WELL OILED SISTERS

STAND BY YOUR BAND

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

Hang on to your stetsons – lesbian music 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 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”.

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 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 live and get that across.

“We had a friend and benefactor, a guy called Drum, who’s got a lovely recording studio in Devon. He got his hands on these and started adding things and I went down to Devon with Alison and Angie and we put some more stuff over some of the old tracks. Now he’s remastered them and they sound great. He’s going to do both CDs but at the moment we are going to put out three on Amazon and Spotify and then will put out one a month. There are probably about 20 tracks, all originals I wrote with some contributions from other band members.”

Lucy recently spotted one of the band’s CDs going on eBay for £45, and also received a Facebook message from a 15-year-old girl who said she had found one in her mum’s attic and the music had “blown her away” as she’d never heard anything like it – “and that’s from a shitty CD” – so that augers well for the new releases.

“People are dying to get back to gigs and I think there’s going to be a new way of listening, I hope from any great catastrophe good art comes out and good music”

I think live music is going to make a big comeback, playing live instruments, not music that’s pre-programmed, so we would like to do at least one more gig.”

The band’s big break came in 1992 when they toured Europe with Morrissey. It sounds an odd pairing, but Morrissey requested them as his support after seeing them at The Power House in London.

His ‘people’ got in touch with their manager and a strange exchange followed when the offer for the tour was made. “They said ‘it’ll only cost you £200 a week’ or something,” says an incredulous Lucy. “Even though it was Morrissey we went ‘fuck off we’re not paying’, and they eventually agreed to pay us. So that was quite good negotiating. Then I got told ‘oh god, you’re supporting Morrissey – you’re going to get killed’, because the fans were so obsessive and gave the support band a hard time. They would boo you off because they wanted him on, but actually we did OK. But it was terrifying – we’d gone from doing pubs to the Olympia with 20,000 people.”

On the back of that came their long association with WOMAD, and Lucy fondly remembers her favourite gig with the festival during a train journey from Perth to Adelaide, with, among others, “throat singers, a Chinese fiddle player, an African whistler guy” – a classic WOMAD line-up – and each night people would pay to join the train and hear the music (it was being filmed as part of an ABC documentary). “It was five days across the desert, which was brilliant, and in the middle we stopped in a little town called Pimba which is like a population of 20 and they’d put up this massive stage and hundreds of people, particularly indigenous folk, came from hundreds of miles around and we were playing as the sun was setting and they were kicking up the red dust. The indigenous folk love country music – you could hear the sigh of relief when the one-string fiddle player got off.”

The band never chased chart success, “we were never going to make it with our image – the Spice Girls had just come out so there was no way that was going to happen. I don’t think any of us wanted it that much to compromise.”

And Lucy remembers a vivid dream she had on the subject. “It was quite pathetic. We were in this nightclub in Blackpool with the disco floor all lit up and there was [puts on a compere voice] ‘And now ladies and gentlemen, performing their smash hit…’ and it was a song called Scratch that I hated, it was so facile and annoying, but it was an instantly woo, woo, woo fast song and in my dream we came off stage after miming to the song that had been a novelty number two hit and I was weeping over a bottle of brandy and looking at one of those lightbulb mirrors. I thought, that could have happened and then you’d just be one of these joke singles or a Trivial Pursuit question. It felt like a prophecy. There was no way we were going to be k.d. lang, we weren’t that polished and we didn’t have the management to drive us in that direction. And by this point we were all in our thirties and I don’t think anyone was going to start wearing a gingham dress and pigtails.”

For now, the band is hyped to release the remastered tracks (the first to be Trouble, Amphetamine and Seven Hours) and Lucy concludes: “It’s very satisfying that this is happening. I just feel at this stage you’ve got nothing to lose. If we get some gigs out of it, it will be great.”

more info

www.thewelloiledsisters.com

FB @thewelloiledsisters

Twitter @welloiledsister

Amazon: www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/ B097XJC8XK/ref=dm_ws_sp_ps_dp#

iTunes: https://music.apple.com/gb/album/ refreshed-2021-version-single/1573801898