Lash: Whip Hot.

The Beautiful & The Damned is in stores now.

“We’re extremely excited about finely having the album out,” starts Jaclyn Pearson drummer for all-girl rock act Lash.

“It’s the most exciting thing that’s happened for us so far. Everything that’s happened like our ARIA nomination, having our first single out but this is the most exciting because we love the songs on the album so much and they mean so much to us. So to finally have it out is something really really special to us. I don’t know why it didn’t come out at the end of last year ‘cause it was ready to. The record company just wanted to wait a while and hook in a few more hardcore Lash fans. They wanted to get a big following happening and I think that they just stretched it out over too long. There were a lot of people that just got too frustrated waiting, as they had been Lash fans from the start. The audience is still growing, so I think they wanted to create a larger audience as we were just new.” 

A while back when you first appeared in the mainstream eye some people were calling Lash an all-girl punk band, where did that all come from? 

“I don’t really know why people labelled us punk we never called ourselves punk. I think at the start because it was hard because we’d been together for so long before we got the record deal and all the hype started about Lash. We’ve always just considered ourselves to be a rock band, we never really labelled our own music and then people just wanted to start putting labels on our music. We had to do a bio and we had to have catchy lines and stuff, we were all a bit ‘okay whatever’ kinda thing. Like now we’re a lot more assertive with that stuff. We don’t want to be called that ‘cause that’s not what we are. At the start we were all over the place ‘cause everyone wanted to have a say and everyone wanted to have an opinion.” 

You girl’s get a bit of a flogging in the media sometimes, how do you deal with all the criticism? 

“No-one ever says bad things to our face, that’s what really gets me. If an interviewer doesn’t like you or respect what your doing we’d appreciated it if they just said it. It’s always just been these people that write stuff up and we find out that they don’t like us. We are taken out f context quite a bit and they grab quotes from places that I have no idea where they got them from, they hear things from other people. Most of the time though, in general, people are fantastic to us. We are a pretty easygoing, happy, funny kind of band. We don’t think that we are the biggest rock star’s to hit Australia and we don’t think that we’re fantastic just because we girls and stuff like that. We just want to do what we’re doing and I think the story of Lash has been manipulated a lot over the years.”

I notice your films clips seem pretty fun, what’s it been like filming them? 

“Really fun. Take Me Away went for two days and we had this little motor-bike we bought in to ride around and I’ve got all this photo’s with Belinda with curlers in her hair riding around on this tiny bike. They bring in food and you laugh and just have a great time. It was a bit scary for that first clip but after that Beauty Queen was one of the most fun days ever and talking about media, this guy was there from NW all day and I read that and first of all he got people’s names wrong, he called Jess the bass guitarist or something and then I thought he painted such an opposite picture of what happened that day. Something must have got up his nose. He was the nicest guy on the day and I can’t understand what happened. The whole bit about Belinda demanding a henna tattoo, we cracked up there’s no way that happened. We were all there.” 

Do Lash have a say in the way they do stuff, like with the new album? 

“Definitely. It was our idea to have the artwork the way it was. We wanted that James Bond type feel; we wanted it around a pool. We say what we want and then the record company combine our ideas with there’s. If we like it we say yeas if we don’t we say no.”