GIRLS

Halfway through Rip It Up’s interview with Chet ‘JR’ White, the man responsible for the musical half of one of 2009’s most promising indie rock exports of the year, the San Franciscan two-piece Girls, I’m enlightened to the fact that the three things everyone’s talking about he does not want to talk about. That would be their lead singer’s Children Of God cult past, their admitted drug usage and, oh yes, not to mention the XXX-rated video clip for Lust For Life.

“I realise that a band’s public perception can gain sensationalistic crass that we as a band don’t create, but that a writer has created,” White says. “Things like constantly asking about the cult, the drugs and things like that, you know...

“So, well you can’t ask me them now can you?” he laughs.

After the success of their debut LP Album earlier in the year, an album of sun-drenched, dreamy indie rock branded with a 9.1 album rating on Pitchfork, it’s been a turbulent few months for Girls. It’s barely a year since they were plucked fresh off the beaches of San Francisco and thrust into months of four-wheeled living, touring across Europe and the United States.

Their tour has brought them to Chicago today, and White quips “for some reason I’m in a mood today”. He’s quick to dismantle the alleged “rock star” life, instead providing a refreshingly honest insight.  

“It’s been pretty interesting so far. Basically everything you’ve ever heard about being a musician is a total lie – the women, the drugs, all that glorified rock‘n’roll extravaganza,” he muses. “You play a show and you try to communicate with your fans but they’re drunk, and you might even be a little bit drunk, and that gets a bit hard at times. And you have to load all your equipment out – unless you’re Oasis – into the back of a van, and it’s kind of like a Tetris game to get everything in. And you have to stay precarious in the van because everyone has their personal stuff everywhere, and you drive to some faithless hotel, fall asleep drunk and wake up hungover and do it all over again.

“But I might be painting a pretty bleak picture,” he adds.

Bleak yes, but perhaps White’s exhausted outlook can be forgiven considering the band’s light-speed escalation into the spotlight. For the entirety of recording Album, the band remained unsigned. Now Girls have found a new home at Matador Records, host to other famous indie groups Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo and Mogwai.

“When we were recording there was no record label involved, it was just two guys sort of getting off work late at night, and staying up all night,” White says. “It was an ongoing thing for over a year because we weren’t really intending to have an ad in a magazine, or a release, I thought it would just be a thing that we really loved and believed in. We wanted to make it as obnoxious as possible. Like Big Bad Mean Motherfucker, to me it’s sort of a punk statement – it’s a very basic song progression and melody-wise rooted in with The Beach Boys. The songs are that kind of rejecting noise music which was very prevalent in the San Fran Bay area years ago.”

Is there a song on Album that he became particularly attached to in the recording process?

“My favourite one’s always been Ghost Mouth. I don’t know why, I guess I just really like it. I worked a lot on it by myself... yeah, I like that track.”

It’s here in the interview that the controversial topic of Girls’ XXX rated video clip for track Lust For Life comes up. For those unfamiliar, the initial clip for Lust For Life was made so audience-friendly every ‘fuck’ was bleeped out, so in response Girls released a second video – this time using all the curse words backed up by two artists singing naked in a bedroom amidst a blurred montage of tits, arse, two guys using each other’s genitals as microphones and naked chicks with permanent markers.  

When I remark on the starry-eyed admiration the video has undoubtedly stamped on indie kids seeing musicians party with naked chicks, White is sceptical: “Yeah that video’s bullshit”.

“I mean my friends made it, and I love my friends and like what they did... but it wasn’t the video we wanted to put out. They had been calling the original video ‘the dirty one’, so we had this ongoing idea where we both looked at each other wide-eyed and said, ‘Well, we should do something really dirty. This isn’t dirty, we’ll show ’em dirty.’”

And on the fifth day thou Girls video clip shalt have dirty.

“So there’s one that’s like a full cut of these two punks basically giving each other blow jobs and that’s what we wanted to put out. But then there were some trips in management and it became sort of a case of us not really paying attention. With the record label now putting out a video saying XXX and NSFW (not safe for work) with a shot of a girl’s tits and a guy’s dick, it’s sort of upsetting to me.

“I feel like I let myself down, I didn’t pay attention, and,” White laughs, “I’m pissed.

“It’s a video I, personally, don’t like. But I guess we wanted to make a beautiful shocking thing and that’s what we did. You make a few mistakes as a band and that was one of them. We’re a new band, we’re just two guys with a record we didn’t spend five years in the trenches – we’re not Pulp.”

When can we expect Girls to hit Australian shores?  

“That’s the question on everyone’s lips – I think it’s an issue of getting enough money to get over there,” he cracks. “But we’ve had some offers, so hopefully soon”.

Album is out now on Pod through Inertia.

Miranda Freeman

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