Sunny Jain - Interview

  by Anthony Strutt

published: 24 / 7 / 2012

intro

Anthony Strutt speaks to Lancashire-based indie husband-and-wife duo the Lovely Eggs about their anarchic band and impossible-to-define sound

The Lovely Eggs are a two piece from Lancashire. They are a married couple, Holly Ross (vocals and guitar) and Dave Blackwood (drums and backing vocals), who have recorded two albums, as well as several singles and EPs on a variety of small indie labels. Pennyblackmusic spoke to both Holly and Dave before a gig at The Donkey in Leicester during part of a three week British tour. PB: How did your name come about? HB: I was living in Paris, and David came over to visit me. I was in a band before as was David, but we just wanted to do music together, because we had been going out with each other for a long time. We decided to form this band. Well, not so much form a band but just to do songs. After a while, it was like, “We've got a lot of songs here. We should have a name.” At the time there was an abandoned nest on my window sill and a pigeon came and sat there. The nest was already made for it to lay two eggs, and over the summer we watched her nesting them. Then just as we were preparing to go back to England to start this new band, they hatched and flew. We called ourselves the Lovely Eggs because of those eggs. PB: Did you name the eggs or chicks? HB: No. DR: They named us! PB: You have done two albums now, haven’t you? HB: We have done two albums now, one called ‘If You Were Fruit’, which came out in 2009, and our second one which came out last year and is called ‘Cob Dominos’. PB: How did those titles come about? HB: ‘If You Were Fruit’ came about because we did our first gig in New York, and when we were over there we found this lemon on a set of steps with the words ‘Eat Shit On It’. We put a picture of that lemon on the cover of the album. Why would anyone put a lemon on a set of steps? We liked the idea though. A couple of friends of ours died while we were writing that album, and I wrote this song called, ‘If You Were a Fruit’, which was about death and is on the album, but we called it that because it had a lemon on the front. DR: ‘Cob Dominos’ is a Lancashire phrase. My mum says it all the time. “You’re a bunch of cob dominos, you are?” It means weird. We called it that because the song of the same name on the album is about our shit jobs. HB: We have just realised that we have become obsessed by food. A lot of ours songs are about food. Our next single is also called ‘Food’. PB: What are your main influences? HB: I would say we are really just influenced by things in everyday life really. Living in Lancashire is quite isolated. It allows to get along without being influenced by too many people, and to be influenced by what is around you, rather than to sing about love and things like that. PB: Like the stuff you see on TV? HB: It doesn't apply to my life and my world. I'm influenced by stuff like books (Later Holly’s head was buried inside a book-AS), and people we meet at gigs, and normal stuff that happens to us. Even though we like a lot of bands, we try not to sound like them. We like to have our own style. I think that is dead important to have that. We like having no rules in our band. We have no rules at all. PB: Do you swap instruments at all? DR: It's not something we have done but we could do. HB: We have songs that are five seconds long, and some that are five minutes long. We won't say we won't do that. We want to keep it fluid. Being in a band is a joy for us. When you go on tour, you travel, meet new people, and the whole experience is a joyful experience. A lot of bands work in a different way. It is for them about signing up to a label. It's about how many units that we have sold, and getting this and getting that. We don't give a shit. It's about having fun for us. If we get played on the radio, we are still as happy as the next band, but it's not the main reason. I always say it's about the journey, not the destination. You are lucky to get signed these days anyway. I just enjoy it, enjoy being in a shitty punk rock band. That is what it is about. You don't need to get signed. PB: You are two albums in. How many singles have you done then? DR: We released four singles last year, and are up to six now! We have also done two EPs. HB: We did a Halloween single, ‘Haunt It Out’, in 2008 in the style of ‘Twin Peaks’, and we gave away a Laura Palmer necklace with every release, and we worked out for every copy we lost money on the necklace, which was more expensive than the record. PB: Have they all been on vinyl? DR: Some were on CDs. But we like to do vinyl if we can. It's not always possible. PB: You said that played your first show in New York. HB: Yeah, I am from Lancashire (Mimics strong Lancashire accent). We didn't want to do a local show. Everyone should be judged on their own merit, not because of where they are from. So we went away for our first show. PB: How would you describe yourself musically? You are sometimes described as an indie pop act. HB: I wouldn’t say that we are an indie pop band. I really don't like the phrase indie pop. It has a lightness to it. We are just a punk band really. PB: Would you say that you had a psychedelic garage sound in a similar way to the Seeds who were a 60s’ garage Punk band? HB: People like to pigeonhole us, and I know everyone wants to say that they are different, but it's hard to describe what we are like. We have psychedelic moments. We have punky moments. I would say there are a lot of pop songs. They are definitely popp. What you hear in your head is different from what we hear in our heads. PB: Would you say that there are any other bands out there that you share, not a scene as such, but a common ground with? HB: Not really. We have been on tour a lot with a band called Hot Pants Romance from Manchester. They are brilliant. They are a really noisy all girl band. We are friends with lots of bands but we all do different stuff to each other, but I think that is quite healthy. PB: Have you had much radio support at all? HB: Bizarrely, yes. 6Music have played us loads. Huw Stephenson on Radio One as well, and John Kennedy on XFM as well. It is weird as we haven’t got a radio plugger, but maybe that's what got us there because we are doing our own thing our way. We have fun. We like what we do, but maybe every band will say that. As I said, I think some bands want to do more, or are looking for the bigger prize. The prize for us is just doing it, and living the moment right now. But don't get me wrong. If in a year's time, we are playing to a thousand people, and filling out venues and selling records. That would be great. It just goes at different levels though. It's like red wine tastes like red wine, whether it's a £2.49 bottle or a tenner. A gig is still a gig, but bands who don't enjoy it on this level are doing it for the wrong reason. PB: Have you toured with anyone really big at all? HB: We toured with Art Brut. We played gigs with Shonen Knife and Jad Fair, but not anyone massive. PB: What are your future plans? Have you written your next album? HB: It's not written yet. It's half written. We have recorded some of it. PB: Thank you. The photographs that accompany this article were taken by Darren Aston for Pennyblackmusic.