Djamila is an absolute firecracker and all-round incredible person. We sit down together after ITHACA’s final performance at ArcTanGent and talk the beginnings, guidance and stories from the road.
Natasha: That was an incredible performance! Bittersweet it being the end, what do you hope your fans take away from your music?
Djamila: I just hope people had a really good time. I feel like I feel like we’re a bit of a broken record really, because whenever we play live we always really try and hammer home this message that everyone is capable of so much more than they think they are.
Oh, we love that! I think a lot of people really appreciate you saying that.
Yeah, we always want people to know that we are just a just a bunch of people that did this, and everyone is on their own singular journey. It doesn’t matter what point you’re at in that journey and everything will be okay. I think, at the end of the day, that is what our parting message would be.
That’s great and thank you. So, the band’s been around for 12 years, a lot has happened in that time. The world’s changed, but also the landscape of live music has changed. If you could go back and give yourself advice at the very beginning, what would you say?
That’s such a fucking good question. If I could give myself any advice back then do you know what my advice to myself would be like? Do not listen to men.
Nice.
When we first started playing, I had this real chip on my shoulder. I was freshly out of teenager-hood and was the girlfriend of someone who was in a much bigger band. Up until that point, we used to call those girls “Mosh Wags”. I was just a girlfriend. I had such a complex about it that I did not tell anyone when I started being in a band, I just really didn’t want people to know. I just fucking didn’t want to be associated with people thinking that I had had a leg up in some way. There were so many decisions that I made in the early days of the band that were a result of my paranoia and me feeling less than and being in a very male dominated music scene.
Like you say, things have changed over the years, much for the better. Back then it really was survival of the fittest. It really was fight or flight, and I had to make quick decisions all the time about how I wanted to present myself and how I want to be seen, how I want to be talked about and a lot of that, I think, was detrimental. I presented myself in a way that came out of such a desire to be seen in a certain way.
We make these decisions trying to control a narrative that we have such little control over, particularly a decade ago and even more so under a spotlight.
Yes, young twenties and doing all this, and making those kinds of decisions that will effectively affect you for the next 12 years. Not to, like, fucking, jump in to deep with it, but the patriarchy. One of the ways that it insists upon itself is by painting other women against you.
Preach! There’s enough room for all of us!
Exactly, one of the things that I fell victim to in the early days in this industry was this desire to be seen as ‘not like other girls’. I didn’t want to be seen as this object of desire. I didn’t want to be objectified. I wanted to be one of the boys and that turned out to be just really damaging.
How did you cope with that?
I started to learn and luckily for me it didn’t last very long, particularly because I am in a band with a bunch of people who are so, so fucking amazing and supportive. And yeah, honestly? They guided me through a lot of it. I felt like I was able to put myself on the right path. So, if I could go back and give myself some advice, I would say all of that, but I don’t know if I would change any of it because where we are now is really such a reflection of the journey that we’ve been on.
So much of life is the result of the mistakes that we’ve made along the way.
Yeah, and would I change anything? Maybe not!
I like that. Okay, let’s do a fun one. What was the most chaotic or cursed day you have had on tour?
We have so many…
Let’s go!
We have had so much weird shit happen on tours. We did a tour where one of the first shows we played got cancelled like an hour before the show was supposed to happen. We got locked in the venue overnight by armed swat police with some of the people who came to the show because there was an armed gunman next door.
What the fuck…?
Yeah! The gunman had taken a bunch of people hostage in a pharmacy. This was in Germany, the police basically locked off the entire block, we couldn’t leave. Armed police basically came into the music venue with massive AK-47s. We were hearing gunshots, and we were just there, us, the bar staff, the venue staff, and a bunch of people who had turned up just before doors. It was so fucking cursed and we were scared.
What did you do to pass the time?
We drank! We played uno. That was all we could do, but it ended up being really cute because it was us, the staff and the production team and some fans.
Definitely a story for those fans.
Yeah, we got to spend the whole night with them. It was in the news the next day. We were just like what the fuck like, what even happened? I remember at one point, me and Dom opened one of the doors because he just really wanted to have a cigarette, and we opened the door and sparked up a cigarette and then heard like gunfire. And we were, like, nope, fucking hell. This was like, maybe, day two of that tour as well.
That’s absolutely wild.
On another tour we did we accidentally got tear gassed in Dijon.
Fucking hell!
I know! We were in France, and we were walking back to our tour bus, and we turned down the street. It was a one-way street which we didn’t realise, and then we turned left and all of a sudden we were in the middle of a protest, and it was just cops lobbing cans of tear gas and we’d walked directly into it. It was insane, and we’d just been to the mustard shop. I was full of mustard. Then we were getting tear gassed.
That sounds fucking painful, what does it feel like?
It feels kind of like when you get sun lotion in your eye and the burn does not go. There’s nothing you can do, yeah, because it’s like, oily. Yeah, it just like sits on your eyeballs.
Well that sounds horrible. Okay so it’s better to go out with a bang then to fade into the darkness, and I think that’s what you guys have done here. Are there still things left unsaid or unplayed, or do you feel like this is closure?
It feels very much like closure. Yeah, my worst nightmare would be playing some shit hole venue and not knowing that that’s our last show. You know, when bands do that and they get into a fight, or something happens, and they break up because they’re just over it. I mean, that would never have happened to us because we all love each other too much, but we were very insistent on giving it a really nice send off. We deserve that and this has been a celebration of all of our work. But also closure for our fans. I know a lot of people keep asking us, like, what’s next? Are you doing another? Are you going to come back in a couple of years and blah, blah, blah, and for now, we really wanted to like, give it a proper send-off and be like, look – this is the end.
I saw so many people crying. Okay silly one, what’s the weirdest item you saw in a venue green room?
Okay not a weird item, but funny story, one time an unspecified member of our band used the toilet in the green room, and did not know it was broken, and they lent forward and went to wipe their ass and the entire toilet tipped over, and it was just like a hole in the ground! Crap everywhere. It was very horrible.
Haha incredible! Okay what advice would you give to the younger generation or anyone looking to get into this scene as a musician?
Do it for fun. Don’t do it for money, remove that thought from your mind immediately. Do it for love and don’t do it for anyone else. And only do what feels right, don’t let yourself be pressured.
That’s excellent. Last question, what’s your favourite dinosaur?
It is a Diplodocus! Everyone expects me to be like T-Rex, but no, that is weak sauce, T-Rex is weak!
Haha, thank you very much, beautiful interview!
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