Rubella Interview

Rubella are an all-girl trio from London who have been together for just over six months. The girls brought their brand of quick-fire, furious-bubblegum punk to Blackpool to play the North by Northwest music festival. We spoke to vocalist and guitarist Noush, bassist Gemma and drummer Lisa.

Why Rubella?
Noush: Rubella came before the pun; we didn’t call ourselves that name so we could make jokes.
Gemma: The name came before the swine flu outbreak. It’s just a happy coincidence I guess [giggling].
N: We only chose Rubella because it sounds like a girls’ name.

There seems to be a despairing theme running through your songs from Napalm to Arbeit. Do you find creative inspiration in devastating events?
N: Yeah kind of. The Arbeit Macht Frei thing, you can link it to the Second World War or whatever but we like it because it means ‘work liberates’. The idea that you can apply that today because we are in the middle of a credit crunch, the worst depression we have had for decades. There is this idea that you work all your life and then your savings get completely wiped out, so it’s sarcastic, Arbeit Mach Frei.

Does anger express itself differently for you than for a male band?
N: To a degree yeah. Stereotypically if girls get angry they just cry, do you know what I mean? But on the other hand there is this myth that if guys get angry with each other then they fight it out and walk away afterwards whereas girls are really mean to each other and bitch behind each others backs, which I think isn’t exactly true. I mean I don’t know many guys who every time they have an argument give each other black eyes. I think the fact that we look the way we do and the way we sound might be unexpected. It isn’t particularly calculated. This is how I dress anyway. I don’t think it’s necessarily shocking, some people might think so. It’s not our intention. It shows we have much more depth, there is always much more going on beneath the surface.
G: It’s a juxtaposition, it takes people by surprise. You come on stage and people don’t know what to expect. It’s quite Japanese school girly, cute and innocent until you start playing.


Who are your influences?
G: We like Manga, so we’re quite influenced by that.
N: We like Kill Bill. I’m really influenced by films when I write songs and lyrics not just listening to other bands. I really like slasher flicks, Quentin Tarantino and all that. We want to be the girl version of Clockwork Orange. That’s why we dress kind of similar.

Like The Droogs?
N: [laughing] Yeah we want to be the Droogettes. If we form a covers band we might call ourselves the Droogettes and we’ll just play Jimi Hendrix covers.

How would describe one of your gigs?
G: It’s different every time really.
N: I just say whatever comes off the top of my head. Sometimes I’m really self-deprecating and sometimes I just really egotistical and rude; depends when you catch us really.
G: It’s a bit of a white-knuckle ride being on-stage with Noush. We never know what she is going to say.

Any festivals planned this summer?
G: No, but we want to and we are working on blagging ourselves into a few places.
N: We’re only getting to the stage now where things are opening up for us.
G: We’ve been advised by people that it’s not a great idea when you’ve just formed to play festival as the promoters tend not to put the same people on new band stages for a second year running. Plus we’ll get a better slot if we’re better established.
N: We’ve been lucky so far getting some exposure on the radio. It’s a mixture of luck and hard work. And we want to build on that.

North by Northwest

Senton Bombs

Named after a wrestling move and sounding like a rubbish version of Dinosaur Jnr or Fugazi the Senton Bombs rocked a busy Blue Room. The three members, all from Blackpool, play their brand of rockabilly surf rock with wanton abandon and a sense of fun. Obviously not concerned with attaining musical perfection the fast and furious blaze of noise is a shot in the arm for anyone tiring after a long day of band after band. There is also a bizarre, yet strangely enjoyable, cover of country troubadour Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Pancho and Lefty’. Lead singer and bassist dedicates a song to street soldier and drug dealer Bodie from television’s The Wire and proceeds to take a stab at a Tom Wait’s impersonation by covering that show’s theme song, ‘Way Down in the Hole’. You can’t argue with that.

North by Northwest

Lupa Tom

Local band Lupa Tom play the upstairs stage at Connolly’s to a handful of people but they set about their songs as if there is a full house. It’s a cosy venue and has the intimate feel of a concert in someone’s living room. The three-piece folk band consists of acoustic guitar, upright double bass and drums.

Their witty lyrics about love and loss, breaking-up and making-up and life on the scrap heap are more than a touch reminiscent of the brilliant I Am Kloot from Manchester. Lupa Tom sing of “cadging cigarettes” and “frappuccino-loving pricks” and getting back at cheating cellulite-ridden girlfriends. The drumming is fantastic, the double-bass a treat and the front man is warm, endearing and funny. They

are never going to set the world on fire but they are better than most bands playing over the weekend and deserve to be local favourites.

Swiss Tony

Scrooges Wine Bar plays host to the acoustic stage and has the feel of a welcoming bed and breakfast. Patterned carpet, choice of wines and a dimly lit stage provide the perfect place for engaging singer-songwriters. Unfortunately Swiss Tony is neither engaging nor it seems a songwriter, in fact I suspect he isn’t even Swiss. He is a young lad who does a short-covers set of songs by The Beatles, The Kinks and The Who, among others. It’s pleasant, harmless fun and the small crowd seem to enjoy it but it sounds like someone impersonating the lead singer of the Stereophonics doing embarrassing cover versions at a party to which he hasn’t been invited.

North by Northwest

Rubella




With a name like Rubella it would be all too easy to talk of fevers, inoculations and a coming epidemic but we’ll leave that to others. The all-girl-London-punk trio look slightly tired as they prepare to play their second gig of the day, having come straight from Connolly’s to the Blue Room.

The cuteness of their St Trinians-style uniforms of blazers and ruby bows, tempered by grunge essentials of Converse shoes, is disarming and makes the furious explosion of sound that follows all the more alarming.

The lead vocalist has perfected the prerequisite look of bored indifference as she bangs out the back-to-basics three chords required of punk bands. During Napalm she sings of children running from the terror of Agent Orange while the bass player ferociously screams the song’s title.The grim subject matter continues with new single Arbeit, and a chorus of “Arbeit Macht Frei” or work brings freedom, the words that greeted prisoners of Nazi concentration camps.

The sound is let down at times by some poor drumming as the tiny frame of the girl in the chair struggles with the timekeeping. This may be down to lack of stamina, and having to play two gigs in a row, but it is a distraction from the eminently likeable songs. Imagine a mixture of Placebo, Yeah Yeahs and Sonic Youth and you get close to the band’s sound. Rubella are certainly one to keep an eye on.

North by Northwest festival in Blackpool

The four venues for the festival were Connolly's Bar, West Coast Rock Cafe, Scrooges Wine Bar and The Blue Room


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The flesh-eating hordes roam the seafront of Blackpool. They are the sybaritic living dead that form the bank-holiday crowd. Girls in barely-there skirts and feral gangs of lads crawl from bar to bar drinking until they either find a partner or an opponent to fight. The bacchanalian orgy of alcohol and violence is a perpetually repeating scene straight from Dante’s nine circles of hell and will be familiar to anyone who has ever visited the seaside town on a busy weekend.

Iain Brownbridge attempted to offer an alternative this bank holiday with a three-day music festival featuring more than 100 bands playing in four of the town’s friendlier venues, all within a stones throw of one another. What’s more the festivities were in aid of local charity The Tommy Castles Trust.

Shot Dead

A gang of four lads from Sheffield, singing in broad Yorkshire accents with bags of attitude and no pretensions, immediately, and inevitably, brings to mind the city’s most famous sons; Arctic Monkeys. The comparisons are, slightly, unfair but unavoidable and they may have to move away from singing about lad culture and start marching to their own drum to rise above the hundred other bands doing the same thing. However, the energy with which they rip into their lunchtime-slot at Connolly’s, playing to a sprinkling of people, is admirable. The rhythm section is tight and chugs along nicely, the guitarist, in a home-made Shot Dead T-shirt, is genuinely impressive and lifts the sound into AC-DC territory; and the cocksure lead singer stomps and thrashes as much as the small stage allows. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday dinnertime.