PIPETTES Issue #32

The British girl group wants to subvert pop music

By Amy Schroeder
Published: June 1st, 2007 | 12:00am

All eyes are on Gwenno at the continental-breakfast nook of the Courtyard Marriott, where she’s staying while in Austin for SXSW. Over the elevator music and stench of bacon and eggs, the singer doesn’t fit in. In a good way.

With a bleach-blonde bob, heels, and a pastel-pink poof dress, her look is Madonna-channeling–Marilyn Monroe á la the “Material Girl” video. She’s clearly the best-dressed musician at the four-day music conference, and at 9 a.m. on a Friday
morning in March, she’s prepared to give good interview. “Pop is such a dirty word — especially in the U.K.,” she says. “But I think you can make it mean something.”

Her band, the Pipettes, has no qualms about being a concept outfit. Inspired by ’60s girl groups, the edgey pop princesses from Brighton, England, sound like the bad-girl version of the Ronettes, and their stand-out asset is their schtick. Onstage, wearing coordinating getups, Gwenno, Rosay, and RiotBecki sing their hearts out to choreographed dance moves and are backed by four male musicians.

Gwenno says the Pipettes were formed as an alternative to the indie music scene that people were bored with in Brighton. “When we were getting the band going, we realized that whenever girl-group music — like the Shangri-Las — played at discos, people immediately started dancing,” she says.

Though their sound is sugary pop to the max, the Pipettes’ sexual lyrics are a response to the fact that it wasn’t socially acceptable for original girl groups to openly sing about sexual desire. On the debut album, We Are the Pipettes (Cherry Tree/Interscope), the trio’s lyrics take on modern men, feminist woe, and one-night stands. Whereas the Supremes sang “Stop in the Name of Love / Before you break my heart,” Pipettes sing, “I don’t want to fall in love / I just want to bump and grind.”

“Real life is not great,” Gwenno says. “Especially with how the world is at the moment. There’s a desire for escapism. That’s what our music is — something to uplift you.”

And while the Pipettes are all about making you feel good, they realize there’s a problem with mainstream pop. “Corporate pop is soulless,” Gwenno says. “The performance is great, and everything’s brilliant about it, but it’s completely meaningless.”

The band’s goal is to combine the power and immediacy of feel-good pop with a sense of female empowerment that you can’t always find in today’s Top 40 hits. “That’s why we went for the ’60s girl-group sound. It was the birth of singing about heartbreak in a glorious way, instead of strumming a guitar in the corner, thinking life is rubbish.”

Whereas Gwenno admires Kylie Minogue, RiotBecki is the resident riot grrl fan. Citing Bikini Kill, Huggy Bear, Bratmobile, and early Gossip among her favorites, she says it’s unfortunate that the influential movement is a thing of the past.

“Riot grrl was a fantastic political movement, and it’s a shame that it didn’t continue,” RiotBecki says. “With anything that serves a purpose, there’s a constant need to re-address a social situation and change things. And if it doesn’t reach more than a small group of people, a movement can die. It’s awful and it shouldn’t happen.”

RiotBecki says that she believes the Gossip was able to become more popular when the band altered its sound. “I like their new sound — they’ve injected pop and disco into the blues-punk style,” she says. “I think it’s great that people are realizing that pop can be a progressive genre. It can incorporate different influences and still being political. If there’s anything that can be subverted, it’s the pop genre.”