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Blow Up Betty.
 Things are going amazingly well for local all-girl band Blow Up Betty. At last they've found a solid line-up, they're playing some great shows and now, finally, their debut EP is about to be launched.
However, things haven't always been smooth sailing. The band have spent the good part of a year sorting the EP out, with more than a few bumps along the way. "We recorded the EP back in February," explains vocalist Fiona Stafford. "And for so long we've been sitting on it, wondering if we'd ever get to put it out. But it was a pretty expensive thing, we paid for everything out of our own money. Not that we're complaining: we love what we do and that's not what we're about. But money restrictions definitely altered our timing."
"The problem," adds bassist Yonna Albrecht, "was that we had to pay for it with money from our 'day jobs'. It's funny though, since now we're signed to a label and people at work are expecting me to sell thousands of records, play shows every night and quit my job. Yeah. As if!" she laughs.
"We had to get the disc mixed and mastered," continues Stafford. "And then we had the line-up change. And then we signed with our label so another couple of months went by organising all of that. But everything was eventually done and we just sat tight until we could secure a date at the Enigma Bar for the launch. See, that's where our first show was so it's a bit of a sentimental thing for us. Plus we just think it's an awesome venue for a show."
Finding the elusive missing member to Blow Up Betty proved quite the task after the band's original guitarist left a few months ago, as Stafford went on to explain. "We tried out a few girls and after each audition we were impressed, but there was still something missing. We knew exactly what we wanted [in a guitarist] though. We wanted her to have a certain image, like we have, so we wanted her to just slot in with the rest of us. And from the minute I met Sacha [Seagrim], I knew she was the one." smiles Stafford.
"We wanted someone we could actually be friends with too," explains Albrecht. "You can't just have people that you just play in a band with, you need to be people too. Otherwise it just turns into all work... We don't hang out heaps, but we still try and do things outside of practice."
I was curious to see how important they, as an all-girl band, found appearances to be. Generally, all-girl bands seem to have a certain look to them. Blow Up Betty manage to avoid the clichˇ black boots and spiked collars girls seem to adopt to look like tough rock stars. "Of course image is pretty important to us though - we're girls!" Albrecht laughs. "But it's because we just don't get taken as seriously as musicians as males do. So the things that's going to draw most people to us first off is the way we look. So if they see some hot girls on the stage they'll think 'Hey, let's go check them out!' and then they'll actually hear the music. Obviously we're most interested in having people hear our music, but you're going to get that sort of shallow stuff. The first thing they're going to notice is how you look. So we've just kind of accepted it."
"And girls definitely do it too," Albrecht adds. "They all go see bands and say this or that guy's hot. But I just think guys are more easily accepted for the music than girls are."
"It can definitely be intimidating," adds Stafford. "It's like guys don't think you can rock out as hard as them. So that's really what we're trying to prove: that in our case at least, it's not true. I mean, there's other certain girl bands out there who don't really pull it off, but thankfully our songs let us really get into it - Kim [Dowling, guitarist]'s such an awesome song writer. And we do get a lot of younger girls at shows who are excited to see us on stage going crazy. It's just a little hard to know what the guys think though."
Ryan Smith
 | Blow Up Betty launch their self-titled CD at the Enigma Bar on Sat 27 Aug, along with Sumi, The Open Season and Forgetting Yesterday. |
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