Pussy Liquor
by Alex Teitz
Pussy Liquor is a 5 piece punk band from Brighton. It includes Ari Black on vocals, Kristen Grant on guitar, Hannah Villanueva on guitar, Tallulah Turner-Fray on bass, and Victoria Lewis Piper on drums. They just released a “Pretty Good For A Girl” and are in the studio working on a 7 inch. They are playing the Loud Women Festival. For info visit facebook.com/pxssyliqxor/
FEMMUSIC: Can you describe your songwriting technique?
PL: We’d describe our songwriting technique as circle time or show and tell; when we write songs we normally start off by asking each other something like what’s made you angry recently or seen anything in the news, had any unwarranted comments in the street lately? And we write lyrics using the topics we discuss together eventually building up the instruments as we go along. We use our music as a platform so we feel it important to include all of our voices.
FEMMUSIC: I was seeing on your FB and elsewhere that you have been recording. When can we expect some tracks, EP or album?
PL: We recently had a session with Third Circle Recordings where we filmed the session and recorded our track Pretty Good for a Girl (available to view online by Friday 29th August).
Alongside this we’ve been working on a 7 inch for a while now which will include 2 tracks to be released on our own label Revulva Records, we’re in our final stages so expect to be hearing dates and seeing releases very soon!
FEMMUSIC: Are you working with a producer? If so, whom? How did you find them? How did you find the studio?
PL: We’ve been working with the wonderful Republic of Music, they have been helping us manufacture our 7 inch through contact of our manager. The studio we recorded our tracks in was our college Access To Music Brighton (rest in peace) where we worked with a former teacher Kevin Ling in the studio whilst we still studied there. The studio wasn’t anything fancy as it was just a college studio, but we had everything we needed to be able to progress by ourselves, without the college’s help it would’ve been difficult.
FEMMUSIC: As a woman in the music industry have you been discriminated against?
PL: Unfortunately yes, we’ve encountered situations where we’ve felt we weren’t being taken seriously and been sexualized. We come off stage and have men tell us we look hot or sexy, as if they’d not listened to a single word of the lyrics. We’ve had bad experiences with promoters and such making unsolicited advances at us and we’ve cancelled on people due to this very reason. It can be rather belittling, but it does give us more songwriting material.
FEMMUSIC: Whom would you most like to collaborate with, or tour with and why?
PL: Well firstly we’re very excited to play at Loud Women fest as we’ll be playing with bands we admire such as Petrol Girls and Hands Off Gretel, it’s very exciting to hear strong female voices in the industry, we look forward to seeing all the lovely people play! If we could just get all the riot grrrls and make a big angry collaboration that’d be perfect really, we’d like to share the voice of everyone.
FEMMUSIC: What one thing would you like to change about the music industry?
PL: The industry is very male dominated, there aren’t many women working behind the scenes leaving a great sense of inequality, even though they’d like to. We’d like to see more job opportunities, support and more platforms for women seeking work in the music industry. Loud Women is a great example of this. We also feel female artists value can be determined down to how hot they are or how they can be sexualized, we’d like to see more labels and companies working against the sexualization and discrimination against women and working towards equality in all areas of music for people of all genders!