Rabies Babies are awesome – they played the first LOUD WOMEN Fest and we’ve been dying to see them again ever since. We posed 10 questions to Lorna Tiefholz, ahead of their appearance at our family-friendly matinee at the Lexington on 30 September.

1. Who would you most like to cover your songs?
I’d love to hear what Holly Golightly would do with a Rabies Babies song, or Jane Weaver or Ela Orleans. Artists who we love and who sound nothing like us. It would be so interesting to hear. We do a cover of The Primitives ‘Crash’, I think we do it ok. It sounds more like a crash than the original version. I’m not sure if anyone recognises it as The Primitives song though.

2. Choose: Cat or dog? 
Cat because we sometimes play a song about Laura’s cat called ‘Mousetrap’, but we like dogs and some of the lyrics in another of our songs ‘La La La’ is inspired by a dog barking.

3. Choose one of your songs to be played on Strictly Come Dancing. What dance would you like to be performed to it?
‘I Fought The Floor And The Floor Won’ with one of those dances where the dancers wear really sparkly costumes, pout and kick their legs around and end up doing the splits.

4. Choose: Pixies or Breeders? 
Breeders. Last Splash is one of the greatest albums ever made. (And I have tickets to see Breeders play soon!)

5. Recommend a record and a book that you think our readers might not have heard of 
A couple of years ago I went into a Berlin record shop and asked the guy working there for recommendations. He handed me a pile of records and one of them was ‘Komm Her!’ by The Inserts. I would love to see the Inserts live. They are like the Berlin version of Rabies Babies. They don’t play often. It is my dream to one day do a gig with them.

Book would be ‘Love & Rockets’ comic books by Jaime Hernandez = tales of crap punk bands, superheroes, wrestling, underage drinking and crushes. We can all relate to that.

6. Bikini Kill or Fugazi? 
Bikini Kill, (even though I do quite like Fugazi). I love the film The Punk Singer, and when Laura’s son was a little baby we used to sing ‘Les & Ray’ (by Le Tigre) to him.

7. What’s the most difficult thing about being in your band?
Our guitarist’s son is almost 3 years old. He is fantastic but sometimes it makes practicing or gigging difficult because babysitters are expensive and/or unavailable. I would love to see studios with creche facilities. Can you imagine that? It would be brilliant. Recently we did an all day gig at a pub and the sound man got arsey about a toddler being near the stage. This is a problem that dads in bands rarely have, but mums in bands often have to deal with. We are very excited to be playing at the Little Loud Women gig so Laura’s son can come along and enjoy the gig too.

8. What are your band goals?
Our band goal has always been to have fun. We have been going 18 years, and we have had a load of fun, so we are doing ok. Our other goal is to fight sexism and sexual assault within the punk music scene, sadly this is needed more now than ever and over the last couple of years we have actually lost friends because we’ve been a bit mouthy about standing up to sexual assault. We have a couple of anti-assault songs and usually do a consent speech half way through our set (we probably won’t do this for the Lexington gig – we’re going to make that performance kid friendly).

9. What’s the most important thing we need to know about your band right now?
We do not sound how we look and we do not look how we sound.

10. Give your top 5 contemporary bands

Otoboke Beaver
Sauna Youth (or Monotony)
Skinny Girl Diet
Shopping
Moon Duo
These are bands that I love seeing play live, and have released excellent albums. All of these bands are tight and have something original about them and are made up of really mind-blowing fantastic musicians.

 

Find Rabies Babies on Facebook and catch them live at Little LOUD WOMEN on 30 September at the Lexington