Chords for Girls meet Lawrence - part 1

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ And [Ab] who are these girls?
These are our friends.
They're just friends, right?
Yeah.
[Db] It's good to have lots of girlfriends.
[N] It's good to make out you've got lots of girlfriends.
_ Yeah, yeah.
I always try and do that.
It doesn't work.
[Fm] And when we were doing the singles on 45,
we were [D] doing just like, they would look just like this.
[Eb] Right, with the girls.
Yeah.
Which ones did you do?
Less For Life.
Right.
Oh, you did a, not the pop song.
It's [Bm] our own version.
It's a totally different song.
Okay.
Oh, I [B] wish I had a [Ab] sundown.
I wish [Db] I had a pizza and a bottle of wine.
I wish [B] I heard a beach house.
[Eb] How do you do your songs?
How do you write yours?
I [Eb] write them all just like on a guitar.
Yeah.
Really basically, simple.
I'll just write a couple chords and just the lyrics and then I'll show them to him.
Yes.
And then we'll discuss where we could take that [N] because you can go 20 different ways.
And then we'll both sort of work out the arrangements and which instruments we like to use and how
we'd like to do it.
And then we'll just start [G] recording.
Basically I write all the songs and then JR does all the production.
[N] Yes.
And do you use keyboards as well or?
A little bit.
Anything.
I've got like one organ.
We've always had this idea of having more players in the band, like doing something
a little bit more grand scale I [F] guess.
But it's the [N] same thing you were talking about.
There's no rush.
Yeah.
It's just that idea of giving your songs away to these people.
You know, to people that when we create a relationship and it's like trusting them
and you have this perfect idea of how it's supposed to sound and it's hard to_
It's really hard to get that, isn't [Ab] it?
And then thinking about adding one more person and [Bm] dealing with that is kind of rough.
_ Come on, come on, come on, [Abm] Kayla.
_ [N] Yeah.
Well, we used to argue about overdubs.
I wouldn't let Morris do an overdub.
I said it has to be_
When people see us live, it has to sound exactly [Ab] like the record.
Because the [N] prevailing trend has always been to do different versions.
Even television used to do really radical different versions of their songs live.
Yeah.
And it sounded nothing like the record.
Yeah.
I've heard like tapes and I've seen them twice.
They really do like mad versions of the songs.
But for us, we wanted to do it_
If someone came to see us, they'd hear it exactly like the record.
So there couldn't be an overdub because we've only got two guitars.
[G] So_
And he'd be going mad because he was like a real [N] trained musician.
And he'd want to_
He'd go, I can hear an overdub there.
And the first overdub we ever did was on Primitive Painters.
You can hear a guitar come in at the end doing a single note thing.
And that was the first overdub that we ever did.
_ We like to do [F] that, but we record usually just the two of us.
So it's kind of difficult.
But you can layer it on top, can't you?
[Gb] Yeah.
We did a few shows where we had like eight of our friends with us.
[G] And we had everything that you hear on the record.
But then when you go out on tour, [A] it's like you can't bring eight people.
No, you can't.
It's too expensive.
And people [G] have their own bands and they want to [Ab] focus on that.
They don't_ Yeah, exactly.
It's [Eb] a lot to ask.
Drop your shit and play [N] mine.
I know, yeah.
Come to play mine.
You've got to have a lot of balls to [D] do it.
You've got to stand up and go, no, we're doing my stuff.
Yeah, [Em] yeah.
It's really quite difficult.
[D] _ _ _ _ _ _
[Em] _ _ _ _ [Gb] Did you find the live shows really hard to play?
Like inside [E] yourself?
Yeah, [N] we never got used to it because we didn't ever have an agent.
We never had a manager.
We were never on the road consistently.
We never did like a run of six gigs, for example.
The most we ever did was, I think, four or five when we played with the Cocteau Twins.
And by the end of the fourth or fifth day, we could see us becoming a band.
And it's a great thing.
You should, I think, try to play live as much as possible.
It's the best thing to do.
Yeah, I think we just played like, what, [Eb] 40 or something.
40?
It was on like a [G] five-week tour.
And before that, we did a US tour.
So it's been non-stop.
We go home for a week and then we do another [Db] US tour.
How do you do that?
It's really insane.
With four [E] people?
It's really insane.
Our guitar player has quit.
He's like, I'm not doing anything after this tour.
_ [Abm] _ _ _
_ [A] _ They get [F] paid pretty much by the day for the tour.
So they can [G] afford to not have a job and be on tour with us if they [N] like.
See, we never had that luxury.
We felt it was always, you [F] can't have a job because you're in a band.
I can't give you any money because there isn't [N] one.
So it's all done on trust and love of the music.
I was lucky that the music was good enough for people [Eb] to go, I want to do it.
[N] But with the new stuff, because Go-Kart is so different sort of band. _ _
I'm battling with [E] musicians all the time.
[Ab] I [Gb] can't give them any money.
I can't make them do what I want them to do.
_ [D] So it's back to square one, really.
[G] That's an echo, echo.
You'd be the alpha neon kettle.
[Bm] Girls, it's a great name, [A] isn't it?
I was [B] coming, I thought you were_
I just thought in [Db] my head, it's a three-piece female band.
I [Abm] just did.
I know I speak to someone, I said, oh, we're doing this thing.
[Bm] And they said, yeah, they're men.
I went, [Ab] God, that's clever.
You're like, damn it.
That's a [Gb] clever move, that is.