Teen genies
Remarkably self-aware and unsullied by the music machine, this 17-year-old duo are doing their own thing… extremely well
Let’s Eat Grandma witticism is designeda grammatical to warn about the dangers about a misplaced or omitted comma in a sentence. The band who have appropriated it as their name also enjoy the effects of subverting meaning and expectations. Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth from Norfolk are 17 and have just released an album I, Gemini. Their music encompasses a melange of electronic and unfashionable acoustic instruments (glockenspiel, recorder and banjolele). They sing innocently or scream, shout and wail about anything from the ennui of teenage existence to imagining the thoughts, while captive, of the scores of children who were taken and held for years by kidnappers in Belgium, Austria and the US.
Rosa and Jenny have been friends since infant school and have ‘messed about’ with any instrument that came into their hands since then. Their parents, who they twice ignore questions about, apparently support their endeavours wholeheartedly. Their music collections, encompassing everything from Pink Floyd to Tears For Fears, had a possible subliminal were influence.signed by Let’s an Eat independentGrandma label that has given them almost total artistic freedom to weave music that people might be inclined to preface with the word ‘post’. Postrock? Post-folk? Post-music?
‘People want us to label what we do, but to be honest I feel like our music is going to evolve so much over the next while that if you accept a label now or describe yourself specifically as doing something, then that could be very difficult to ever shake off,’ says Jenny.
‘Each album may sound completely different from the last but that description of what you agreed you do may follow you around, no matter how you change.’
Rosa chimes in with a giggle: ‘We like to be a nightmare for journalists. We like to do the opposite of what people expect us to be doing. People who work in the industry or write about music like to think they know everything about what inspires music and we admit we play on that. ‘People make guesses about things and then pass that off as the truth. We have definite ideas of what we are going to do next but you will have to join our coven, our cult, to find out what that is.’ I laugh at the last statement – but they don’t. They open their live sets, as they do their record, with a game
of pat-a-cake which looks too child-like even for their young years. Then as droning keyboards swell during Deep Six Textbook they indulge in a dance with their bodies bent, their long manes of hair covering their features. You think at this point that if the girl in the well from the movie The Ring found her sister and formed a band they might look and sound like this.
‘We wrote the songs on the album when we were 13 or 14. That reflects what we were like then,’ Rosa says.
‘As young people we have quite an adventurous spirit. I think when you are our age you develop so quickly in a couple of years. You learn so much in a short space of time. We are different now from when we wrote the album.’
Jenny adds: ‘We honestly never thought it was going to be reviewed by people.
‘Even when it came to making this album, we wrote the songs and recorded them the way we felt like doing it. It didn’t occur to us that people would be evaluating what we’ve done or the meaning of the songs.’
Now studying music at college the duo will continue to pursue as a career something that they only ever felt was a pastime. That said they say they never thought about alternative careers.
‘I think we’ve been incredibly lucky. Music was only ever a hobby,’ they agree.
‘We never thought of making a career out of what we do. We’ve started getting recognition before we’ve had to make any big career decisions. People our age usually have to make decisions about what they want to do with their lives; we’ve been fortunate, we never had to think about that and we seem to have ended up with a career doing this. If we had to really concentrate on A-Levels or concentrate on getting into Uni we might not have had time to make music.’
We know their parents are behind their musical adventures but what do their respective grandmothers think about Let’s Eat Grandma? They pause a while affecting concern.
‘Our grandmas are still about and they’re quite concerned about us,’ Rosa says, then Jenny interjects, ‘But we know if we ate them we would get less of an inheritance.’ I laugh, they don’t.
I Gemini is out now on Transgressive Records. Let’s Eat Grandma play Castlepalooza, Tullamore on Friday, July 1.
‘I laugh at their “join our cult” comment , but they don’t’