Music

You can’t keep a good thing down, they say. But you can banish it to the fringes where – away from the limelight and nurtured by devotees – it will quietly but steadily develop into a distinctive microcosm and then insinuate itself back into the mainstream. For this reason, ‘nu’ has been prefixed to every musical genre from disco (reinvented by French producers as filtered house) to folk (getting progressively more wyrd and less beardy with each passing week). For this reason, goth will never die.

There is, however, nothing much ‘nu’ about the rockabilly currently being played by Camden’s Kitty, Daisy And Lewis. They name as their favourite bands Johnny Cash, Louis Jordan, Louis Prima et al, wear embroidered cowboy shirts and vintage blouses on stage, and between them play banjo, slide guitar, ukulele, drums, accordion, piano and harmonica. They’re about to release their debut single, ‘Mean Son Of A Gun’, an unreconstructed, honkin’-tonkin’ cover of Johnny Horton’s tune from the late ’50s. It’s an unusual choice for a debut single in today’s climate, perhaps, but not totally bizarre. Not until you consider the fact that Kitty, Daisy And Lewis are siblings aged 13, 18 and 15 respectively and so should by rights want to be the next Bullet For My Valentine. Feature continues

They grew up listening to the rockabilly records owned by their mother and father (who play double bass and guitar in the band), fell in love with the sound and have stuck with it. They began playing together about four years ago (when Kitty was eight!), although pianist, singer, accordion player and drummer Daisy claims that ‘we didn’t mean to start a band’. The family used to frequent Come Down And Meet The Folks at the Golden Lion, a local country and western-folk night run by The Arlenes. Guitarist ‘Big’ Steve Arlene knew that Lewis played banjo and so one afternoon invited him up on stage. Kitty volunteered to play the drum kit that was already set up, and the pair were so impressive they were asked back. At that point, Daisy threw in her lot with the accordion, dad took over on guitar… et voilà. ‘We didn’t go around asking for gigs, they just sort of came to us,’ she says, matter-of-factly.

When asked what it is she likes about rockabilly, Daisy claims ‘It’s the energy and the rhythm. It’s just got this swing to it and I don’t get that with contemporary music, although I’m not ashamed to say I like some of that too. I like rockabilly instrumentation and the fact that it’s all real, rather than synthesised – it’s got a raw sound. I love swing R&B, like Louis Jordan plays,’ she enthuses. ‘It just makes you want to dance; that’s what music is all about. It’s about giving you energy and making you excited.’

Swing, of course, is the thing about rockabilly. It might not be a quality you’d expect a respected überlord of techno and mechanico-funk to enthuse about, but enthuse Andrew Weatherall does. In fact, the DJ, producer and remixer is so massive a fan of rockabilly that he happily interrupts his holiday to talk about it. ‘Sometimes I get a bit blasé about music,’ he confesses, ‘and I think when that happens, you go back to the sounds that first excited you. In my case, that’s reggae and rockabilly – two radically different forms but essentially two forms of roots music.’