Image by Ryan Pfluger
Noisettes
Issue #32
The band’s vixen of a front woman, Shingai Shoniwa, is flattered by Billie Holiday and Karen O comparisons, but she really just wants to sound like herself
By Andrea Bussell & Amy Schroeder
Published: June 6th, 2007 | 11:26am
It’s difficult not to draw comparisons between Noisettes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Both bands are three-pieces and fronted by pop-punk vocalists who command attention. But it’s understandable that Noisettes frontwoman-bassist Shingai Shoniwa gets frustrated with the media’s tendency to describe the singer as “Billie Holiday meets Poly Styrene” or “the next Gwen Stefani.” In short, Shoniwa’s an individual, and she wants to carve out her own niche.
Rounded out by vocalist-guitarist Dan Smith and drummer Jamie Morrison, the trio released its first EP, Three Moods of the Noisettes, on indie label Side Salad Records in the summer of 2004. Their title as one of London’s best live bands is appropriate. Their energetic performances have impressed crowds around the world, and their stage presence is just as powerful on rooftops, boats, and lumberyards as it is at Coachella or on major tours with Bloc Party and TV on the Radio.
The band’s debut full-length, What’s the Time Mr. Wolf? (Universal Motown), packs a high-energy punch in less than 40 minutes. Standouts include “Sister Rosetta (Capture the Spirit),” about gospel-guitar legend Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and the infections “Scratch Your Name,” a song that suggests “scratching your name into the fabric of this world before you go.”
The daughter of a Zimbabwean single mother, Shoniwa grew up in a South London public-housing estate. The experience, she says, absolutely informs her music. “Wanting to escape from reality can inspire the greatest and most trivial creative natures in people,” she says. “I think escapism is something that connects all of us. Everybody has their own little soundtrack, and I guess I’m trying to make my own soundtrack to my escape plan. I want people to realize that there’s so much more.”
Shoniwa talks here about stage injuries, gimp roles, and women in the music industry.
You excel at making live shows interesting. I’ve heard about your playing guitar with a loaf of bread. Is this true?
Yeah, that’s true. We were playing at this squat party, and we’d already done two gigs that day — an acoustic one and a proper organized gig at a venue. Then our friend asked us to play at this squat warehouse place. All the equipment was fucked — excuse my language — nothing was working. Beers were being spilt next to all kinds of electrical things; it was all a bit precarious.
We kept having power cuts, so we were just having fun and sort of taking the mickey out of how the whole show could be over in one minute. I wouldn’t say it was an intentional, arty kind of experiment. It was three or four in the morning, and everyone was really off their trolley by that point. It was the last boost of energy we had, and there was a big loaf of bread on the table, and I just picked it up. I was just clowning around.
Is it true that you dislocated your shoulder from jumping around while on tour?
Yeah, I did. I’ve been double-jointed since I was little because I did gymnastics and stuff, and I had dislocated it from a bike accident like a month before. By the time I went on the Babyshambles tour [in fall 2006], it felt like it had healed, but the doctor was like, “You should wear the sling for six weeks.” I thought, “It’s been a month, and I’m going on tour.” It was kind of cramping my style, and I felt like I was fine. I think it was just because I didn’t obey the doctor’s orders and it hadn’t finished healing.
How much of what goes on onstage is theatrical, and how much is just being taken by what you’re doing?
To be honest, most of it is just all being taken with what we’re doing. The only thing that makes it seem theatrical to people is the way we look. We don’t all go onstage in matching suits like Franz Ferdinand or something. Coming from South London, that would be quite boring unless it was for a video or a photo shoot.
I love dressing up. I’m from a huge African family and grew up in a really colorful place. The way I dress reflects my environment and wanting to take people into a fantasy world for half an hour. Arctic Monkeys are a great band, but bands like that sometimes spend a lot of time reminding people about the shitiness of reality. I don’t want to sing for half an hour, reminding people about how shit Sheffield is — unless it’s for one verse or a joke.
When you look at someone like Grace Jones, David Bowie, and Hendrix, you see part-human transcending that part-beast who can’t really control their own surroundings. Music is the way of bringing all of those things together and making people rise all around the room. It seems like that’s what coming back in entertainment.
A lot of attention is being placed on you, which isn’t unusual for the front person of any band. How are you dealing with it?
Because we’re a three-piece, we don’t really have many problems with photographs and interviews. I think that once we actually get in a room together, we’re so different that we could never compete for the same slice of the stage, and we don’t really feel the need to do that. I think we’re just going to do whatever we can to subvert and maybe redirect certain attentions that we might feel represent us in a positive or a negative way. What’s good for the band is what’s good for the band and if that means that sometimes Dan does certain interviews, we understand that it’s all for a common goal.
I don’t think democracy always works in a band. Let the torch shine where it shines. Three-pieces — like Nirvana, Band of Gypsies, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs — I think any of them will tell you there’s always going to be a gimp. And that’s not always the same person. The gimp role switches. Sometimes, I’ll be the one who’s getting on everyone’s nerves, and then sometimes Jamie or Dan will be the bitch (laughs).
Speaking of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, you’re often compared to Karen O and Billie Holiday. What are your thoughts on these comparisons?
I think they’re both kind of vixens in their own right. I would never think of comparing them just because they’re women, and that’s not just because I’m in a band. It’s because I’m a girl and because we’ve come so far as women in the music industry. We are able to speak for ourselves through our music rather than being defined and put into the spotlight in a very male kind of groomed way for an obviously predominantly male audience.
I feel like it is our time now. [I wish] Billie Holiday had had a lot more female support back in her day, when the music industry was run by men. Billie Holiday had to be so clever in the way that she would manage to subvert songs that were given to her. Sometimes she’d be given the blandest piece-of-shit songs and in her heart was probably thinking, “God, I have to sing this?” Any girl can see the sort of fight that she had to fight. These days, someone like Karen O and me, maybe we’re kind of lucky. There are a lot more women behind the scenes and lots of the people who end up comparing us are male journalists writing for men who might not get it.
When someone like Kurt Cobain or Jack White comes out, they didn’t go, “He sounds just like Muddy Waters,” did they? They just said, “He’s great, he sounds like him.” When women come out and men write about them, they tend to write about them in a way that other men can understand, which sometimes can seem a bit patronizing. But like I said, whoever you have to shine the torch on to get the people into that light, it’s not always a bad thing.
I’m not here to complain about how we’re represented by the press, because the music isn’t for the press. The music is for the kids and for people who want to feel an emancipatory feeling. I used to complain about that shit all the time, but all you can do is laugh. [I get compared] to someone who died 50 years ago, and the only thing we have in common is a passion for music and our gender and obviously some kind of timeless struggle.
WEB EXCLUSIVE: INTERVIEW CONTINUED FROM THE SUMMER 2007 ISSUE OF VENUS ZINE
Do you consider Billie Holiday or Karen O influences? What's influenced you up to this point?
I can't say that they're influences directly, but I think everything that you hear, even from the time you're in the womb, crawls into you and under your skin in some way. If you really want to do music, it just reminds you that it is possible.
When I was younger, I think I was more inspired by a lot of films and anything that could take me out of my reality and help me imagine transforming or turning into someone else if I wanted to. I like a lot of old silent-movie stars. I guess a lot of the old-timers probably laid down so many foundations that women performers today should be quite grateful for. I think a lot of women in the ’80s like Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, and Grace Jones took a lot of influence from these stars that the press didn't really realize some of the homage that was being paid to them subconsciously.
The moment that I knew I was going to be a performer was like that scene in Bugsy Malone where the guy is sweeping and he fancies that girl with the big afro — the dancer in the corner — and he sings that song, "I was born to be a dancer now." It's just like the light in their life, like “we can do it, we can make it.” It's the cheesy stuff like that that influenced me more than one particular band, song, or album.
What's it like for Noisettes to be on a major label now?
The main difference is that we've actually got money to tour properly. Whereas before, we were a bit more restricted to touring in the U.K., because we just couldn't really afford it. It's so expensive for bands to tour — especially in Europe because things are so expensive. Now we can go to America and we're going to Japan this week [Editor’s note: This interview was conducted in late February 2007].
When they were putting the record out there, it would have been so difficult for us to tour. We would've had to wait for money to be recouped in different territories before we could afford to tour. So we've got their support on the road, which is the most expensive part of being in a band apart from making the record. Tour support is what the independent label that we were on in England couldn't offer us after putting out an EP and a couple of singles. We couldn't take Noisettes on the road. Obviously a big part of what we do is live, whereas some bands are really great studio bands — like Air — and they don't like to tour more than once a year because they've all got families and they prefer being a studio band.
That's not really our thing. We're a rocknroll band, so it doesn't make sense for us to sit in a studio all year and then just post the record around the world by airmail. It's just not gonna work.
So what can U.S. audiences expect if they see you perform?
They can expect to be brainwashed! (Laughs). Do you know that scene in The Man With Two Brains? Steve Martin falls in love with the brain in a jar, which is supposed to be a love experiment gone wrong. He's touching the brain as if he were about to stroke a woman and singing that song, "If you like-a me, like I like-a you…" It's a really bad old theater kind of song.
Just come as you are and be as introverted or as extroverted as you want. Our audiences in England at the moment seem to be quite diverse. When we were playing on the Muse tour — which was arenas in Europe for six weeks — we were playing to about 30,000 kids a week and a lot of the audience is predominantly guys who wore a lot of black and looked like little Matt Bellamy clones. Which is cool, because it's nice to have that when you go to gigs and everyone seems to be in it together paying homage to this sort of cult of personality. But it was really funny because we got video footage of us playing at the Muse gig and what the crowd looked like, and then forward to our own gigs, which are probably about a tenth of that size, and it looks like the funniest thing, like some circus. Our shows are people from work, bloody kids, old people. It just looks great, they're quite an affair.
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