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The Donnas.
The Donnas' Torry Castellano attacks her drumkit with seemingly reckless abandon, propelling the band on in a flurry of arms and hair. As it turns out, that abandon was more reckless than anybody realised. Castellano was diagnosed with deQuervain's Tendonitis, due to swelling on the thumb side of her wrists, meaning an enforced layoff from playing.
"It was pretty scary and pretty frustrating, and I'm not the most patient person, so there were times when they were like, 'OK you can start playing again - try three minutes a day and then we'll get up to five', and I was like 'ahh, just let me play!' I got a lot from it. I did change my technique a little, I changed how I set up my drums and stuff, and it's really helped."
The problem stemmed from the fact that the band is pretty much self-taught. Hence she not only required rest, but also to re-learn how to play. "It's definitely been an effort, but I think every time I play it gets a little bit better. It was pretty serious; in our business there's always not enough time, so there was some a lot of pressure to get better really quickly."
Castellano is a joy to talk to: she's bubbly and particularly animated. Her enthusiasm for The Donna's new record 'Gold Medal' is contagious, and the live shows so far have been a blast. "Actually we started [touring] about a month before the record came out, so we've been on the road for a while now. Whenever we write a record we try to make sure that we songs we put on the record are songs we'd like to play live, and this record was no exception, we really made sure that every song is one we'd want to play live.
"It's always kind of nerve-wracking when we put a record out... are people gonna like it, what will they think, what are they gonna say, are the fans going to like it? But still we all felt really proud of the songs, so we were ok with it." The title track in particular - a catchy, acoustic singalong - stands out, and may be released as a single.
'We've talked about it because it is so different that maybe it would catch people off-guard, and also [it's] just that we love the song. So I don't know 'cause we're in the process of picking singles right now." Go on, it's a killer song. "Awesome! OK, I'll take that into consideration!" she laughs.
One of the early ideas for an album title was 'Gold Metal', playing on the band's love of the genre. The Donnas could always record an album of classic metal covers and release it as a companion piece, I suggest. "Yeah that would be really fun actually! We might have to do that! I really loved Metallica actually, and Slayer, and Exodus and all of those kinds of bands. I was really into that for a lot of years. I still love them all, so yeah I guess I was into metal, it was really cool."
The recent murder of 'Dimebag' Darrell Abbott and others is also playing on people's minds, but Castellano is keeping things in perspective. "Obviously that's very extreme with what happened and that whole situation, but a few years ago we had some pretty serious threats - someone saying that they were going to come to our show and hurt Allison, and hurt all of us and hurt the audience, and blow up the stage, and all this stuff. The police had to get involved. So you know there are those people that just get something in their minds, and I don't know... it is kind of scary but there's so many more people that just want to go and have fun, and you just have to keep going."
The attitude of many within the industry towards a female rock band is a point of contention. "We still have a lot of issues because of that. I think we do get a lot of attention because we're all female, but I think that - especially here in the States - the rock radio stations are still really sceptical about playing an all-female band on mainstream rock radio. It's just very frustrating and you just have to keep on going, but sometimes it feels like 'is it ever gonna be not an issue?' We question that a lot, and it can make you really angry."
Happily though, there are those who love the band. "We got to meet Slash and that was like a dream come true! I absolutely love him so much and I was sweating and nervous and I didn't know what to say and it was really scary...but he was so complimentary and he loves Allison, our guitar player's guitar tone actually. That was so cool to have Slash say things like that about our band."
Wade Howland
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The Donnas play the Big Day Out Orange Stage at 12.15pm
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