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Dollsquad

Interview: DollSquad... in Leather

DollSquad is an Australian garage-punk band, which has 6 beautiful girls. The group has released 2 albums in 2005 and 2009, one EP and one single.
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DollSquad is an Australian garage-punk band, which has 6 beautiful girls. The group has released 2 albums in 2005 and 2009, one EP and one single.

Their recent album is called "Lethal in Leather" and they speaked to Dimitris Antonopoulos about it and many other things. Check it below:


 *First of all tell me about your forthcoming tour in Europe
This is the Lethal In Leather tour! And it is gonna kick some serious rock n roll butt!

I started DollSquad about 6 years ago and this is the second European tour for DollSquad.  The first one ended in true rock n roll disaster with the first line up of my band splitting up overseas. Right on stage in Vienna in fact!  I then quickly moved on and formed a temporary European line up my band DollSquad in just 3 days!! I finished that first tour with that temporary line up. Then I came back to Australia and I looked very hard to find all of the current members. That was over two years ago. We have Yolanda my new co-songwriter on guitar, Alice on keys, Aleks on bass, Ash on drums and Lulu on backing vocal and percussion.  Wow DollSquad became bigger and better: a sextet! 

DollsquadNow this line up is solid as a rock!  So, we decided to again embark on a tour of Europe. I am very excited about this tour. It is going to better than the last time and the shows are going to be even more spectacular. The show we have for the European audiences is totally wild!  It’s not an easy thing getting a six piece all girl band across the ocean from Australia to Europe! It takes a lot of dedication, organization, time and of course money. It is not something that punters in Europe are going to see every single day of their lives. This is rare.  This is a very special event and a real treat for the European rock n rollers! It really is like nothing they have ever seen before…and its all the way from Australia!

Our manager, Steve Lucas, got in touch with a few really great bookers in Europe and they have done a fine job in booking the gigs for us, organising the equipment hire, the van and so on.   We kick off the tour in Italy which I am thrilled about because we didn’t make it to Italy the last time we toured Europe and I was very upset about that.  Then we head to Spain which I am also really excited about.  I always wanted to play gigs in those two countries.  The whole band is ready and primed to totally rock out and make for really good party times at every single one of our gigs.

Then we head to Germany to play the Summer Safari and pick up a van with a girl driver of course! And we drive all over the place including France where we headline the Cosmic Trip Festival. Our full tour dates are as follows and we all hope to meet as much of our audience as possible at every single show:

Dollsquad29 Apr  
Casbah Club Pegognaga (Mantova), Italy
30 Apr  
Shindy Club in Bassano Del Grappa (Vicenza), Italy
1 May  
Sidro Club Savignano Sul Rubicone (FC), Italy
2 May  
LA CASA MATTA In Biauzzo Di Codroipo, Udine, Italy
4 May  
ARCO Alcazar De San Juan, Spain
5 May  
Wurtlizer Ballroom Madrid, Spain
6 May  
Los Picos Santander, Spain
7 May  
La Iguana Club Vigo, Spain
8 May  
Run Rum Ferrol, Spain
10 May  
Cocodrilo Negro Ponferrada, Spain
11 May  
Helldorado Vitoria, Spain
12 May  
Rock Sound Barcelona, Spain
14 May  
"Summer Safari Festival" Halle, Germany
17 May  
Velbloud Budweis/Budvar Czeck Republic
18 May  
Schaffhausen, Fasskeller, Switzerland

Dollsquad19 May  
Solothurn (Switzerland) "bad boys (and girls) for life tour" Kofmehl, Switzerland
20 May  
Alte Hackerei Karlsruhe , Germany
22 May  
Palais d’Auron - COSMIC TRIP FESTIVAL Bourges, France
23 May  
ZwölfZehn Stuttgart, Germany
24 May  
TBA Frankfurt, Germany
26 May  
Bastard Club Osnabrück, Germany
28 May  
Bassy Cowboy Club Berlin, Germany
29 May  
Sonic Ballroom Koln, Germany
My only regret is that this time we don’t make it to Greece!

* I love the girl groups of the sixties! Do u know SHANGRLI-LAS?
We were raised on the sixties girl group sounds. We love all of the Phil Spector ‘wall of sound’ records. We
love The Shangri-Las too of course. My favorite band however is Shocking Blue. I was very inspired by Mariska Veres as a young child.  I thought she was amazing. Nothing compares to her! While we love the girls sound of the sixties we do not want to just be a ‘carbon copy’ re-hash of the sixties. Furthermore it’s the girl bands that wrote and played their own material that we love best! For example Goldie and the Gingerbreads, She, The Daughters of Eve and Suzi Quatro’s first band The Pleasure Seekers. I also loved The Brood! DollSquad is a very competent band. We are more like these later bands than the cute girl bands. 

Reviewers today compare us to Iggy and the Stooges as well as The New York Dolls. We like comparisons to male bands as much as we like comparisons to girl bands! At the end of the day we are just a band! The Stray Cats asked for us to support them on their last tour here in Australia. That was such a great experience for all of us. Slim Jim was very cool and friendly was very impressed by our Drummer’s technical ability (she is left handed too like Jim)! Each of us can play several instruments and some of us are classically trained. So, while we can put on a great show as a girl band with sixties dance moves we also have all of the essential rock n roll paraphernalia such as microphone tricks, and playing the guitar behind the head. We are also very good musicians! The sixties girl groups firstly did not write their own songs and secondly did not play or could not play instruments. We do both! We have played with The 5,6,7,8s and they are a great band. There are many great girl bands that we have played with and that we admire. But DollSquad is different to most girl garage bands.  We are not a trash band either. We are not afraid of the word ‘rock’ and you will never ever know this unless you see us in the flesh!  We do original songs in the style of the great garage punk and pop punk classics.  For fun, we sometimes cover our favorite songs from the past too! 

Dollsquad* What about your name, Dollsquad?
The name comes from the Ted V Mikels film “The Doll Squad” of course,  Retro B grade movies is something we all
love.  And, Tura Satana!

However our band name is one word not two words.  We are DollSquad not Doll Squad or The Doll Squad.The name was also chosen by me because I wanted my band to be a squad not just a band.  I wanted us to be a team, a GANG!  That makes for a cool and fun band I think!   We have to be ‘all for one and on for all’  United we stand, divided we fall and all that jazz.   You can see this unity on our myspace from the live videos and photos.  www.myspace.com/theofficialdollsqud.

* 'Lethal in leather'...great title for the new album...tell me some details
This is DollSquad’s second album. All our previous release *(all on European labels) were self produced. 
This time I wanted a more objective production. I wanted an outsider to step in and make the hard decisions!  I wanted to see what an outsider would do with the ‘dollsquad sound’ I wanted a change in musical and visual direction for this album too. I wanted tougher, stronger, more competent, more rock n roll, more power less pop. But it was important to choose the right person for this job too! So I asked Steve Lucas from legendary Australian punk band X. This is a band that has an amazing history of solidarity in the face of constant trouble. They flew in the face of commercialism and refused to succumb to the big hand of the major label that was interested in them.They could have been huge but they chose to stay grass roots. That is what I admired. Who the hell wants to be mainstream if you have to forsake your individualism, your original fan base and the way you look? Not me! 

Steve listened to my demos and the demos that guitarist Yolanda and I had made and then he called me to say he was interested in doing the production of our album.  I was so happy about that! I asked Steve because he had never produced any other band before! I wanted that freshness of attitude. It’s very important to have that mindset of anything is possible. I didn’t want the mindset of ‘oh this is how we always do things’ that’s boring! I didn’t want a ‘name’ producing our album I wanted someone that could not be compared or benchmarked, categorized or classified. I wanted a really great album not just a ‘famous producer brand name’ for an album! I didn’t want people to say ‘oh so and so produced it so it must be good’ or ‘oh so and so produced it so it must be bad’ I didn’t want anyone to be able to pre-judge this record! I wanted people to have to actually listen to the damn thing to get an opinion about what it was all about. After all that’s what music is for right?

DollsquadSteve did such a great job on this album. He made the recording process a lot of fun and it’s the best sounding record my band has ever done!  I love it the best.  It sounds full, butch, strong and original. We did not use protools to overdub and fix up anything that was a ‘mistake’. We did not compress the hell out of the tracks because both Steve and I dislike that compressed drum sound in particular. The drums sound big full and booming! The recording as a whole sounds really ballsy! GOOD! Steve even left some of the talking between the tracks for extra fun. The most important thing is that we recorded 15 songs in one day! Then we did vocals the next day and backing vocals and then Steve did the mixing with the engineer. It’s a very live recording and we were not precious little girls about it. We went in, we recorded, we came out smiling!  Lethal in Leather is a truly excellent example of what DollSquad sounds like live right now. There is nothing on that album that we cannot replicate in a live show! Not many bands can boast that about their records today!!

* Whats going on in Australia right now? What about the local rock n roll scene I mean...
DollSquad, it's what’s happening!   There are some great bands we like right now: Digger and the Pussycats, The
New Black, Freddie and the Pops, Mass Cult Suicide, Bunny Munro, Tim Rogers, Cold Harbor, The Council, The Bad Kills, The Cool Charmers, Brigitte Hadley and the Dark Shadows, The Booby Traps, and of course X who are gonna be in the USA on tour in May. 

But many venues in Melbourne and Sydney are closing down from pressure from the government due to liquor licensing laws.  Developers want land to build high rise….boring!  Pokie Machines (mini casinos) want to put their stupid gaming machines in live venues so the live venues are getting less and less.   The music scene is terminally ill and if something is not done soon it will die.   Everybody wants to make money and nobody wants to pay.   Only a handful of clubs do it for the love of it.  Only a hand full are ‘true blue’ as we say.  One of the best is The Sandringham Hotel in Sydney, The Junkyard (Railway Hotel) in Maitland and of course Cherry Bar in AC/DC Lane in Melbourne.  

Young kids in Australian are not into subcultures as much as we were when we were their age.  They are into computer games and facebooking the hell out of life.  It’s not the same as when we were growing up and the local record store was THE SHRINE to be worshipped! 

Today anything can be bought fast on ebay so everything loses its mystique!  When subcultures die rock n roll cultures die and then you may as well be dead…the living dead! 

Dollsquad*Tell me about your Fuzztones cover on the tribute album
Well Rudi asked us and we answered the call to duty.  We did a killer version of Bad News Travels Fast. Really
hard and fast and primitive just the way Rudi wanted it.  It opens the new tribute sampler Illegitimate SpawnThat was a pleasant surprise! 

I change the lyrics a bit to make it from the girl’s side..the BAD girl’s side hahaha. ‘So here’s one pussycat that’s deadlier than most’ Then in the instrumental I whisper ‘ohhhh I’m sorry Rudi’  it’s totally tongue in cheek.  Very funny!

*Did u ever meet Rudi really?
Yes! Of course!  I met Rudi and Lana the first time I toured Europe.  We also met Paul Weller…

Anyway I stayed at Rudi and Lana’s apartment in Berlin last time. Amazing isn’t it to finally meet musicians you really dig! Lana is really cool! A great keyboard player and a fantastic girl! Lucky for Rudi we already have a keyboard player or we would pinch Lana hahahaha.

They will come to the Berlin show this time too at the Bassy Club. If Rudi is keen, I will certainly invite him to duet Bad News Travels Fast with us hahahaha! That will be something to see!

*Is there a project for an Athens gig maybe?
Nana Mouskouri watch out!  DollSquad takes no prisoners!
But seriously, Greek bookers take note! Contact Steve Lucas on
rocknrollhonesty@hotmail.com and make us an offer! We would love to rock it out in Greece in 2011.

Dollsquad - Bad Word


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