The Puppini Sisters! We love 'em! When we first heard about their glam 30s style we had horrible flashbacks to a night we once went to where we were made to feel like the crap that came in someone's shoe. The world of the Puppinis is not like that at all. Mixing proper training and crystal voices with old-school 30s arrangements and the occasional (glorious) cover, these three girls are an absolute delight to watch. But even the most glamorous of ladies have to hit the festivals so let's find out the usual: the highs, lows oddities and essentials of their festival lives.
Best?
Marcella: “Glastonbury.”
Stephanie: “I haven’t been to that many festivals…”
Kate: “Mine has to be Reading. In fact I’d have to say Reading 2001. Was that the one with Slipknot? One of them landed on me! And do you remember Daphne and Celeste played before them and people were throwing water balloons full of wee, and bottles? Why put Daphne and Celeste on before Slipknot?”
M & S: “Who?”
Aloud Festivals: “They were like a really crap TATU only English.”
All: “Oh no!”
K: “And they were like, “Seriously, why are you being so horrible?” with these huge mother Slipknot fans.”
M: “That has to be someone’s idea of a joke”.
S: “That’s cruel. I miss it so much! I want to go back!”
Worst?
All: Hampton Court!
S: “Let me explain. We were doing 11 dates there. Eleven. It would have been nice. We have a glamorous look, we like to maintain that, and we had to get ready in the portaloos. The gents’ portaloos.”
K: “Urinal cakes and all.”
M: “They were very nice Portaloos…”
S: “And this is while the world’s biggest palace is staring us in the face. There’s not one room for three little ladies to just put a bit of make-up on?”
M: “It was such a haul getting there and back. And we were fed sandwiches for eleven dates which, after a while, made us very unhappy.”
K: They were horrid sandwiches.
M: “They were really nice people, the situation was just…awful.”
S: “It was just really difficuilt for us to come out to a crowd sitting on the grass with the picnics, and us coming out of the gents’ portaloos going “Hello!” and clutching our bags.”
Weirdest?
K: “Oh crumbs. Oh there’s so many surely.”
M: “Glastonbury was my first experience last year and I was part of the Ghost Train which was really weird in itself. And then all the people who were associated with that, the whole circus and cabaret thing, there were all sorts of freaky people but they were all really nice!”
Essential?
All: “Lipstick!”
K: “That’s pretty much it. Because as long as you’ve got that on, that’s pretty much your badge.”
M: “And tongs. And toilet roll!”
Best festival band?
M: “We saw Antony and the Johnsons the other day but they’re not a festival band.”
K: “No, not at all, it was the wrong setting for them completely. The sound…”
M: “…’Cause he’s a freaky guy, he’s got a freaky voice – wonderful voice – and he’s a weird-looking guy, looks odd, is odd and you need to see that.”
S: “It’s got to be more personal.”
M: “He’s wonderful. He’s a hero. Just not a festival.”
K: “I think my best experience would have to be Daphne and Celeste, seeing that!”
S: “I’d have love to see that. Oh no it’s horrible, I wouldn’t!”
Read on for the full interview. It's long. Settle in, they're lovely. Oh yes, and their tremendous album Betcha Bottom Dollar is out now. Buy it! Then go and catch them at Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival this weekend, and the Secret Garden Party on August 20. “We had a little criticism on YouTube.”
“What’s going on?”
“No I haven’t told you yet…”
“…Reeeally?”
“Well they said that we took the point out of it and I almost replied saying yes but you’ve seen a really low-quality…”
“Can we just rewind and tell me what happened?”
Time out before our ears fall off. The three Puppini Sisters – not sisters and only one Puppini just to clear up the confusion of why they don’t look anything alike – talk like typewriters. Listening to them is like watching an old Merry Melodies cartoon: in Puppini world, conversational threads are passed so quickly that it’s hard to keep up.
Back to YouTube later. For those who haven’t yet had the pleasure of these glamorous ladies, The Puppini Sisters and their band perform close harmony classics of the sort beloved by the current strain of 30s and 50s clubs, but which never get performed live. Along with versions of ‘In The Mood’, ‘Mister Sandman’ and ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy (Of Company B)’, they do covers of Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’, The Smiths’ ‘Panic’ and Kate Bush’s warbling oddity ‘Wuthering Heights’ that are quite remarkable. If Immodesty Blaise is the look of burlesque, then The Puppini Sisters are the sound: winking, appealing but devastatingly well-thought out, karaoke à trois this ain’t.
All classically trained singers – Kate Miller (blonde) Marcella Puppini (brunette) and Stephanie O’Brien (tenuously classed as redhead) formed at Trinity College of Music in Greenwich after Marcella had a brainwave while watching cult animation ‘Belleville Rendez-Vous.’
”Knowing that there was this burlesque 1940s revival we just thought it was incredible that no-one was covering this style of music - so we did,” she says and she was well-placed to know. Marcella is a performer in the Ghost Train cabaret at Glastonbury and used to pole dance at power-lesbian London club, Candy Bar. The songs really took off when the group started to do the occasional set at legendary Vauxhall cabaret night Duckie (cue a Puppini chorus of “You must go! They’re gods those people.”)
“My husband knows the guy who runs Duckie and he said that we did this amazing version of Wuthering Heights, which is their anthem,” explains Marcella. “We didn’t! We had this idea that we wanted to do covers and that was our first.” They put it together in two weeks and choreographed it to the music video for a laugh. The famously difficult crowd – “If they don’t like you, they really don’t like you” – went nuts and the Puppinis were a hit. Since then they’ve entertained all over the place, from regular gigs at East End hotspot Bistrotheque to this summer’s hippest festivals.
Back to YouTube. At Latitude, Aloud Festivals took a very wobbly video of the Puppinis doing ‘Wuthering Heights’ which was alternately praised and slated by some of the 1000-odd people who watched it.
“One guy said ‘Very clever, I can see they’re very talented, but this is a classic example of taking a great song and taking all the point out of it,”’ says Marcella, clearly pissed off.
“Isn’t it just giving it a new point?” asks Kate.
“Well, I was going to write to him. It’s a bit unfair because it really was just a snippet of us doing the moves and you can’t really tell what it sounds like….”
“…And it’s not in the context of the band.”
“Oh, that doesn’t bother me at all,” says Stephanie, completely unfazed.
This is all nonsense really. You can tell what the Puppinis sound like perfectly well, even if they do look like a bunch of oranges whirling around in a blender. You can understand why they’re annoyed though: if someone’s going to have a go at you, it would be preferable for them to do so to the whole song, well-packaged, than a clip with someone’s head continually bobbing in and out of shot.
”I mean, I think it is gimmicky,” says Kate, whose own background is in rock and jazz. “But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
“A gimmick done by people who can do their own arrangements can sing, can play, it’s fun,” says Stephanie. The girls arrange the music themselves, which can take ages.
“That was learning our craft really, with the transcripts,” says Stephanie.
“Yeah, but now we’ve got the skills and we can transcribe and arrange the covers, and we’re going to be doing original material so everything’s a natural progression,” cuts in Marcella. “We can all play our own instruments and that’s something we obviously have in the live show but which we’d like to incorporate on the next album. We’ll still do the old stuff but it’s whatever takes our fancy at the time. We might well come across a tune that really speaks to us.
There have been some lazy comparisons with Brighton’s doo-wop trio The Pipettes (there’s 20 years between them musically but nevermind). What do they think of them? The typewriter cranks back into action.
”We were just discussing that ‘cause we get a lot of comparison to them but…”
“…We don’t see any similarity between us other than…”
“…A lot of people aren’t quite clued in with music enough to tell the difference”
“…And also they’ve seen us with them in Vogue.”
“…And Puppini, Pipettes: people go ‘Oh! They’re the same!’”
“…But we formed ourselves, we do our own arrangements, we play our own instruments and it’s a completely different style of music.”
“…But it’s really good, it’s a completely new wave of girl band that’s breaking into the fore.”
Aaaargh, stoppit now. It’s true, retro girl sounds are being increasingly noticed by the mainstream labels and after decades of boys ripping off the 60s, 70s and 80s it’s about time. The Puppini Sisters have just released their debut album ‘Betcha Bottom Dollar’ on Universal’s Classics and Jazz arm, and with fashion spreads and hip gigs coming out of their ears, they’re coasting the wave of curiosity and appreciation in red lipsticked style. Still, they’ve trained, worked and earned their contracts: behind the shiny façade and curls there’s steel in abundance, and there will have to be as nobody quite seems to know what to do with them. When we bumped into them at Fruitstock, Marcella (fully made-up) and her husband were lugging equipment around, something you don’t see buzzed-about guitar bands doing very often.
The Puppini Sisters are talented, clever, good people. Listen to their records and dance your ass off: once you dive into Puppini world, there’s really no other choice.
Betcha Bottom Dollar is out now, The Puppini Sisters play Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival on August 12 and the Secret Garden Party on August 20. |
