“Beautifully Wrong was the third album that was supposed to come out in 2003, but never got released,” explains Doko. “We’ve put about four of the songs from it on the compilation disc (Loved & Lost), though, with the rest being the big singles and the more commercial songs… but the remainder of the songs are on Beautifully Wrong – they’re the lost songs.”
“You can only buy them at the shows on this tour,” Doko adds. “You can’t get Beautifully Wrong at the shops or anything; it’s more of a tour edition that will later be released digitally by Sony.”
Which means attending the band’s upcoming three-date mini-tour is an absolute must for die-hard Bachelor Girl fans from back in the day. For Doko personally, it’s been a case of deja vu so far, and you better believe the chemistry between her and Roche is still very much there indeed. But are the upcoming shows just a one-of occasion, or is there much more brewing for Bachelor Girl?
“It might look like a one-off on the surface, but let me just say that you don’t put in all this energy into something that never comes back again,” the singer says. “Will it be what it was? Who knows… We’re both pursuing other things, we’re both older, we’ve got different projects, but anything is possible for Bachelor Girl.
“We used to say James and I have got the marriage without the sex!” she adds with a laugh. “In 2011 we’ve got a fresher vibe and our relationship is very brother-and-sister. We’re not as attached to the band, it doesn’t define us anymore.
“We officially moved on in 2004,” she continues, “but I didn’t rest on my laurels. I went to LA and I’ve spent a lot of time in Scandinavia – in Sweden a lot of people know Bachelor Girl, so that’s been a great passport. I also had this electro project which was a dance/rock/remix kind of thing, I also got involved in youth work.
“Then I decided to hang my hat up on being an artist because I wanted to try songwriting. That was wonderful because you could dabble in pop, soul, rock, dance, whatever, because you could cover all the genres under the umbrella of songwriting. I managed to work with some great people, including on a song that was in the movie Step Up 3 and I also worked with Germany’s X-Factor winner last year.”
According to Doko, Sweden is actually the music world’s best-kept secret and the very country she is hoping to become a permanent citizen of, after recently applying for a visa. Roche, on the other hand, has been spending his time working in London on various projects of his own. It’s a set-up, however, that wouldn’t necessarily get in the way of a possible Bachelor Girl reformation, according to Doko.
“I love Sweden, but I wouldn’t mind escaping the winter and head to Australia because it gets to minus-20 degrees!” she laughs. “Sweden is definitely the best-kept secret in music – if you look at the charts in the last month, nine of the 10 top Billboard-charted songs were produced by Swedish producers. They’re not just pop guys; they’re indie and rock guys. They just know how to make a chorus work and they can even make the cheap and nasty tracks sound amazing, they just pull it off and even make the cheesy disposal pop sound really good! Good, catchy music is really their brand.
“For James and I, the plan is to do these reunion shows and then both go back to our commitments in Sweden and London, but then return back to Australia in the European winter. That’s why we’re not in a big rush – these are going to be three big shows, rather than a bunch of little ones. After being almost dead for eight years, we thought the best thing to do was to go with the less-is-more vibe!”
After all, as Doko points out, things are done quite differently these days anyway – it may have been less than a decade since Bachelor Girl rules the Australian airwaves, but the industry has certainly changed in a major way since those days.
“When James penned the line ‘I got so many friends on the internet / I could never be alone’ in Lucky Me, nobody knew that 10 years later there – this was back in 1999 – that the world simply wouldn’t be able to function without the internet!
“I didn’t spend the tenth of the time on the net that I do now! I feel like a social networking whore!” she giggles.
“I remember how TV and radio used to be the biggest promotional tools for artists, but now there’s a much more holistic approach where they’re radio plugs and TV and stuff still, but predominantly it’s social networking and interaction on the internet that’s used as promotion! It’s a very different industry now to what it used to be when we started out.”
