Girls With Guitars

For high-energy, girl-fronted four-piece Diva Demolition, 2013 has already proven their best year yet, having scored an opening spot on the national Monster Tour, featuring some of their biggest musical heroes – KISS, Motley Crue and Thin Lizzy – and the New Zealand and Melbourne Aerosmith shows. What's exciting them right now though is the imminent release of their debut album, Like It Too Much!.

“It only took about three weeks to record,” guitarist Sherree Newton explains, the album essentially finished by the middle of last year. “It's just about bringing out at the right time, and we had those two big tours, and in that time we obviously wrote more tunes and [the label] looked at us and went, 'Well that's gotta go on,' and we're, 'oh really? Okay,'” she laughs. “So there are just so many tunes now – and we're still going. It's just like this creative tap that's been turned on – it's very exciting.”

Newton and main singer, songwriter and bass player Kylie Cowling began working together in Adelaide back in 2005, forming an all-girl band called Legless that toured nationally and internationally, to Japan and, for Australia's Defence Forces in Timor Leste, the Solomons and the Middle East. By 2010, however, the band had fallen apart and the pair relocated to Brisbane where they met guitarist Ricky Collision, who introduced them to the guys who run indie label Spitfire Records and, taking their name from the final Legless album, Diva Demolition was born. They've already an EP, Diva Disease, to warm things up for the album release.

“That actually happened the week of rehearsal prior to going on tour with KISS,” Newton admits. “It just came to us. It was about a particular person as well,” she raucously laughs again, “and it's a culmination of stories put together, and the label said, 'You've got to play that!'”

In Legless, the four girls each took on a particular character – the cop, the school girl and so on – gaining them attention while giving them the kind of confidence performing as someone else brings, as shown by the Chrissy Amphlett. In Diva Demolition however, Cowling and Newton are very much themselves, though there's still plenty of rock'n'roll glitz and glamour involved. Now they transform, on their website and in their videos, into Anime characters.

“That was the original idea, many years ago, becoming someone else when you dressed up – you tend to come out of your shell more. Now, we're ourselves, but we can express more through the animation, as a delivery format. Everyone's got their take on it! It's just rock'n'roll.”

The album was produced by Craig Porteils, whose extensive CV includes working on the triple-platinum Heart Of Stone album from Cher and Fleetwood Mac's “comeback” album, Behind The Mask. As for touring with KISS and Aerosmith, “it was mind-blowing – mind-boggling! We had to stop saying 'pinch me, is this really happening?' because we were getting bruises!

“I felt like I'd run a marathon by the end of the Monster Tour, I was so excited and so pumped – you couldn't keep me still. And we were only up there twenty-five minutes or so. God it was good fun! There was an incredible amount of people out there, who'd come early too, to catch the opening acts.”

For now it's back to the pubs on the Miss Adventures Tour – with fellow female-fronted band, Melbourne's Bellusira, who are touring their debut album, Connection.