, songwriting wasn’t a novel idea for us and it didn’t feel too different from the first album for us.

One thing that has really improved from the first album is the production quality. How was this achieved?

Lewis and Graham (the band’s dad and rhythm guitarist) organise the recording end of things. In terms of equipment not much was changed but we had a serious look at the room we were recording in and moved it all about quite a lot. We felt it came across a lot more together too and were generally more pleased with the production this time around. But yeah – no big secret, just a bit of feng shui.