"IT'S like being constipated," reveals Tahita Bulmer, singer for British quintet New Young Pony Club, as she discusses the process of writing lyrics. Yet, were it not for the other women in the band, it seems she might well say the same thing about the strains of touring.
Bulmer is delightfully loose in conversation but she describes "moments of gritting my teeth and going 'arghh!' until they finally come out" when recalling the lonesome task of penning lyrics.
"What will normally happen is I'll get two or three killer lines that seem to come from nowhere. The rest is hard-won."
One of those killer lines leaps from 2006 single Get Lucky, where Bulmer snarls: "Let your girlfriend do what your boyfriend can't."
"That's a popular one," Bulmer says. "It just sounded daffy!"
It's not a feminist-lesbian manifesto? "Yeah, definitely!" Bulmer says. "I liked the fact that it could be read on lots of different levels. I try to write like that whenever I can. I was thinking of a call to arms for straight girls as well, and not necessarily in a totally sexual context."'
The band's biography plays up a certain boy-girl antagonism between Bulmer and NYPC co-founder Andy Spence. Even though Bulmer plays it down - calling it "fraternal" - there's clearly a fondness for some friendly fire between the sexes, as well as gender blurring. "I'm all for that, definitely," she says.
It's partly why Bulmer and her band are infatuated with an episode in American musical history that is much-mined today. As the 1970s were morphing into the '80s, numerous New York groups gave birth to a chameleon known as punk-funk. It quickly grew brightly coloured claws, nourished as much by disco and gay culture as it was by rock.
"I wouldn't say we were slavishly trying to copy those bands, but they've been really inspirational," Bulmer says. "To a certain extent we kind of hark back to that era. We would've liked to have been a part of that whole scene, because there was so much cross-pollination of ideas and people of differing genders, mental states, sexuality and musical genres. It was a genuinely exciting, interesting time."
The band's debut album, Fantastic Playroom, was compared to Big Apple pioneers such as Talking Heads, even though Britain had its own late-'70s trailblazers.
"Obviously in the UK there were a few figureheads like Annabella Lwin [Bow Wow Wow], Rip Rig and Panic, X-ray Spex and Siouxsie," Bulmer admits.
"But in terms of how the music press worked in the UK … it was a much more phallocentric scene in terms of who got pushed the hardest. Whereas the New York scene seemed to be a bit more fluid."
It figures, then, that Bulmer was keen for New Young Pony Club to have a strong contingency of women when in 2005 she and Spence went about recruiting the other three members. They settled on a ratio of two guys to three girls.
"I'd been in bands with boys before and they're all lovely but they're very boring," Bulmer says, chuckling.
"After a certain length of time, all they want to do every time the bus stops is get out and play football [or] they just want a drink. You can't have a decent conversation with them half the time, unless they're in tears from something that's happened."
By Paris PomporNew Young Pony Club
5 August 2008
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