Don’t box us in as a band

Dead Pony’s Anna Shields on why she objects to the group being called ‘female-fronted’

POST-PUNK group Dead Pony have galloped through lockdown to emerge with new songs and gigs playing TRNSMT, headlining King Tut’s and supporting Twin Atlantic.

The group are Anna Shields, singer and guitarist, Blair Crichton on guitar and Liam Adams on bass. Anna tells us how it is.

As a femalefronted band, have you taken inspiration from the likes of Wolf Alice or Chrvches or even 90s singers Skin, Justine Frischmann or Louise Wener?

I think that the commonality of these bands shouldn’t come down to the fact they have female singers, but the fact they are respected and skilled artists.

We try to stay away from the term “female-fronted” because to me it can feel quite onedimensional and boxed in.

We take inspiration from Wolf Alice in the same way that a band with a boy singer would take inspiration from them.

I also think that people like to use the term “female fronted” as though it were a genre, but a lot of the bands that get put together under this umbrella term have drastically different sounds.

First time playing Barrowland? Excited?

Yeah it’s my all-time favourite venue so it’s going to be so cool to play on that big stage especially because our friends in Declan Welsh & The Decedent West are playing too!

And is it the first time you’ve played TRNSMT?

We played TRNSMT a few years back with our old band and we also attended it back in 2017 to see Radiohead. Liam and our drummer Euan went last summer and had an amazing time seeing The Chemical Brothers. I can’t wait to play it, it’s always such a fun festival and a great atmosphere. I also can’t wait to go to the Riverside stage and see a lot of our friends playing. It’ll be a great weekend.

How was lockdown?

Lockdown was pretty difficult as it was for everyone during that time. We couldn’t see each other in the flesh, but we enjoyed many a pub quiz over Zoom which looking back was actually quite depressing.

We also wrote a lot over lockdown and recorded demos remotely to send to each other.

It wasn’t until practice rooms opened back up that we were able to get together and the songs started to come to life, but most of our upcoming EP was written during lockdown.

We actually just went away on a writing weekend away to the countryside where we met two Donkeys (Meatball and Eeyore) and we worked on some new songs.

It’s the first time in ages that we’ve all had the chance to sit together in a room and write and I’m really excited about the new songs we have demoed so far.

How did you get together?

Blair and I have been writing music together for around six years and we met through mutual friends.

We met Liam at a Beatles tribute gig where he was dressed in a Sgt Pepper costume.

We have been making music together as Dead Pony since 2020.

We met our drummer Euan through mutual friends a few years ago and would bump into him at gigs and festivals.

We asked him to join the band in summer 2021 and can’t imagine not having him in the band now.

How did you come up with Dead Pony as a name?

A few years ago we wrote a song about childhood naivety and how everything you thought as a child is ruined once you become an adult.

We called the song Dead Pony, but we thought it actually made a better band name so we changed the song to Everything