Not A 'Girl Band', Not A Joke

When Atlanta party punks The Coathangers kicked off their career in the mid-noughties, a lot was made about them being a “joke” band, mainly due to their irreverent approach and a slew of songs with titles such as Nestle In My Boobies and Shut The Fuck Up. Four albums and a ton of touring later, they’ve no doubt earned the right to be taken as a more serious concern, yet it’s proved tough for them to shake that initial tag.

We were terrified to [take it seriously] because we were all fucking around, but it’s something that inside we’ve always wanted to do.

“It was just for fun,” recalls Julia Kugel (guitar/vocals) – aka Crook Kid Coathanger – of their initial forays. “Saying that it was a joke bums me out because we always took it seriously because it was art for us, but it was more for fun because we weren’t trying to ‘make it’. We never thought that we would make a record, we just thought that we were playing together for fun. We were terrified to [take it seriously] because we were all fucking around, but it’s something that inside we’ve always wanted to do. It wasn’t like, ‘Yes, we’re going to take over the world,' it was kind of like everything that happened was a total surprise. It was like a dream come true, the whole thing.”

Was there a point where it became clear that it was going to a new level?

“Yeah, when we had to write our second record,” Kugel continues. “When we did our first one, it was cool because we didn’t think people would listen to it, but then people started having opinions and dissecting the songs and analysing what Nestle In My Boobies means. It was like, ‘What the fuck?’ It kind of put this odd ‘this is real’ pressure on us, knowing that people are going to be listening and judging you. It’s not the coolest part.”

And it’s so easy for people to misconstrue things, especially when a band is taking the piss a bit.

“Oh my God, I used to read everything that people wrote, and some of the analyses of the songs were just ridiculous,” Kugel laughs. “Like, ‘Nestle In My Boobies is about how men rely on women,’ and we were, like, ‘Woah, no! It was just about boobies!’ It’s cool but it opened up a lot of dialogue that really made us have to answer to it – I wonder how many ‘regular’ male bands have to answer in-depth about what their songs mean to feminism or the men’s movement. Every time we did interviews it was like doing a book report on feminist theory, and we were, like, ‘Woah, it’s just a song!’ I guess it’s interesting though – maybe it’s something that sets us apart? Not really though, there’s a lot of female musicians. We were inspired by music, not just ‘female music’ – we were inspired by all sorts of stuff – and we just want to be a band. Not a ‘girl band’, just a band.”

There was a massive change to The Coathangers’ ranks last year when keyboardist/vocalist Candice Jones (aka Bebe Coathanger) left the ranks, in the process changing them from a quartet to a trio, but Kugel explains that this proved to be a minor distraction at most.

“Actually it was a really smooth transition,” she tells. “It basically just made us more determined and tighter, and more focused I think. We were, like, ‘Okay, if we’re still going to do this then we’re really going to do this now’. It was an amicable split and we’re still friends – we still wish her a happy birthday and stuff like that – but this is what we want to do, the three of us, so it feels great. It felt great before and it feels great now.”

It kind of made us all need to fill in the extra space by being better.

The Coathangers’ recent fourth album Suck My Shirt is their first without keys and sounds completely fine – if you weren’t familiar with the earlier material you wouldn’t notice anything amiss.

“That was kind of the point of trying to do that record – I feel like it sounds more straightforward, where as with the keyboard it sounded a bit… different,” Kugel ponders. “You can tell it’s the same band. It doesn’t sound that different. Basically it kind of made us all need to fill in the extra space by being better, either vocally adding more layers or adding more elements to the song, because we felt like something was missing that was filling in space. We had to figure out how to put in those extra melodies another way.”

All three members of the band take turn sharing the vocals – is the songwriting done by who’s singing a particular song or is the process more involved and collaborative?

“It’s not necessarily who’s singing the song who came up with the song or whatever – it’s very collaborative,” Kugel reveals. “Sometimes one of us will come in with a really personal song and say, ‘Yeah, I’m singing this song because it’s about blah blah blah’, but a lot of the times it just comes from a riff or a jam. We used to write all the words together but that tends to be a little time consuming, so now we’ll read the words to each other and say, ‘What do you think?’ We really try to communicate a lot – there’s no dictator over the sound or anything, it’s collaborative.

“Some songs we’ll write in minutes, just bang it out and, ‘Hey, that’s a song!’ Some songs, like Zombie from the new record, are a little bit more intensive, maybe because they’re outside our comfort zone a little bit more. They might take a week or something, so it all depends.”

I’d hope that we’ve progressed from how we started, because we started as complete buffoonery.

From the outside listening to the assured nature of Suck My Shirt it seems like the trio are becoming stronger writers – does Kugel concur with this assessment?

“I hope so, I hope that we’re becoming stronger in everything – stronger players, stronger writers, stronger lyricists,” she smiles. “That’s the whole point. We’re always going to sound like how we sound, and we’re always going to play how we play, but we’re always trying to get better at it – we’re never going to be complacent. And I’d hope that we’ve progressed from how we started, because we started as complete buffoonery.”

The Coathangers’ visceral music touches upon many areas of the heavy guitar hybrid – do they mainly listen to rock and punk, or is their taste more eclectic than their music would suggest?

“That’s the weird part – it’s like we all came from different musical backgrounds, but now we’ve all melded into one mindset,” Kugel reasons. “Initially it was a lot of punk and post-punk and rock’n’roll, but now we listen to everything, like a lot of new country for instance.

"As far as entertaining ourselves in the van, we put out on heaps of stupid stuff that we don’t have to think about, but as far as music we take seriously it’s always been classic, everything from Johnny Cash to Julio Iglesias – everything or anything that’s good. We take stuff from all sorts of music, like the perfection of a Beach Boys song and how it’s short and to the point, you could take that and apply that to one of our songs too even though we don’t sound anything like The Beach Boys. Or the aggression of a Refused song – we love Refused and that kind of comes through, but we don’t sound like Refused. We listen to a lot of hardcore obviously – there’s a lot of screaming on our records, and the aggression and intensity is there and translates into the music, it’s just that what we make is what comes out of us and is what we’re capable of doing. There’s a lot of different stuff.”

They’ve been lauded for their live show; does Kugel feel that there’s much of a difference between The Coathangers onstage compared to the sound they conjure on their albums?

“From what I understand people always say that it’s better live, because we’re just hanging out together – all of us, the audience and the band – so I think it’s more fun,” she offers. “It can depend on the mood, the entire experience. But you’d hope that live is better than the record, it’s rowdier. We’re definitely rowdier live than you might perceive on the record.”

And, finally, are they looking forward to the long flight south?

“Yeah, we’re stoked!” she gushes. “It’s like it really feels like we’ve made it – ‘We’re going to Australia!’ It’s a dream come true. It’s great.”