SYTERIA

come on, you’ve got to put more ideas in. I’m not saying don’t write, please write. If you don’t bring anything to the table, we can’t put it in. So, they all started writing,” explains Jax. “I think Steph and Julia wrote together. Pablo gave me a drum track, and I wrote a song around that. I mean, most of them we’ve done on our own. I think there’s five or six of them on there that are mine.”

Jackie adds: “We get a full demo with the drums and bass because we all don’t play everything. So, we just put the drums, bass, guitars and vocals and all the harmonies on there and then just present it. And then obviously when we get to rehearsals, we just bash it out and it just comes out. We tend to change the harmonies to something more natural to ourselves because we’re all quite natural to harmonies. And then yeah, it just turns into a Syteria song. So, however, it starts off, it always ends up sounding like a Syteria song.”

One of Syteria’s recent singles, It Hit Me has been in Jackie’s repertoire for some time. “Well, that’s funny. I wrote that in 1993. So, I was still married. I’ve done it with about three or four bands. My ex-husband was playing bass on it because he was in Heat Wave and stuff. So, we played really funky. And I’d written a song and he just put a bassline over the top of it. And a few bands I’ve played with did it. And it was just one of those songs that’s quite catchy and it’s kind of punky as well,” she says. “Lyric wise it’s about, it hit me that you are missing me as much as I’m missing you on a breakup. It’s like, don’t tell me you’re not missing me, because I know you are - that type of song. When you’re young, you write about that kind of stuff.”

Earlier this year, the guitarist extraordinaire was out on the road on a co-headline tour with Girlschool and Alcatrazz. “It was great. There were eight shows,” says Jackie. The tour was built around the band’s date at the Underworld in Camden, which had originally been due to take place a couple of years back but was cancelled due to several members of the touring party catching COVID at the time. “This year, it was the first gap we had where we could all make it because obviously, the Alcatrazz guys are from America. So, to bring them over for one show would have been ridiculous. So, we booked another six or seven shows around it and just played the old favourites.”

Jackie adds: “So yeah, it’s been good fun. We are planning to go to South America in September. So, we’ve already started booking that, so that’s being booked as we speak.”

You can see Jackie Chambers performing with Girlschool at HRH Road Trip in Ibiza. The new Girlschool album WTFortyfive will be released on July 28th. The new album from Syteria, titled Syteria World will be released shortly after. The official release date of the latter is to be confirmed.