14 Sept 2019 at London’s Dome and Boston Music Room looks set to see the biggest (and best?) LOUD WOMEN Fest yet! Here’s the news we’ve been dying to tell you for months … our final* lineup, in no particular order …
Plus afterparty DJs, food, zines, records, and all manner of fun things we’ve not even thought up yet – get in touch with us on loudwomenclub@gmail.com if you’d like to get involved!
Earlybird tickets are now sold out but you can still grab regular advanced tickets from here.
*I mean, as final as anything is that could possibly have slight changes here and there in cases of sickness, injury, best friends throwing last-minute weddings, that sort of thing. But pretty damn final I’d say!
The soundtrack to my day today is PersonalBest’s hot AF second album, ‘What You At’ – and it can be yours too from this Friday! Jam-packed with deliciously retro indie-pop bangers and punked queer rock love songs, the record comes with the wonderful tagline ‘Classic Rock for Tragic Lesbians’. Out Friday 14 and available to pre-order now from Dovetown Records and Sheer Luck Records in the US.
Singer/songwriter/guitarist Kate delivers powerfully poignant, often bittersweet, totally endearing lyrics over giant guitar riffs, taking the tropes of “classic rock”, aka “Dad rock”, re-appropriated for womankind and delivered in a shower of glitter. See ‘Near to the Wild Heart’, which deserves a medal for the, I assume, deliberately over-stretched outro; an increasingly complex array of instruments taking turns to solo. Actual lolled when a trumpet appeared from nowhere – I hope that was the intended response!
Stand-out tracks for me were ‘You Don’t Call Me Baby Anymore’, which instantly had me singing along to the chorus and dancing round the kitchen at LOUD WOMEN HQ. And title track ‘What You At’ is a triumph; I don’t often use the word ‘anthemic’ as a compliment, but seriously, if Personal Best don’t get to perform this queer rock anthem on an enormous stage some day there’s no justice in the world.
In the meantime, make sure to catch them on any size stage they play! Can’t wait to hear this live, this Saturday, when the band launch the album with a headline show at London’s The Victoria. Support comes from TheSpares (the spin-off of our faves SpareRib) and our own mummycore punk dinnerladies, I, Doris. Good times guaranteed. Facebook event deets here.
Stay tuned too for more exciting news about Personal Best relating to a festival close to our hearts … wink wink etc. Announcement coming this weekend!
Personal Best are headlining our show this weekend at Amersham Arms, awesomely supported by The Ethical Debating Society, Dream Nails and Best Praxis! We can't wait! To get to know them a bit better in the meantime, we asked them 10 questions ...
1. Who would you most like to cover one of your songs? St. Vincent could do a great job of ‘This Is What We Look Like’ I reckon. Get some cool beeps and beats on there. Make it a club banger.
2. If you could add one member to your band – any person, living or dead, musical or otherwise – who would it be, and what would they play?
I wanna say a sick guitarist like Mary Timony but then I’d feel really inadequate. I’ve toyed with the idea of getting a pianist or keyboardist so I’m gonna say Carole King. She also seems really nice and I reckon she wouldn’t hog the hummus.
3. If your music could have a superpower, what would it be? Turning homophobes into goldfish.
4. What’s best: playing a big venue full of strangers, or a small pub full of friends?
Big venue! We are a stadium rock band at heart haha.
5. Recommend a record and a book that you think our readers might not have heard of. Record – Any Other City by Life Without Buildings, which continues to blow my mind. It’s not mega obscure but they did one album then split up in the early 2000s and it’s perfect. I kind of admire them doing that just as they were getting loads of cult attention. Book – Near to The Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector. It plays with perceptions of time and perspective and explores amorality and disruptive childhoods.
6. One for the guitarists … bore us with the details of your set-up please.
My guitar is a 2015 Gibson Firebird (that model has an extra millimetre width on the fretboard). I love how extra this guitar is, it’s very silly and over the top. Amp – Cornford Roadhouse 30. The company doesn’t exist any more but you can still find the amps around occasionally. Best amp I know for the money. Cost me £380 and it’s amazing. Cab – a Zilla oversized 112 with Neodymium lightweight speakers. They make custom cabs with a bunch of cool options. I picked it up second hand a while ago. Pedals – Way Huge (Jim Dunlop range) Swollen Pickle fuzz, Way Huge Angry Troll linear amp boost, Boss RV-2 Japan reverb.
7. What’s the best thing about being in your band? When I bring a song to practise and everyone does their thing over it and makes it sound a million times more exciting.
8. What are your band goals?
For this year, release album two, tour in the US which we haven’t done yet. Just get next level. World domination.
9. What’s the most important thing we need to know about your band right now? That we’re writing a really sick album.
10. Give your top 5 contemporary bands
St. Vincent, Doe, Nervus, El Morganand the Divers, Colour Me Wednesday. Why? Cos they’re all amazing obviously.
Personal Best are headlining 
