There are, of course, a few bands bucking this trend and one of those is Melbourne three piece grungy alternative act Valentiine. Although, according to the band’s lead vocalist and guitarist Vanessa V, it wasn’t a conscious or contrived thing go against the grain in this way and leave the boys out of the band, it just kind of happened that way.
“It’s funny, because we never thought of it like that,” she begins, “maybe when I was 13 or 14 I thought ‘wouldn’t it be cool to be in an all-girl band’, but it just never happened. And we never intentionally tried to form an all-girl band, it honestly happened by pure accident. We thought being in an all-girl band might make it a little bit harder in some respects, it definitely does matter a little bit.”
In what way? “In my music class in Year Seven I was playing guitar,” she recalls, “I was playing acoustic, and all the boys were doing the loud stuff. I’d lock myself in a room and play and I had a guy come in and say ‘shit man, you play pretty good for a girl!’ And that stuff believe it or not does happen. You’ve just got to fight that little bit harder, to get on bills and all that. I don’t think people do it intentionally; it’s just the way it is. And girls don’t stick together as much as guys do. Hopefully in a few years all this will change.”
Ultimately however, the girls in Valentiine are philosophical about this attitude towards female bands, and are happy to simply rock out and take things as far as they can go, despite the resistance that they face on occasion. “It’s fuckin’ music man,” she emphasises. “It’s so there for anybody, and a band is a band and a good band is a good band and that’s it…we could be in an all-girl band and wearing mini skirts and not really writing our own songs, and that might actually work, it might be a lot easier for us. But we just said ‘fuck it, we want to do what we do and how we do it.'”
They will be putting their musical and performance wares on display for all to see when they launch their brand new single Animal at Pony in the city on November 26, letting people know that chicks can rock hard too.
“Man, we’re so excited,” she enthuses. “We didn’t expect it to happen this quickly. We only just did the first album launch at The Tote, and that was awesome. But we’re just so excited. The new stuff is quite intense, energy wise. It (the single) is a really cool summer vibey song. It’s the perfect time for us to launch Animal. It’s a really cool high energy track, and Pony is probably one of the dirtiest places in Melbourne. So we’re really excited about just getting totally mental!
“Look, I guess it’s very honest,” Vanessa describes, with regards to the band’s live show. “It’s three-piece, guitar, bass, drums. The three of us sing, so there’s a lot of harmonies. And it’s sort of stripped down; it’s very honest, very raw, and the new stuff has a nice amount of energy to it, so the live shows are always massive fun. There’s always broken bones, and bloodied feet. The energy’s always really cool, the people who come along to our shows are really cool people, they’re really into it. I don’t know, if you want to see just a fucking good high energy live show, then that’s what you get from one of ours.”
The song is the first single off a forthcoming album, which is being recorded at the moment and should be unleashed at some stage early to mid next year, and Vanessa tells us that the album promises more of the same up tempo, high energy rock that you hear on the Animal single. “Yeah, definitely,” she confirms, “we didn’t even think of it as a single, but it’s come together really really nicely, and we’re excited about it all. The whole album is sort of along those lines, heavy, fast. The whole record should be like that.”
The single launch looks like being their last show for 2011, however it seems that 2012 will be an exceptionally busy year for the girls. “Man, I have a feeling that it’s going to be a very crazy 12 months,” Vanessa foresees. “We’re in the studio as much as we can, which is really time consuming. We’re shooting some videos for the upcoming singles, which is always fun. And just playing as much as we can, and trying to get this record finished. We’re going to ramp things up a bit, which is cool.”
