South London's Alien Chicks talk relentless touring and upcoming second EP 'Forbidden Fruit' • Interview • DIY Magazine

“One day I was humming in class and a student goes, ‘oh, don’t quit your day job, Sir!’” grins Josef Lindsay, guitarist and lead vocalist of Alien Chicks. “Someone else in the room goes ‘nah, shut up - Sir is a great singer, innit Sir?’, and winked at me.”

Once the bell rings on his day as a chemistry teacher, Josef and bassist Stefan Parker-Steele (a physics teacher) can regularly be found racing from school to the train station, picking up drummer Martha Daniels en route to that night’s show. “[Josef and Stefan] got sick of driving, so now they’ve implemented a ‘touring by train’ policy,” explains Martha, sitting between them in the garden of a South London pub. “I’ve been having lessons and I was meant to do my test a month ago, but my instructor said if I do my test I’ll fail!”

The punk trio have recently finished touring with Norwegian outfit Pom Poko - creating a series of chaotic railway adventures that resulted in Stefan losing one of his work shoes. “I got them for Christmas as well,” he says woefully, as Josef laughs. “I was fuming.”

They’ll soon be back on the road (or tracks) to open for the similarly raucous Lambrini Girls, before hopping the Channel for a headline Germany tour celebrating the release of impending second EP, ‘Forbidden Fruit’. “We’re just trying to figure out how to get to places,” Martha says, returning again to the logistics of public transport, this time with an international outlook. “[Gledeberg] looks like a hamlet - I was looking on the map and it’s about ten houses, and we’re playing at a bee farm in a barn.”

The band have found firm fans in Germany; among them, one man who’d trekked from his isolated house atop a mountain to see their show, and another who rocked up wearing merch from their very first single, ‘While My Landlord Sleeps’. “They said they nearly flew to England to watch us,” Stefan remembers of the latter. “When you meet people of that quality, it doesn’t matter if there’s only nine or ten people. It really makes it worth it.”

Having first cut their teeth at Brixton’s Windmill - they refer to the venue like a beloved alma mater - collecting fans via their live shows is practically in the band’s DNA. Their commitment to the culture is clear in the injuries they’ve played through: an impromptu demonstration at school that went wrong and left Josef with a boxer’s fracture to the hand; a sprained ankle (also Josef), and the physical and emotional trauma from Martha falling between the train and the platform edge at a German train station (“They don’t say ‘mind the gap’ in Europe!”).

“When you meet people of that quality, it doesn’t matter if there’s only nine or ten [in the crowd].”

— Stefan Parker-Steele

The stage has also proven to be fertile ground for songwriting. The frantic ‘Steve Buscemi’ - a crowd favourite that folds rap into the crunching guitars of the band’s punk instincts - was born from an onstage jam at one of their earliest shows, when their catalogue didn’t yet stretch to the runtime they’d been handed. The track features on their first EP, last year’s ‘Indulging The Mobs’. As on their debut, their second EP’s seemingly tongue-in-cheek titles (‘Dairylea’, ‘Mister Muscle’, ‘I’ve Become A Palm Tree’) bely more sincere themes of generational lethargy and the limits of free will, as jazzier melodies offer a new sonic perspective.

“You should listen to ‘Say Fish’ on the EP - that’s probably the best song we’ll ever release,” Josef says, leaning closer to the phone laying on the table to record our conversation. “Actually - not ever. But up to this point, it’s the best song we’ve written. I feel like a lot of the songs we’ve put out have been, compared to the rest of our set, actually quite one-dimensional.” [We would politely disagree, but OK - Ed] “Not on purpose or anything. Just because. But I think ‘Say Fish’ has lots of very different ideas that all blend really nicely.”

Like ‘Indulging The Mobs’, ‘Forbidden Fruit’ was recorded in just two days - a financial necessity, with the silver lining that recording the tracks live maintained much of the energy they summon onstage. “We’re figuring it out as we go along, but I think we know what we like the sound of now,” Stefan says of the recording process this time around. “I think we know what bits we want to improve on a bit, before we go and do an entire album. I don’t want us to do it and then not be happy with it at the end of it.”

What they do seem pretty happy with is the current game plan: gig as much as humanly possible, recording what they can, when they can; maybe hire a van once Martha can drive it. Their non-stop touring calendar provides endless anecdotes that they fire back and forth across the table, occasionally leaping to their feet to demonstrate a story more enthusiastically. At the core of the band are three mates having a laugh, and sticking to what feels most authentically Alien Chicks takes chief importance.

“The songs are quite weird,” Martha summarises, explaining how they’ve struggled to find session musicians to pack out their sound the way they’d like. “There are quite weird chords and everything, and it can be a bit complicated.”

“Martha, ask yourself this,” Josef says dramatically, swivelling round to face her. “If the chords weren’t weird, would we be having this interview right now?” She laughs. “We’d probably be having more!”

‘Forbidden Fruit’ is out on 9th May via So Recordings.

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