In the first of a regular feature, Ace Bushy Striptease frontwoman Eve Phillips reflects on life in a local band. In this edition, Eve reflects on playing the clarinet, meeting her bandmates at a night called Tropical Hotdog and the benefits of combining an appreciation of great music with potentially child-bearing hips…

The songs are brief, stubbornly avoid repetition and are a bit fancy-pants sloppy-ass pop-punk, all up in your face all of the time…

Sometimes it feels wretched to admit that music isn’t ‘all I’ve ever wanted to do’, and other uncomfortably earnest statements. But then, it also feels a bit wretched that nobody would expect it to be the case for the current girl in Ace Bushy Striptease. I wasn’t in the rock bands at school because I played the clarinet, and Twisted Humour (formerly Year 10 Band) did A LOT of covers but Stranger on the Shore wasn’t one of them. And I couldn’t sing or owt. Luckily for me, though this remains true, it doesn’t matter to ABS. 

I met Simon and Jeremy (Ace Bushy Striptease’s bassist and drummer respectively) at Calories’ first gig at the Flapper and Simon had on a Pixies t-shirt that he still wears from time to time. They were Dom from Sunset Cinema Club’s young protégés. Not protégés, but he was recording their first album for money and they had clung on to his coat-tails in an attempt to befriend their heroes. They were playing a gig at this night, Tropical Hotdog, and I went along. I thought they were incredibly frenzied and a right fucking mess of noise-pop and looking hard at their instruments. That might have been the night that they claim to have played Good Vibrations but I assure you nobody who was there heard it. There were all these boys and this one girl with a cool big hat on. 

So then time went on a bit, we all lived and learned. They were about a lot and I was about sometimes too, so we’d get to know one another between songs that bands were playing. We’d talk about Tanya Donelly bands (‘It’s cool that you like Belly, I keep meaning to get some of their music as I’m all over Throwing Muses and yeah. That Star album was only £3 in Music Exchange by the comic shop and Sunflower the other day. I didn’t buy it because we need all the money to keep us in drugs and high fashion. Have a lovely day. Simon’ – Myspace ‘08) and I’d often be banging on about wanting to be in a band myself, almost seriously, so one time Simon was like, ‘Let’s be Lamb Post!’ Sadly the name was taken but we became Jet Ski Accidents along with another member. She was consistently tardy and ill-tempered so we took a hiatus. 

Ace Bushy Striptease took me in because they can’t not have girls on their records and the girls who came before lived too far away/were better than that. Some people might look upon the fact that they’ve had a string of transient girl singers pretty cynically but I think there’s purity to the fact that they have always needed the sound of girls to be part of their music in order for it to be as ‘terribrill’ as they always dreamed it. It’s like the way that it’s the other way round for many bands. To me, it’s lovely that just getting jacked up about excellent local music and brilliant international music and having potentially child-bearing hips is more or less enough for them, but it’s funny because they were incredible during the brief spell that they were a boys club (they can never know).

None of us feel like we’re that good at what we do as individual musicians (except Basith (Ace Bushy Striptease’s guitarist/vocalist) but we are all big fans of Ace Bushy Striptease (except Basith). We’ve been known to play more than one Pavement song in a set, which is one of the more obvious manifestations of how musically gauche we are. As it turns out, a lot of people don’t like it when a band isn’t proficient, can you believe that? We do try really hard, surprisingly, but I think that we’re none of us that interested in icy perfections. We like pop tunes and words a lot, though they’re probably not always distinguishable or artfully ambiguous, sometimes they’re pretty good! Like this: 

As the light in the floor / melts a circle in the snow / I thought you should know / I am in love, are you? / And on the day that I see two bloody patches in the city centre / I’m more attached than ever

Pretty sweet, I think. I didn’t write that but I’m working on becoming as competent. Bas and I watched the film Strange Powers recently and there was a bit in which Claudia read from Stephen Merritt’sFormulist Manifesto which said “We the formulists renounce the deluded striving for expression by moderns through novelty”. This is a great thing to say; I think our music agrees to a large extent because we are trying to sound like loads of things, but due to our ineptitude, sound like not much exactly. The best of both worlds, maybe.