36 Scene
and found themselves (not entirely naked, but some topless) in a press conference for Siouxsie Sioux. That was the kind of image the Scottish-formed band liked to perpetuate, and that, along with their “a bit punky, a bit Pogues-y and the kind of pisstake element of the cowboy” music, was what drew so many lesbian fans, seeking an alternative to the rather more serious performers of the time. “The famous ones like Joan Armatrading, Tracy Chapman, k.d. lang, they were really quite intense and serious but there was not a lot of having a good time to it. It’s beautiful and poetic but it’s not like Saturday night beered-up music and having a good dance and just being a bit uninhibited.” The band were originally together for around a decade, but “we sort of fell apart mainly because the bass player, who was my main musical soul partner, fell in love on one of our Australian tours and went there to live, and so did the drummer. Both on one tour. I virtually came back on an empty plane”.
STAND BY YOUR BAND
“We were at a quite big Swedish festival, which did something about dropping the alcohol prices and everybody in Sweden headed there. I got so pissed on the plane that I was actually sick in a nun’s shoe”
) Hang on to your stetsons – lesbian music
The band now comprises Lucy, “token heterosexual” Alison Jones on fiddle, Alics Gate-Eastly on bass and backing vocals and Angie Thomson on accordion and backing vocals, with temporary drummers drafted in.
The Well Oiled Sisters are back with a new EP featuring remastered classics. Jaq Bayles finds out why now and takes a trip down memory lane with lead singer Lucy Edwards royalty the Well Oiled Sisters, who took stages around the world by storm during the 1990s as “the original Cowpunk and badgrrl band”, are releasing an EP called Refreshed featuring newly remastered tracks from their two existing CDs on July 3. Coincidentally, their song Trouble is featured on the soundtrack of the widely lauded new movie Rebel Dykes (on general release later this year), which chronicles the 1980s underground activist London lesbian scene (more on this in Scene later in the year). So is there a renewed appetite for the kind of raw energy and hetero-disruptive behaviour that characterised the Sisters’ image and the excesses of the ‘90s? Lead vocalist, songwriter, guitarist and gifted raconteur Lucy Edwards, who lives in Brighton, thinks so and is hoping the band will get to gig again to give their legion of existing fans and a new generation of live music lovers another chance to experience their unique brand of punky country music.
“I do think it could reach a younger audience – I hope it wouldn’t be some ‘novelty granny in cowboy hats’ deal. I think there’d be a resurgence of people who used to come and see us but I do think there’ll be younger people who are ready for this just for the live music and the fun thing. It’s something a bit different – it’s all so homogenised now,” says Lucy. We’re chatting over zero-alcohol beers – oh, how times have changed! Google the band and it’s not long before you find they once “walked naked into a Swedish press conference” – not something you hear every day. “We were at a quite big Swedish festival, which did something about dropping the alcohol prices and everybody in Sweden headed there. I got so pissed on the plane that I was actually sick in a nun’s shoe,” recounts Lucy. “I had to wash it and put it back furtively under her seat, wet. That was the start of it all.” After using the pool at the posh hotel they’d been put up in, dressed only in “nasty lesbian boxer shorts”, the band flung open the doors to the wrong room
“The core of us have been together since the beginning of the ‘90s but about the year 2000 that was it really – we’d tried everything, we had a record deal and had to end up buying ourselves out of that because it was such an appalling deal.” After that the band launched what would probably now be seen as a crowdfunder, with people donating to get a second CD made, but “it was very badly mastered and produced and we were never happy with it”. They last played together in 2018 for a 20 Years After tour, which included gigs at WOMAD and London’s Hundred Club. Lucy had been living in Wales for 11 years and when she decided to move back to Brighton she realised she had all the original reels for the CDs. “They were just sitting in a drawer but had not been mastered properly so it was just a waste and a shame, although it’s very hard in all fairness to replicate a band that’s basically
