The Bitter Lemons Are Making Old-School Rock ’n’ Roll Feel Dangerous Again
Punk Head: “No museum-piece rock ’n’ roll” is quite a manifesto. What makes rock ’n’ roll feel alive rather than merely well preserved?
RJ(Richie James): For me, it’s about energy and grit. The rock ’n’ roll I love, whether that’s Little Richard, Nick Curran or The Delta Bombers, has personality and rawness to it. It feels alive.
With The Bitter Lemons, I think variation is part of that too. I don’t want to hear twelve songs that all go exactly the same way, and I definitely don’t want us to make twelve songs like that either. We’ve got different strokes to what we do, but it all still sits together as us.
HJ(Hayley James): I think we take little flavours and homages from lots of different eras of rock ’n’ roll. You can hear things from the golden era, but also other strands that came later.
There’s 40s blues, 50s rock ’n’ roll, 60s garage, 70s punk and everything that grew out of those things. It becomes almost a curation of music history under that big rock ’n’ roll family tree.
You can still recognise where those influences come from, but it isn’t a tribute. It’s taking all of those things and making something living out of them now.
Punk Head: You call the album Peel A Little Deeper. What did you discover underneath the surface that surprised you?
RJ: I think what surprised us was how coherent it became as an album, because it was recorded over about a year and there are a lot of different flavours on it.
You can go from a murder ballad to something with that Bo Diddley attitude, but there’s still something holding it all together. Every song has something to say, whether it comes from personal experience or something we needed to get off our chest.
I think we found out more about ourselves as we went along as well. That’s something we want people to get from the record. It isn’t just on one level. There are a few dimensions to it.
HJ: The title also really grew out of what we’d done before. We had the Zest and Rind EP, and those five songs were almost the surface layer. Then Peel A Little Deeper became about drilling further into the influences, the songwriting and everything underneath it.
Some of those songs had also changed after months of gigging them. The same goes for songs from the Heart Ache Shake EP. They were physical-only releases, but after touring and playing them live for a year, we went back and re-recorded and reimagined some of them for the album.
So there’s literally a process of peeling deeper into songs we thought we already knew.
Punk Head: There’s a lot of darkness in the record, but you’ve also got murder ballads, bad decisions and straight-up escapism. Do you find humour more useful than solemnity when dealing with ugly subjects?
RJ: I’m definitely quite tongue-in-cheek as a songwriter. I don’t always want to give absolutely everything away about my personal life, but I do like reflecting things back with a bit of humour and playfulness.
Toxic Waste is a good example. On first listen it could sound like a murder ballad about an ex-girlfriend, but it’s actually about the negative voice inside my own head, dressed up as a lover who won’t leave you alone.
So I like dealing with serious things, but not necessarily presenting them solemnly all the time.
There are moments where being direct matters though. With Rebel Cry, there are things within the rockabilly, rock ’n’ roll and psychobilly scenes that can be problematic, and I didn’t want to shy away from that. I remember saying to Hayley when I wrote it that there would probably be people in the scene who wouldn’t like it because it was quite direct. But it needed to be said.
HJ: Expectations has that same sort of layering in a different way. Musically it’s very upbeat and fast, almost Chuck Berry or Bo Diddley-esque in the way it moves.
But lyrically there are more challenging things underneath it, about what it means to be a woman in the music industry, in music scenes, and in the world generally.
So there’s that juxtaposition between something that feels really energetic and fun on the surface, and something with a lot more weight underneath.
Punk Head: Your influences stretch from The Cramps and Nick Curran to 60s girl groups. What do those records give you that a more obviously contemporary rock vocabulary doesn’t?
RJ: For me, a lot of contemporary rock music has become an amalgamation of so many things that sometimes the rawness and the truth of it can get diluted.
Obviously our music is an amalgamation too, but when I listen to The Cramps, they took blues and garage and all sorts of things and created something completely their own out of it. Nick Curran obviously loved music from the 40s, 50s and 60s, but there was still this incredible rawness to what he did.
The same goes for Little Richard, The Shangri-Las, even The 101’ers before Joe Strummer went into The Clash. There’s a direct line there back to something very raw and immediate.
For me, going to those records gives me a tap into the mainline rather than hearing it after it’s been filtered through another four generations of rock music.
HJ: A lot of the records we love also have this kind of urgency and authenticity to them.
Some Cramps records almost feel bootleggy because of the way they were recorded and produced. Even with something like Nick Curran’s Reform School Girl, which is obviously a properly made, professional record, there’s still that live feeling and that drive underneath it.
And then the 60s girl-group stuff brings something completely different. It can be cleaner and more polished, with all those vocal harmonies, and I think that duality really comes through in us.
You can have quite a feminine vocal sitting over a really gritty guitar. That contrast is a big part of what we like.
Punk Head: You describe the album as “loud, melodic, messy”. Which of those three qualities was hardest to preserve in the studio?
RJ: Probably melodic for me. Messy is easy!
I think there’s a really thin line between keeping something melodic and making it too polished. Once you start cleaning everything up too much, some of the rock ’n’ roll can disappear out of it.
HJ: I’d probably say messy was the hardest, but I mean that in a good way.
You want the mess of a live band, the little imperfections and mistakes that add character, but you don’t want it to sound like a sloppy record. There’s a balance there.
In imperfection there’s texture, there’s character and there’s that live feel. So the challenge is making something sound like a well-produced record without cleaning away the buzz around it.
RJ: Maybe that’s why we work well together. I’m completely messy and Hayley’s more melodic.
HJ: And loud depends on the song as well. Something like Kill My Baby is naturally loud and raucous, and it’s probably the perfect mix of loud and messy.
Then something like Curds and Whey is musically more melodic, but Richie’s vocal has that rougher quality to it.
So every song has its own balance of those three things. Some songs make one of them easy and another one more difficult, but that push and pull is part of what gives the record its character.
