Deap Vally
LA’s dirt-blues duo are all about “fucking attitude”. Heckle them at your peril.
If you’ve ever wondered what happened to all the warrior princess female rockers, then Deap Vally are the cavalry. Seven years ago the garageblues duo clattered out of California like a bulldozer in cut-offs, their lean, brutal racket built entirely on Lindsey Troy’s scything guitar/vocal and Julie Edwards’s flayed drums. Debut album Sistrionix pricked up our ears in 2013, but it was their latest record, Femejism, that grabbed our lapels, jabbing chauvinism in the eye on tracks like Smile More and Two Seat Bike. A bleary-eyed Troy rolled out of bed to tell us more.
Are people still surprised by the power that just two musicians can muster?
Yeah, we get that all the time, like: “You guys make so much noise for two people.” We think it’s kinda funny, because, y’know,
it’s amplification [laughs].
If Deap Vally hadn’t happened, what else could you have been?
I’m a lifer. My dad is a big Dead-head and he was at Woodstock, so I went to Grateful Dead shows as a kid, and our parents were really into us doing music. I do think about my life sometimes, and maybe if I’d gotten more degrees in school. But I try to read on the road and keep my brain stimulated, y’know?
Did Deep Vally play some tough shows on the way up?
On the first tour we ever did on the West Coast, this guy was like: “Get a bass player!” I think he was a bass player, so he was a little salty. And I told him to get a vagina [laughs]. He didn’t know what to say to that.
What was it like being on tour with Blondie and Garbage last summer?
You can’t ask for a cooler tour to be on. It was, like, three generations of bands, all very different. But it was a total love-fest too. Shirley Manson is super-cool, an absolute sweetheart. And Debbie Harry, she’s a total fucking icon. A total bad-ass. Untouchably cool, for sure. We’d be in her dressing room, and I would pick her brain. I was so curious to know who her idols were, because she really predates a lot of female icons. I mean, she’s one of the first.
In your adolescence, was it rare to see women with such attitude?
I mean, I was from California, and I grew
up on a lot of classic rock and also nineties grunge, so for me that was quite normal. I grew up listening up to Janis Joplin and stuff like Hole and No Doubt. Even as a young girl listening to, like, Alanis Morissette’s first record, y’know, she was full of attitude, even as a pop-rock star. I was always very drawn to a frontwoman with tons of attitude. I always thought that was just the most bad-ass.
Did you find Trump’s comments about women as disappointing as we did?
Of course. That whole election was really heartbreaking for me. Now I’ve just kinda accepted it and detached myself a bit from politics. I personally was really looking forward to the idea of having a woman in office. But it is what it is.
Femejism – is that title your own modern interpretation of feminism?
Well, Julie actually came up with that word. It’s one of her favourite things, to invent new words. Femejism is a lot of things. It’s a response to us having to constantly be asked about what it’s like to be women and are we feminists – which is frankly quite annoying. But it also has humour, and it’s a fresh take on the ‘F’-word, sure. It always tickles us to see people’s reaction or interpretation to the title.